Smoke (Alma Classics)

by Ivan Turgenev

  Between May 1860 and May 1861, Turgenev spent most of his time in France, except a brief visit to Britain and a few weeks on the Isle of Wight in August 1860. It was here that, as he swam off the beach at Ventnor, the first idea for his next novel, Fathers and Children, occurred to him. He swiftly set about drawing up the characters, and then working out a detailed story around this germ of an idea. The first draft of the novel was completed at Spasskoye on 11th August 1861; then, in September that year, on his return to Paris he began revising it extensively. Published in Russia in February 1862, Fathers and Children unleashed a torrent of abuse from all sides that Turgenev simply had not anticipated. The right-wing press vilified him for daring to take the radical and free-thinking younger generation as its heroes, while the radicals saw the representatives of this generation in the novel, particularly the young doctor Bazarov, as caricatures of themselves. Incidentally, Bazarov describes himself as a “nihilist”, a word which, although not unknown in Russian before, was popularized by Turgenev with this novel: following its publication, many of the younger generation ostentatiously adopted this label for themselves. In Turgenev’s usage, it implies not so much somebody who believes in nothing, but a person who takes none of the commonly accepted beliefs on trust, subjecting everything to analysis by intensive reasoning. Years later, Turgenev wrote to a correspondent that he regretted giving what he called the “reactionary rabble” this word to beat the younger generation with.

  Viardot and her husband had in the meantime moved to a villa near the fashionable German spa town of Baden-Baden, so in 1863 Turgenev settled in this town too, living there until 1871, with the exception of a few brief visits back to Russia. In the spring of 1862, Viardot had resumed contact with him, possibly because she wanted him to help her select a number of Russian poems she could set to music and use his influence to sell them for her in Russia.

  At this time, Turgenev was still under suspicion from the Russian authorities. On a visit to England in May 1862, he had met up with a number of Russian radicals based in London, and discussed their ideas with them. This became known in Russia, and he was summoned back there to be tried for his association with these people or face the risk of having all his property confiscated. He wrote a letter to the Tsar in person, in which he said that he had never expressed his political opinions by violent means, but had explained them in all moderation in his works. Back in Russia, in September 1863 he appeared before a court consisting of members of the Senate, and all charges were immediately dropped. Herzen and Bakunin, however, two of the revolutionaries based in London, in their publications accused Turgenev of having compromised himself by writing to the Tsar, and have betrayed his old ideals. To make up for the contempt with which he was regarded by some of his Russian contemporaries, Turgenev became acquainted with famous French authors such as Gustave Flaubert, whom he first met in January 1863.

  In 1862, Turgenev had started drafting detailed plans and character sketches for another novel, Smoke. He began writing it in November 1865, and finished it in January 1866. After lengthy discussions with the editorial board of the Russian Herald as to the work’s political and moral content, the book was published in March 1867. Smoke takes place largely outside Russia, and one of its major characters, a Russian called Potugin, who is vaguely reminiscent of Turgenev, is a passionate Westernizer contemptuous of the Russian mentality. Not surprisingly, this provoked a storm in Russia, where the press accused Turgenev of a total lack of patriotism.

  The Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, and the resulting growth of aggressive anti-French feelings in Germany, meant that Pauline Viardot, whose husband was French, no longer felt safe living there. The family moved to England in the autumn of 1870, and settled there till the end of the war. Turgenev, although as a Russian he had no reason to feel unsafe in Germany, faithfully followed them to London in November 1870, where he stayed for almost a year. He spent what Henry James – whom he met in Paris four years later – called a “lugubrious” winter in London.

  While in England Turgenev was introduced into the leading artistic circles. There he met, among other literary figures, Tennyson, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Ford Madox Brown, and struck up a close friendship with George Eliot. Although there is no record that he ever spoke to Dickens, it is likely that he met him, since he attended three of his public readings and was enthralled by them. Turgenev’s English was by now excellent, and he was invited to Edinburgh to give an address in English at the Walter Scott centenary celebrations in August 1871. While there he went grouse-shooting on the Scottish moors, where he met the poet Robert Browning.

