Smoke

At the fashionable German spa of Baden-Baden in 1862, Grigory Litvinov, a sensible young Russian who has studied agriculture abroad, is waiting for his fiancée, Tatyana, when he meets again Irina, the beautiful woman who jilted him ten years before and is now married to a general. Their old passion flares up again, while around them Russian expatriates talk endlessly about Russia's future, words that seem to Litvinov like so much smoke.

Ivan Turgenev published the novel in 1867, and its satire of both Slavophile conservatives and Westernising radicals angered almost everyone in Russia, Dostoevsky among them, who quarrelled with him over it. The translation is Constance Garnett's. Worth reading alongside it: On the Eve.

Ivan Turgenev (1818–1883) grew up on an estate in central Russia owned by his tyrannical mother, who controlled thousands of serfs. He studied in Berlin, and his Sportsman's Sketches, with their sympathetic portraits of serfs, made him famous; an obituary of Gogol earned him a month in detention and exile to his estate.

He spent much of his life abroad, following the singer Pauline Viardot, whom he loved for forty years, and became a friend of Flaubert and a bridge between Russian and Western literature. His novel Fathers and Sons gave the world the word nihilist.