Smoke (Alma Classics) Read online

  Smoke

  Ivan Turgenev

  Translated by Michael Pursglove

  ALMA CLASSICS

  Alma Classics

  an imprint of

  alma books ltd

  3 Castle Yard

  Richmond

  Surrey TW10 6TF

  United Kingdom

  www.almaclassics.com

  Smoke first published in Russian 1867

  This translation first published by Alma Classics in 2013

  Reprinted 2014, 2016, 2019

  Translation, Introduction and Notes © Michael Pursglove, 2013

  Extra Material © Alma Classics Ltd

  Cover design by Will Dady

  isbn: 978-1-84749-316-3

  All the pictures in this volume are reprinted with permission or presumed to be in the public domain. Every effort has been made to ascertain and acknowledge their copyright status, but should there have been any unwitting oversight on our part, we would be happy to rectify the error in subsequent printings.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.

  Contents

  Introduction

  Smoke

  Note on the Text

  Notes

  Extra Material

  Ivan Turgenev’s Life

  Ivan Turgenev’s Works

  Select Bibliography

  Introduction

  On 4th August 1862 (16th New Style; all further dates will be given only in the Old Style of the time), after the furore provoked by the publication in the journal Russian Herald of Fathers and Children, and a month before its appearance in book form, Turgenev left Russia for the German spa town of Baden. It was his second visit to the town (now officially known as Baden-Baden), which was a popular destination for rich Russians; five years earlier he had met Leo Tolstoy there. Government disapproval was soon added to literary polemics: Turgenev became suspected of involvement in opposition émigré activity (the so-called “Affair of the Thirty-Two”) and was summoned to Petersburg. He did not go, choosing instead to settle in Baden with his illegitimate daughter Paulinette. The reason for his decision is not difficult to discover: his long-time paramour, the singer Pauline Viardot, had just retired from the stage and set up house in Baden with her husband and children. In June 1865 Turgenev purchased land next to Pauline’s villa and arranged for the building there of a palatial residence for himself. The building – which still stands at what is now 47 Fremersbergstrasse – was completed in September 1866, but Turgenev did not move in until April 1868. Almost immediately he ran into financial difficulties and had to sell the house to Pauline’s husband Louis. When the Franco-Prussian War broke out in July 1870, the Viardots moved to France, thus effectively ending Turgenev’s links with the town.

  Turgenev had begun to draft a follow-up novel to Fathers and Children in the autumn of 1863 but did not begin serious work on it until 6th November 1865. On 28th November he wrote to the memoirist Pavel Annenkov: “I’ve set about composing a novel… I’ve already written a considerable number of pages.” By 17th January 1867, as he noted on the draft manuscript, the novel was complete, despite the fact that for nine months in 1866 he “did not write a single line”. At the end of the month he read it to the poet A.M. Zhemchuzhnikov and gave public readings of selected chapters, first in Moscow then, in early April, in Petersburg. In mid-April the novel was published in the Russian Herald; a book version followed at the beginning of November.

  A translation into French appeared almost simultaneously. It was done by Avgustin Petrovich Golitsyn (who transliterated his name as Galitzine), bore the title Fumée and was edited by Turgenev himself, a fluent French speaker, and by Prosper Mérimée, an indefatigable promoter of Russian literature. This translation formed the unacknowledged basis of what purported to be the first translation of the novel into English, by Rowland Crawley, which appeared in London in 1868. Such was the welter of mistakes in this translation, which bore the subtitle Life in Baden, that Patrick Waddington has branded it “a celebrated travesty”. An error-strewn German version, under the title Rauchen, by Friedrich Tschiesch (Cziesch) also appeared in 1868. Fumée was also the basis, this time acknowledged, of William F. West’s translation, published in America in 1872 and in London in 1883. However, it was not until 1896 that a translation into English, by the redoubtable Constance Garnett, was published which was based on Turgenev’s original Russian. This was followed in 1903 by the American Isabel F. Hapgood’s translation, but then over four decades elapsed before Natalie A. Duddington’s translation was published in London in 1949 and the Harry C. Stevens version appeared in America in 1950. Thus, while there have been at least four translations of Fathers and Children since 1990, no new version of Smoke has been published for well over fifty years. In remedying that omission, I have, of course, consulted earlier versions and learnt from them, even when I disagreed with them.