  Turgenev followed the Viardots on their return to Paris in October 1871 and, apart from a few brief spells in Russia, he spent four years living as a guest in the various houses occupied by Pauline and her husband. In 1875, he and the Viardots purchased a large country estate at Bougival, near Saint-Germain-en-Laye, a forty-five-minute ride from Paris. He built himself a Swiss-style chalet on the estate, very close to the manor house where Pauline lived, and it was here at Bougival that he spent the last years of his life. Turgenev now established a very close friendship with Flaubert, and also had frequent contact with George Sand, Zola, Daudet and, some time later, Maupassant.

  Turgenev spent his time not only writing original prose, but also translating into Russian from French, German and English: for instance, his was the first version into Russian of Flaubert’s Trois Contes. His last novel, Virgin Soil, a book that he had been planning, writing and revising for six years, was published in the January and February 1877 issues of the European Herald. He told the editor of this periodical that, in this last novel, he intended to put everything that he thought and felt about the situation in Russia, both about the reactionary and revolutionary camps. The novel was fiercely attacked in the Russian press, with many commentators claiming that the author had now been so long out of his country he had no longer any knowledge of Russian life. However, just a month after the novel’s publication, fifty-two young people were arrested for just such activities as Turgenev had described in his book and, exactly as he had foretold, they were put on trial. This created great sympathy for the prisoners both at home and abroad, and Virgin Soil became a best-seller in Britain, France and America, with one French critic claiming that Turgenev had shown himself to be a true prophet.

  If Turgenev, as a result of the Russian press reaction to his novel, now believed he was despised by the public, including the liberal younger generation, he was mistaken. In January 1879 his brother Nikolai died, and Ivan set off to Russia to oversee the disposal of Nikolai’s estate. At a literary gathering, a toast was proposed to him as “the loving instructor of our young people”. Turgenev was so staggered at this unexpected reception that he burst into tears. He was invited to meeting after meeting, where he was constantly greeted by thunderous applause, although the authorities still disapproved of him. In Petersburg his hotel was stormed by thousands of people wanting his autograph, or even just a sight of him. He returned to Paris, looking – as friends said – younger and more cheerful. He was now showered with academic honours, including an Honorary Doctorate at Oxford University, for which he travelled to England. The orator at this ceremony declared that his works had led to the emancipation of the Russian serfs.

  Turgenev was by now beginning to feel very unwell. He paid a final brief visit to Russia in February 1880, and spent one further short period in England in October 1881, where he went partridge-shooting at Newmarket, meeting Anthony Trollope, R.D. Blackmore and other writers.

  On 3rd May the following year, he wrote to a friend from Bougival that he had been suffering from some kind of angina connected with gout. His shoulders and back ached, and he often had to lie down for long periods. In January 1883 he was operated in Paris for a small tumour in his abdomen. But his condition continued to worsen: he was in intolerable pain and had become very emaciated. His illness was at last diagnosed as incurable cancer of the spine. By now
he was bedridden at Bougival, and on 1st September 1883 he slipped into unconsciousness, dying two days later. His body, unaccompanied by Pauline Viardot, was transported to Petersburg. The funeral service was held in the Cathedral of Our Lady of Kazan, and a vast funeral procession followed the coffin to the Volkovo Cemetery in Petersburg, where Turgenev was buried on 9th October.

  Ivan Turgenev’s Works

  As mentioned before, Turgenev’s early works were mainly poems in the high-flown classical style of pre-Pushkin Russian writers. However, he swiftly turned against these models, and strove to achieve for his mature writings a limpid idiom, including dialogue based on the everyday language of the Russian peasant. In sharp distinction to many of the writers of the time, who explicitly tried to put forward a progressive social message in their works, Turgenev aimed to achieve total objectivity and impersonality. Whilst depicting the sufferings of the working people around him, he limited himself to describing their lives without passing judgement and leaving the readers to draw their own conclusions.

