‘Smoke’ was first published in 1867, several years after Turgenev had
fixed his home in Baden, with his friends the Viardots. Baden at this
date was a favourite resort for all circles of Russian society, and
Turgenev was able to study at his leisure his countrymen as they
appeared to foreign critical eyes. The novel is therefore the most
cosmopolitan of all Turgenev’s works. On a veiled background of the
great world of European society, little groups of representative
Russians, members of the aristocratic and the Young Russia parties, are
etched with an incisive, unfaltering hand. _Smoke_, as an historical
study, though it yields in importance to _Fathers and Children_ and
_Virgin Soil_, is of great significance to Russians. It might with truth
have been named _Transition_, for the generation it paints was then
midway between the early philosophical Nihilism of the sixties and the
active political Nihilism of the seventies.
Markedly transitional, however, as was the Russian mind of the days of
_Smoke_, Turgenev, with the faculty that distinguishes the great artist
from the artist of second rank, the faculty of seeking out and stamping
the essential under confused and fleeting forms, has once and for ever
laid bare the fundamental weakness of the Slav nature, its weakness of
will. _Smoke_ is an attack, a deserved attack, not merely on the Young
Russia Party, but on all the Parties; not on the old ideas or the new
ideas, but on the proneness of the Slav nature to fall a prey to a
consuming weakness, a moral stagnation, a feverish _ennui_, the Slav
nature that analyses everything with force and brilliancy, and ends, so
often, by doing nothing. _Smoke_ is the attack, bitter yet sympathetic,
of a man who, with growing despair, has watched the weakness of his
countrymen, while he loves his country all the more for the bitterness
their sins have brought upon it. _Smoke_ is the scourging of a babbling
generation, by a man who, grown sick to death of the chatter of
reformers and reactionists, is visiting the sins of the fathers on the
children, with a contempt out of patience for the hereditary vice in
the Slav blood. And this time the author cannot be accused of
partisanship by any blunderer. ‘A plague o’ both your houses,’ is his
message equally to the Bureaucrats and the Revolutionists. And so
skilfully does he wield the thong, that every lash falls on the back of
both parties. An exquisite piece of political satire is _Smoke_; for
this reason alone it would stand unique among novels.
The success of _Smoke_ was immediate and great; but the hue-and-cry that
assailed it was even greater. The publication of the book marks the
final rupture between Turgenev and the party of Young Russia. The
younger generation never forgave him for drawing Gubaryov and Bambaev,
Voroshilov and Madame Suhantchikov--types, indeed, in which all
revolutionary or unorthodox parties are painfully rich. Or, perhaps,
Turgenev was forgiven for it when he was in his grave, a spot where
forgiveness flowers to a late perfection. And yet the fault was not
Turgenev’s. No, his last novel, _Virgin Soil_, bears splendid witness
that it was Young Russia that was one-eyed.
Let the plain truth here be set down. _Smoke_ is not a complete picture
of the Young Russia of the day; it was not yet time for that picture;
and that being so, Turgenev did the next best thing in attacking the
windbags, the charlatans and their crowd of shallow, chattering
followers, as well as the empty formulas of the _laissez-faire_ party.
It was inevitable that the attack should bring on him the anger of all
young enthusiasts working for ‘the Cause’; it was inevitable that ‘the
Cause’ of reform in Russia should be mixed up with the Gubaryovs, just
as reforms in France a few years ago were mixed up with Boulanger; and
that Turgenev’s waning popularity for the last twenty years of his life
should be directly caused by his honesty and clear-sightedness in regard
to Russian Liberalism, was inevitable also. To be crucified by those you
have benefited is the cross of honour of all great, single-hearted men.
But though the bitterness of political life flavours _Smoke_, although
its points of departure and arrival are wrapped in the atmosphere of
Russia’s dark and insoluble problems, nevertheless the two central
figures of the book, Litvinov and Irina, are not political figures.
