Smoke

"The profound disillusion following the failure of the Revolutionary movement of 1848, which swept over the intellectuals of Europe, had also its characteristic repercussion among the intellectual youth of Russia, and made a generation like the later generation so well portrayed by Chekov -- the men of the 1880s, and also like the Intelligentsia after the failure of the Revolution of 1905. The restless futility, self-searching, flabbiness of will so native to this type are incarnate in one of Turgenev's greatest characters, Rudin. They persist in numerous characters in Smoke, and are not absent from the make-up of Litvinov himself -- nor of Turgenev, for that matter. The conception of the futility of effort, of revolution, of political ideas in general, the tranquility attained only by seeing life from the standpoint of eternity, Turgenev had already enunciated in Fathers and Children. He wished to see life with Olympian calm; the irony of Basarov's death is a keynote of his profound pessimism. But in Smoke there is bitter satire, showing that life to him was still a battle, an exasperation." -- from John Reed's 1919 Introduction to SMOKE


Genre: Literary Fiction