Smoke

Written by one of Russias literary masters, Smoke is both a poignant love story and a brilliant sociopolitical study. Marked with a barbed wit and a visionary modernism, it became the center of a famous philosophical breach between Turgenev and Dostoevsky.On the brink of marriage, Grigorii Litvinov visits the fashionable European spa of BadenBaden, a scene dominated by the Russian upper classes. Among them is the beautiful Irina Osinin, Litvinovs first love, to whom he was engaged ten years earlier. Litvinovs struggle with a nostalgic passion is set against the background of a society pulled both toward and against change as it feels the influence of the West.A sensitive and intelligent commentary on human nature, Turgenevs Smoke endures for its high aesthetic standards and its universal qualities of understanding.