Luckily for them, in Gubaryov’s words, they belong ‘to the
undeveloped.’ Litvinov himself may be dismissed in a sentence. He is
Turgenev’s favourite type of man, a character much akin to his own
nature, gentle, deep, and sympathetic. Turgenev often drew such a
character; Lavretsky, for example, in _A House of Gentlefolk_, is a
first cousin to Litvinov, an older and a sadder man.
But Irina--Irina is unique; for Turgenev has in her perfected her type
till she reaches a destroying witchery of fascination and subtlety.
Irina will stand for ever in the long gallery of great creations,
smiling with that enigmatical smile which took from Litvinov in a glance
half his life, and his love for Tatyana. The special triumph of her
creation is that she combines that exact balance between good and evil
which makes good women seem insipid beside her and bad women unnatural.
And, by nature irresistible, she is made doubly so to the imagination by
the situation which she recreates between Litvinov and herself. She
ardently desires to become nobler, to possess all that the ideal of love
means for the heart of woman; but she has only the power given to her of
enervating the man she loves. Can she become a Tatyana to him? No, to
no man. She is born to corrupt, yet never to be corrupted. She rises
mistress of herself after the first measure of fatal delight. And, never
giving her whole heart absolutely to her lover, she, nevertheless,
remains ever to be desired.
Further, her wit, her scorn, her beauty preserve her from all the
influences of evil she does not deliberately employ. Such a woman is as
old and as rare a type as Helen of Troy. It is most often found among
the great mistresses of princes, and it was from a mistress of Alexander
II. that Turgenev modelled Irina.
Of the minor characters, Tatyana is an astonishing instance of
Turgenev’s skill in drawing a complete character with half-a-dozen
strokes of the pen. The reader seems to have known her intimately all
his life: her family life, her girlhood, her goodness and individual
ways to the smallest detail; yet she only speaks on two or three
occasions. Potugin is but a weary shadow of Litvinov, but it is
difficult to say how much this is a telling refinement of art. The
shadow of this prematurely exhausted man is cast beforehand by Irina
across Litvinov’s future. For Turgenev to have drawn Potugin as an
ordinary individual would have vulgarised the novel and robbed it of its
skilful proportions, for Potugin is one of those shadowy figures which
supply the chiaroscuro to a brilliant etching.
As a triumphant example of consummate technical skill, _Smoke_ will
repay the most exact scrutiny. There are a lightness and a grace about
the novel that conceal its actual strength. The political argument
glides with such ease in and out of the love story, that the hostile
critic is absolutely baffled; and while the most intricate steps are
executed in the face of a crowd of angry enemies, the performer lands
smiling and in safety. The art by which Irina’s disastrous fascination
results in falsity, and Litvinov’s desperate striving after sincerity
ends in rehabilitation,--the art by which these two threads are spun,
till their meaning colours the faint political message of the book, is
so delicate that, like the silken webs which gleam only for the first
fresh hours in the forest, it leaves no trace, but becomes a dream in
the memory. And yet this book, which has the freshness of windy rain and
the whirling of autumn leaves, is a story of ignominious weakness, of
the passion that kills, that degrades, that renders life despicable, as
Turgenev himself says. _Smoke_ is the finest example in literature of a
subjective psychological study of passion rendered clearly and
objectively in terms of French art. Its character, we will not say its
superiority, lies in the extraordinary clearness with which the most
obscure mental phenomena are analysed in relation to the ordinary values
of daily life. At the precise point of psychological analysis where
Tolstoi wanders and does not convince the reader, and at the precise
point where Dostoievsky’s analysis seems exaggerated and obscure, like a
figure looming through the mist, Turgenev throws a ray of light from the
outer to the inner world of man, and the two worlds are revealed in the
natural depths of their connection. It is in fact difficult to find
among the great modern artists men whose natural balance of intellect
can be said to equalise their special genius. The Greeks alone present
to the world a spectacle of a triumphant harmony in the critical and
creative mind of man, and this is their great pre-eminence. But _Smoke_
presents the curious feature of a novel (Slav in virtue of its modern
psychological genius) which is classical in its treatment and expression
throughout: the balance of Turgenev’s intellect reigns ever supreme over
the natural morbidity of his subject.
And thus _Smoke_ in every sense of the word is a classic for all time.