  If anyone expected Turgenev to produce some sort of sequel to Fathers and Children, they were surely disappointed. Smoke is approximately the same length as its predecessor – both contain twenty-eight chapters – but there, for the most part, the resemblance ends. The bulk of the novel, twenty-three chapters, is set not in Russia but in Baden-Baden. This is a crucial feature of the novel, not least because, as Litvinov makes clear in Chapter 6, Baden is about as unlike Russia as anywhere on earth can be. The topography is German, but the bulk of the names are either French (l’arbre russe, l’Hôtel de l’Europe) or denoted by both French and German names (Konversationshaus/Maison de la Conversation; Altes Schloss/Vieux Château). Even the name of the town (Baden to its habitués, Baden-Baden to the naive outsider Kapitolina Markovna) has its French variant Bade. The spa is run by a Frenchman and its Jockey Club is an offshoot of the Paris Jockey Club. In the gaming rooms French currency is accepted as readily as south German guilder.

  The date is August 1862, some seventeen months after the Emancipation of the Serfs, a time when there was still hope that the reforms of Alexander II, which were still in progress, might signal a new dawn for Russia. The main characters in the novel are the Russians who form the expatriate community in Baden. They divide into two groups: the high-society types, of which the reactionary military men (“the generals”) form an important sub-group, and a motley collection of students and “progressive” intellectuals, loosely connected with Heidelberg University. The politics of the two groups are very different: the generals are right-wing, monarchist and suspicious of Alexander’s reforms; the “intellectuals” range from Slavophiles to socialists, feminists to Fourierists. An important difference between the two groups is that the high-society types use French (but not German, which they speak badly) as readily as Russian, whereas the “intellectuals” never use French, a fact which emphasizes their isolation in the cosmopolitan world of Baden. The novel contains, alongside a smattering of German and English, an enormous amount of French, some 120 examples in all. It is clear that, with one exception (the lady from Arzamas in Chapter 10), the upper-class Russians all speak good, accurate French, which contrasts markedly with the heavily accented efforts of the sole American in the novel, Mr Fox (Chapter 15). Nevertheless Turgenev satirizes their efforts. On the very first page of the novel we are told that the Russians’ French is “guttural” and in the same chapter Turgenev, temporarily adopting the attitude
s of one of the characters he is describing, asserts that the phrase “le culte de la pose” cannot be translated into Russian. In Chapter 5 Potugin tells a typically lengthy anecdote about a Russian’s inability to speak colloquial French and in Chapter 10 Litvinov recognizes that he is about to encounter Russians precisely because the members of the picnic party are speaking French; in Chapter 12 Irina says of Potugin: “And one can speak Russian to him. It may be bad Russian, but it’s Russian, not that revolting non-stop saccharine Petersburg French.”

  There is an ironic twist to this theme in the final chapter of the novel, set in Russia in 1865. Here the fatuous Bambayev (who never once uses French) is discovered by Litvinov working as a steward for the grotesque Gubaryov brothers, who insist on calling him “Monsieur Roston”.

