Smoke: A Sign of a New Historical Community

Abstract

By analyzing the new reality that arose in Russia in the second half of the nineteenth century, Turgenev identified different anthropological cross-sections of Russian society. His novels are dominated by the idea of a dialogue of cultures—the obvious dialogue between Western and Russian cultures and a less obvious dialogue played out within Russian culture itself, occurring among the nobility, the people, the raznochintsy, the merchants, and the petit bourgeois. Each of these groups had distinct styles of speech, which are depicted by Turgenev within a single literary work. One salient feature of the new Zeitgeist described by Turgenev is the argument that Russia’s problems can be solved arationally, not by reason but by abrupt changes of fortune.