Smoke

A young Russian man, engaged to be married, encounters his former love in a German spa town and is soon enmeshed in a torturous romantic tangle in this graceful, politically tinged love story by a Russian literary great.

Ivan Turgenev's fifth novel, Smoke, caused a furor when it was published in 1867. Tolstoy claimed that his fellow writer loved only fornication, not his country; the poet Tiutchev that he was polluting "the smoke of the fatherland, sweet and pleasant." The novel's vulnerable...