: Smoke by Turgenev Ivan Sergeevich Garnett Constance Translator - Russia Social life and customs Fiction

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Translator: Constance Black Garnett

THE NOVELS OF IVAN TURGENEV ILLUSTRATED EDITION

SMOKE

NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN MCMVI

HEIDELBERG, ,, ,, 298

INTRODUCTION

But Irina--Irina is unique; for Turgenev has in her perfected her type till she reaches a destroying witchery of fascination and subtlety. Irina will stand for ever in the long gallery of great creations, smiling with that enigmatical smile which took from Litvinov in a glance half his life, and his love for Tatyana. The special triumph of her creation is that she combines that exact balance between good and evil which makes good women seem insipid beside her and bad women unnatural. And, by nature irresistible, she is made doubly so to the imagination by the situation which she recreates between Litvinov and herself. She ardently desires to become nobler, to possess all that the ideal of love means for the heart of woman; but she has only the power given to her of enervating the man she loves. Can she become a Tatyana to him? No, to no man. She is born to corrupt, yet never to be corrupted. She rises mistress of herself after the first measure of fatal delight. And, never giving her whole heart absolutely to her lover, she, nevertheless, remains ever to be desired.

Of the minor characters, Tatyana is an astonishing instance of Turgenev's skill in drawing a complete character with half-a-dozen strokes of the pen. The reader seems to have known her intimately all his life: her family life, her girlhood, her goodness and individual ways to the smallest detail; yet she only speaks on two or three occasions. Potugin is but a weary shadow of Litvinov, but it is difficult to say how much this is a telling refinement of art. The shadow of this prematurely exhausted man is cast beforehand by Irina across Litvinov's future. For Turgenev to have drawn Potugin as an ordinary individual would have vulgarised the novel and robbed it of its skilful proportions, for Potugin is one of those shadowy figures which supply the chiaroscuro to a brilliant etching.

EDWARD GARNETT.

THE NAMES OF THE CHARACTERS IN THE BOOK

Grig?ry Mih?lovitch Litv?nov. Tat-y?na Petr?vna Shest?v. Kapitol?na M?rkovna. Rostisl?v Bamb?ev. Semy?n Y?kovlevitch Vorosh?lov. Step?n Nikol?evitch Gubar-y?v. Matr?na Semy?novna Suh?ntchikov. Tit Bind?sov. Pish-tch?lkin. Soz?nt Iv?nitch Pot?gin. Ir?na P?vlovna Os?nin. Valeri?n Vlad?mirovitch Ratm?rov.

In transcribing the Russian names into English--

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