  If the novel is bilingual, the plotting is bipolar. Smoke is, in effect, two novels in one. The first is a typical Turgenevan romance, a love triangle, Litvinov – Irina Ratmirova – Tatyana Shestova. The ingredients are familiar to any reader of Turgenev: an earnest, ineffectual, passive male, a virtuous, chaste heroine and a femme fatale. The central figure of this novel is Grigory Mikhailovich Litvinov. The second novel is the “pamphlet novel” involving the Russian expatriates, who are mercilessly caricatured. Turgenev’s work, influenced as it was by the work of Gogol and Griboyedov, had always had a satirical streak in it, but whereas in Fathers and Children characters such as Kukshina and Sitnikov remain secondary figures, in Smoke such characters dominate whole sections of the novel, although fewer chapters overall are devoted to them than to the romance. The pamphlet novel was written in response to a series of articles, cast in the form of letters, written by Turgenev’s erstwhile soulmate Alexander Herzen. Herzen had abandoned his earlier Westernism and now advocated a peculiarly Russian type of socialism, based on the peasant commune. Turgenev was as unsympathetic to this view as he was to the diehard reactionary views of the generals. The quasi-intellectuals are portrayed two-dimensionally and have obvious faults. Nevertheless at least some of them have redeeming features. In Chapter 5, for instance, Potugin finds kind things to say about four of them: Sukhanchikova, Pishchalkin, Bambayev and Voroshilov. Their main fault is their blind allegiance to Gubaryov who, as well as being a fraudulent intellectual, is revealed in Chapter 28 to have a brutal streak in him, as does his brother. The same brutal streak is to be found in the generals, especially in General Ratmirov. In a typically Turgenevan flashback characterization in Chapter 12 we learn of his faux liberalism and his brutal treatment of rebellious peasants in Belorussia. While they may lack the brutality of the generals, the other members of high society are treated by Turgenev with unalloyed scorn. Prince Koko does not physically maltreat peasants, but in a quarter of an hour gambles away the equivalent of the quit rent from 150 families (Chapter 5). In Chapter 15 the upper-class Russians evoke merriment among the German hotel staff with their futile attempt to hypnotize a crayfish. However, despite this unremittingly satirical picture of high society, it is with high society that the novel ends, and in the last paragraph Turgenev records that three of the generals, including General Ratmirov, are well advanced along “the road which the French call the Way of Honours”.

  The only sympathetic character to emerge from the pamphlet novel is Sozont Ivanovich Potugin, who, despite a tendency to exaggerate Russia’s lack of culture and civilization, is nevertheless clearly intended to be Turgenev’s mouthpiece. He is also, through his links with Irina, a structural bridge between the romance and the pamphlet novel. Critics have always disagreed as to whether Litvinov, who appears in practically every scene, or Potugin, with whom the novel ends, is the main hero of the novel. The novel begins with Litvinov, who has some superficial similarities with Bazarov. Both were brought up on small impoverished estates and in both cases the mother, but not the father, was of noble origin. Litvinov’s name ultimately derives from the Greek word for stone and he is twice (Chapters 14 and 26) referred to as such by Bambayev. Furthermore, although Potugin’s Westernizing views are clearly close to those of the author, there is a strong implication that Turgenev believed Russia’s future to lie with the Litvinov type: honest, patriotic, studious, conscientious, hard-working, unheroic and, above all, ordinary. As Frank Seeley puts it: “While Potugin proclaims Turgenev’s political creed… it is Litvinov who is destined to put it into practice…” Leonid Tsypkin, in his novel Summer in Baden-Baden, followed Turgenev’s contemporaries Nikolai Strakhov, Alexei Suvorin and Alexander Skabichevsky in opting for Litvinov, but described him scathingly as “that bloodless hero of a bloodless novel”. On the other hand the novel ends not with Litvinov but with the news that the mysterious young girl entrusted to Potugin’s care has died. This is another example of the Schopenhauerian pessimism which pervades this novel and, indeed, most of Turgenev’s post-Emancipation work. Turgenev was acutely aware of the arguments surrounding his hero and wrote with some exasperation: “First they tell me that I present Litvinov as the hero; then they prove him to be a feeble nonentity (tryapka) and announce triumphantly that I contradict myself.”

  Like Fathers and Children before it, Smoke gave rise to a literary furore. Writing in 1880, Turgenev himself commented:

  Smoke, although having considerable success, did however arouse great indignation against me. Accusations of a lack of patriotism, and of insulting my native country and so on, were particularly strong. It turned out that I had offended equally, albeit from differing points of view, both the right wing and the left wing of our reading public.

