Recommendations
Books Like Dym (Smoke)
Books for readers who loved Turgenev's portrait of Russians adrift in Europe
Ivan Turgenev's 1867 Dym (Smoke) is set among Russian émigrés in Baden-Baden — liberals whose eloquent talk produces nothing, reactionaries whose complacency produces nothing, and Litvinov caught between virtue and passion. These eight books share that quality: the Russian or European intellectual abroad, the gap between idealism and action, and the literary tradition of watching a whole social class produce nothing but beautiful, dissipating smoke.
- 1Buy on Amazon
Fathers and Sons
by Ivan Turgenev
The essential predecessor — Smoke is the sequel in spirit to Fathers and Sons, showing the generation after the nihilist moment and its failure; read Fathers and Sons first to understand what was supposed to replace the smoke.
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Buy on AmazonThe Magic Mountain
by Thomas Mann
Hans Castorp's seven years on a Swiss mountain among European intellectuals who talk brilliantly and produce nothing — the most extended portrait of the intellectual class dissipating in beautiful talk.
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Buy on AmazonThe Europeans
by Henry James
Two European siblings arriving in New England and the social comedy of their misalignment with American expectations — the James novel closest to Turgenev's theme of cultural displacement and romantic failure.
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Buy on AmazonBuddenbrooks
by Thomas Mann
A German merchant family's decline across four generations — the same melancholy observation of a class producing nothing but the form of what it once was, without the substance.
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Buy on AmazonThe Hare with Amber Eyes
by Edmund de Waal
A family of Jewish bankers in Vienna and Paris at the turn of the century — the same world of European cultural life as Turgenev's Baden-Baden émigrés, observed with the same ambivalent love.
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Buy on AmazonThe Remains of the Day
by Kazuo Ishiguro
Stevens the butler, who served the wrong cause with perfect devotion, is the English version of Turgenev's liberals — a man whose excellence of manner has produced nothing of value.
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Buy on AmazonAn Education
by Lynn Barber
A young woman seduced by the sophistication of an older man who turns out to be fraudulent — the Smoke situation of the attractive person whose brilliance masks emptiness, in a memoir register.
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Buy on AmazonStoner
by John Williams
An academic who spent his life in a university and whose life produced nothing dramatic, nothing recognized — Williams's quiet tragedy shares Turgenev's melancholy about the gap between a person's quality and their effect.
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