Dym Reading Order

Dym (Smoke, 1867) by Ivan Turgenev is the most politically contentious of his novels — set among Russian émigrés in Baden-Baden in 1862, it attacks both the liberal intelligentsia (who spend their time in beautiful speeches that dissolve into smoke without producing any action) and the reactionary aristocracy (who spend their time in gambling and self-congratulation). The title is Turgenev's metaphor for everything Russian society produces: eloquent, impressive, and dissipating without leaving anything behind. The novel's personal story follows Grigory Litvinov, who is engaged to the virtuous Tatyana but falls under the spell of Irina, a married woman he loved years ago — a love affair that proves as ephemeral as the smoke of the title. Smoke was the most internationally oriented of Turgenev's novels — set almost entirely in Germany, among Russians who have come to Europe and found that both Russia and Europe disappoint them — and it is also the angriest. Turgenev was living in Baden-Baden himself when he wrote it, attached to the opera singer Pauline Viardot in an arrangement that he described, with characteristic irony, as providing him with all the disadvantages of both marriage and freedom simultaneously. The novel was attacked in Russia from every political quarter, but it is now recognized as one of Turgenev's essential works and a key document of Russian attitudes to Europe in the 1860s.