  Among the left-wingers who took offence were Alexander Herzen, Dmitry Pisarev and Nikolai Shelgunov (who features among the list of names reeled off by Voroshilov in Chapter 4). A leading right-winger who took exception to Turgenev’s novel was the great lyric poet Fyodor Tyutchev, who objected to the absence of “national sentiment” in the novel, by which he meant the presence in it of anti-Russian sentiments; he responded to the journal publication of Smoke with an epigram and a thirty-two-line poem, also entitled ‘Smoke’. Another conservative-minded lyric poet, Afanasy Fet, objected to the novel on rather different grounds, considering that in it Turgenev was advocating a “progressive” view of marriage. However, perhaps the most famous right-wing critic of the novel was Fyodor Dostoevsky. His stand-up row with Turgenev in the German spa town on 28th June 1867 is memorably recounted in fictionalized form in Summer in Baden-Baden.

  There were some, mainly, but not exclusively, from what might be termed the centre or centre right, who approved of the novel. These included the memoirist Pavel Annenkov, the diarist and censor Alexander Nikitenko, the poet Alexei Pleshcheev and Nikolai Strakhov, who went so far as to declare that Smoke “was a splendid, first-rate thing, on a par with the best that Turgenev has written”.

  Turgenev hesitated over the title of his novel. He originally opted for Two Lives (referring to Irina and Litvinov, and to the dualism inherent in both their characters), but then settled on Smoke. In 1867, however, before the novel was published, he admitted to his fellow liberal novelist Mikhail Avdeev that the title might be changed. He was equally unhappy with the obvious French translation of his new title, Fumée, but in the end retained it. The full import of the title is not revealed until Chapter 26. As Litvinov sits in the train en route from Baden to Russia he watches the ever-shifting billows of steam and smoke from the engine, and we are told that “suddenly everything appeared to him to be smoke, everything: his own life, Russian life, everything human and especially everything Russian”. Later in Chapter 26, and elsewhere in the novel, Turgenev elaborates on this all-embracing statement. Litvinov is reminded of Gubaryov’s smoke-filled rooms (Chapters 4 and 6) and the expensive cigars smoked by the generals (Chapter 10). In Chapter 23 Litvinov writes to Irina of “all the dead past, of all these undertakings and hopes which have turned to smoke and ashes”. At the end of Chapter 26 the smoke is emblematic of the brief enthusiasm among Russians for studying the sciences at Heidelberg, an enthusiasm which, Litvinov predict
s, will soon dissipate like smoke. In the final scene of the novel, in the opulent setting of Petersburg high society, the smoke image returns when a society lady, discussing Irina’s reputation and character, is described as having a voice which “evaporates like incense smoke”. Turgenev’s title thus bears a heavy, perhaps too heavy symbolic weight, which may account for Turgenev’s apparent uneasiness about it.

  In November 1867 Turgenev published a brief, two-paragraph preface to the first edition of the novel. In it he writes of the “many and varied criticisms” and says that he has been advised by well-wishers to refute these in his preface. This he declines to do, saying that to do so would be to justify himself, and he has no reason to feel guilty. In any case he would be unable to win over those who were offended by the views expressed by Potugin. In April 1868 Turgenev added a short extra paragraph to the preface for the second edition of the novel. It is worth quoting in full:

  In publishing the second separate edition of Smoke the author does not find it necessary to add anything to the words with which he prefaced the first edition. He is pleased that his book is being read and hopes it will be of some value, in spite of its inevitable shortcomings.

  The translator has the same hopes for this new translation.

  A debt of considerable gratitude is due, individually and collectively, to the following for elucidating several very difficult linguistic and factual points: Mel Dadswell, James Dingley, Richard Peace, Tim Sergay of the University of Albany and Felix Abramovich Litvin and Valentina Nikitichna Grishanova, both of the University of Orel. Alessandro Gallenzi encouraged me to translate this text and Christian Müller edited it with great care and sympathy. Any remaining mistakes in it are entirely my own responsibility.

  – Michael Pursglove

  Smoke