  Turgenev wrote nine plays in all, but the only one to have found a permanent place in the repertoire is A Month in the Country (1855). Indeed, after 1857 he virtually abandoned the genre.

  Turgenev wrote the first version of A Month in the Country in 1850. It was originally called The Student, then Two Women. He sent the manuscript to Sovremennik, who agreed to publish it, but the censors demanded drastic cuts, as the speeches of the student Belyayev were too inflammatory, and the motif of a married woman in love with another man was morally impermissible. The censors ordered that she be changed into a widow, and Turgenev reluctantly made the relevant cuts. The play was still turned down, and had to be revised even further. This version was published only in 1855, and does not appear to have ever been staged. It was only with the easing of the political climate under Tsar Alexander II that Turgenev’s play was published again in 1869, in a version much closer to his original idea. In the revised text, the widow is once again shown as a wife in love with another man. However, even when it was finally staged in Moscow in 1872, under the title A Month in the Country, further revisions had to be made because a few of the speeches were still regarded as too incendiary. The play was not a great success, but in 1879 the renowned young actress Marya Savina chose it for a benefit performance in Petersburg, and asked for just a few short cuts to be made on grounds of length. This time it was a triumph, and immediately entered the repertoire.

  A Month in the Country predates Chekhov in its depth of characterization and its skilful depiction of the series of barely perceptible changes that take place over a month in the relationships between the characters, leading, by the end, to their lives being totally altered. The play contrasts two social groups, the old and the young, in what was to become a recurring theme in Turgenev’s work: the older gentry living fruitless and frustrated lives, with the younger generation full of hope and idealism – and neither of them attaining happiness.

  In the play, Natalya is married to the staid and much older Arkady Islayev, while a “friend of the family”, Rakitin, also lives in their country house. Natalya and Arkady are clearly based on Pauline Viardot and her husband, and Turgenev explicitly stated in a letter that Rakitin represented how Turgenev felt about his own situation with regard to them. Natalya falls in love with a young, idealistic, socially progressive student, Belyayev, whom she has engaged as tutor to her son. Vera, her seventeen-year-old ward, instantly falls in love with him too, but Natalya, as a result of her own feelings for him, forces her into marrying the much older and boring Bolshintsov. Belyayev cannot cope with the intensity of the two women’s passions and flees. Rakitin, badly hurt by Natalya’s lack of feeling for him, withdraws from the scene, leaving her alone with her husband, whom she respects, but does not love. They return to their aimless, idle lives after this month of emotional turmoil.

  The title which first established Turgenev’s reputation in Russia was Memoirs of a Hunter (which has also been translated as Sketches of a Huntsman and Notes of a Sportsman). This collection of tales of Russian rural life was mostly written in France and Germany, where Turgenev lived at the end of the 1840s and beginning of the 1850s. It consists of twenty-four stories of between 3,000 and 12,000 words in length, most of them originally published as they were written in Sovremennik between 1847 and 1851. Twenty-one sketches were published in volume form in 1852; a further story was added in 1872, and another two in 1874. The tales were drawn from Turgenev’s own observations of the appalling living conditions of the peasants and the cruelty imposed by the upper classes on their serfs, which he had witnessed when he had roamed round the countryside in his childhood and when, as a youth, he had gone hunting in the locality. The style of the stories, set against lyrical descriptions of nature, is totally impersonal. The reactionary Tsar Nicholas I dismissed the censor who had permitted the volume’s publication, but when he died in 1855, the new Tsar, the reforming Alexander II, is said to have read the book and resolved to free the serfs – which finally happened in 1861. The book was a great success and was immediately reprinted.

