Further, her wit, her scorn, her beauty preserve her from all the influences of evil she does not deliberately employ. Such a woman is as old and as rare a type as Helen of Troy. It is most often found among the great mistresses of princes, and it was from a mistress of Alexander II. that Turgenev modelled Irina.

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.

As a triumphant example of consummate technical skill, Smoke will repay the most exact scrutiny. There are a lightness and a grace about the novel that conceal its actual strength. The political argument glides with such ease in and out of the love story, that the hostile critic is absolutely baffled; and while the most intricate steps are executed in the face of a crowd of angry enemies, the performer lands smiling and in safety. The art by which Irina’s disastrous fascination results in falsity, and Litvinov’s desperate striving after sincerity ends in rehabilitation,—the art by which these two threads are spun, till their meaning colours the faint political message of the book, is so delicate that, like the silken webs which gleam only for the first fresh hours in the forest, it leaves no trace, but becomes a dream in the memory. And yet this book, which has the freshness of windy rain and the whirling of autumn leaves, is a story of ignominious weakness, of the passion that kills, that degrades, that renders life despicable, as Turgenev himself says. Smoke is the finest example in literature of a subjective psychological study of passion rendered clearly and objectively in terms of French art. Its character, we will not say its superiority, lies in the extraordinary clearness with which the most obscure mental phenomena are analysed in relation to the ordinary values of daily life. At the precise point of psychological analysis where Tolstoi wanders and does not convince the reader, and at the precise point where Dostoievsky’s analysis seems exaggerated and obscure, like a figure looming through the mist, Turgenev throws a ray of light from the outer to the inner world of man, and the two worlds are revealed in the natural depths of their connection. It is in fact difficult to find among the great modern artists men whose natural balance of intellect can be said to equalise their special genius. The Greeks alone present to the world a spectacle of a triumphant harmony in the critical and creative mind of man, and this is their great pre-eminence. But Smoke presents the curious feature of a novel (Slav in virtue of its modern psychological genius) which is classical in its treatment and expression throughout: the balance of Turgenev’s intellect reigns ever supreme over the natural morbidity of his subject.

And thus Smoke in every sense of the word is a classic for all time.

EDWARD GARNETT.

January 1896.

[THE NAMES OF THE CHARACTERS IN THE BOOK]

Grigóry [Grísha] Mihálovitch Litvínov.
Tat-yána [Tánya] Petróvna Shestóv.
Kapitolína Márkovna.
Rostisláv Bambáev.
Semyón Yákovlevitch Voroshílov.
Stepán Nikoláevitch Gubar-yóv.
Matróna Semyónovna Suhántchikov.
Tit Bindásov.
Pish-Tchálkin.
Sozónt Ivánitch Potúgin.
Irína Pávlovna Osínin.
Valerián Vladímirovitch Ratmírov.

In transcribing the Russian names into English—