Smoke

by Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev

Overview

'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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781518763823
Publisher:	CreateSpace Publishing
Publication date:	11/07/2015
Pages:	62
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.13(d)

About the Author

Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev, a Russian novelist, short story writer, poet, dramatist, translator, and proponent of Russian literature in the West, lived from 9 November 1818 to 3 September 1883. Russia's Oryol is where Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev was born. His father fought in the Patriotic War of 1812 as a colonel in the Russian cavalry. Turgenev concentrated on Classics, Russian literature, and philology while attending the University of Saint Petersburg from 1834 to 1837 after spending a year at the University of Moscow. Turgenev never wed, but he had many relationships with the family's serfs, one of which gave birth to his daughter Paulinette, who was not his biological child. Oxford conferred an honorary degree on Turgenev in 1879. Turgenev periodically traveled to England, and the University of Oxford awarded him an honorary doctorate in civil law in 1879. Throughout his later years, Turgenev's health deteriorated. An aggressive malignant tumor (liposarcoma) was surgically removed from his suprapubic area in January 1883, but by that time the tumor had spread to his upper spinal cord, giving him excruciating suffering in the months before his death. In his home in Bougival, close to Paris, on September 3, 1883, Turgenev passed away from a spinal abscess, a side effect of metastatic liposarcoma. His bones were transported to Russia and interred at St. Petersburg's Volkovo Cemetery.