  The Diary of a Superfluous Man (1850) may be considered Turgenev’s first novella. It was with this work that he introduced into the Russian consciousness the concept of the “superfluous man”, which had played such a large part in Russian literature before and was to appear in many subsequent literary incarnations. The term denotes either a person who has the education and abilities to work for society and improve social and political conditions, but who through lack of willpower never manages to achieve anything, or someone who strives to achieve change but is totally ignored by society and so gives up in baffled disillusionment. The story is a personal account written by a young, well-educated man who has learnt from his doctor that he may be dying of an unnamed illness. He has drifted through life without any goal, has never managed to make much use of his education, or fulfil any of his ambitions, or set up any permanent relationship with the opposite sex. Now, as he may be approaching an early death, he is left to reflect on his wasted life.

  “Mumu’ (1854) was based on an incident which had happened at Spasskoye, and the female landowner of the story represents Turgenev’s own mother. A hard-working young peasant, being deaf and dumb, has never managed to marry, and the only thing he can find to love is a young puppy that has been abandoned. As he is unable to speak, Mumu is the only name he can give to it. But the landowner complains that the puppy’s barking is keeping her awake at night, and the order goes out, via the steward, to kill it. The peasant takes the dog to a river and, uncomplainingly, drowns the only thing ever to have loved him. However, the story ends with him striding away from his owner’s control, and readers are left to draw their own conclusions about what his feelings are at this piece of wanton viciousness on her part.

  Faust (1856) consists of nine letters from a character called Pavel to his friend Semyon. Pavel recounts how, a few years after his first meeting with her, he sees again Vera, now a married woman. She had been brought up in a very strict manner, and forbidden by her mother to read any books, especially poetry. Pavel, now he has met her again, visits her frequently at home, and tries to interest her in literature by reading her Goethe’s Faust. Her feelings are so inflamed by this first exposure to literature that she falls in love with Pavel and arranges a tryst with him; however, on the way to her rendezvous, she sees an apparition of her dead mother – possibly caused by her subconscious guilt – falls seriously ill and dies.

  Asya (1858) is a novella set in a small village on the Rhine and, unusually for Turgenev, it contains no implicit social message. The unnamed narrator, a middle-aged Russian, recalls events of twenty years before, when he was on holiday in Germany and met a Russian painter called Gagin, who introduces him to Asya, a girl he claims is his sister. The narrator suspects she is his mistress, but later Gagin tells him she is his illegitimate half-sister, whom he has been bringing up since the death of her parents. Although loving Gagin wi
th the feelings of a sister, she falls passionately in love with the narrator, who baulks at the idea of marrying her and decides to give the matter some prolonged thought. By the time he decides in favour of the relationship, Gagin and Asya have returned to Russia, and he accepts that he has missed his chance of happiness. She writes to him reproachfully, telling him that one word of encouragement from him would have been enough to persuade her to marry him. However, his feelings prove shallow: he doesn’t suffer long, and he never hears of her again.

  First Love (1860) is perhaps the most autobiographical of all Turgenev’s works. The author claimed that an identical incident had happened to him in his adolescence at Spasskoye. The hero is a boy who falls in love with the slightly older daughter of a young neighbour. Realizing she does not return his feelings and has a lover, the boy takes a knife to attack his rival. However, on drawing near the girl and her lover, he sees to his dismay that it is his own father. He drops the knife and flees mortified, with bitterness having entered his young soul.

  In King Lear of the Steppe (1870), the narrator is an adult who recalls the time he was an adolescent still living on his mother’s estates. The tale’s main character is one of her serfs, Kharlov, the “King Lear” of the story. He is a man of gigantic stature and strength, a hard-working peasant farmer who lives in a small house he has built with his own hands. The narrator’s mother, Kharlov’s owner, had married him off at the age of forty to a seventeen-year-old girl who bore him two daughters but then died. The two girls, out of compassion, were subsequently brought up in the narrator’s home, but they became cruel and grasping. One night Kharlov has a dream he interprets as a premonition of his coming death, and immediately draws up a will dividing his estate between his two daughters. Just a few weeks later he is evicted by them, and is given refuge by the narrator’s mother. But, driven mad, he climbs up onto the roof of the house he had built, which has now passed into other hands, and begins to tear chunks from it. He falls from the roof to his death.