<div> <p class='DefaultText'>Written by one of Russia’s literary masters <em>Smoke</em> is both a poignant love story and a brilliant socio-political study. Marked with a barbed wit and a visionary modernism it became the center of a famous philosophical breach between Turgenev and Dostoevsky.</p> <p class='DefaultText'>On the brink of marriage Grigorii Litvinov visits the fashionable European spa of Baden-Baden a scene dominated by the Russian upper classes. Among them is the beautiful Irina Osinin Litvinov’s first love to whom he was engaged ten years earlier. Litvinov’s 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.</p> <p class='DefaultText'>A sensitive and intelligent commentary on human nature Turgenev’s <em>Smoke</em> endures for its high aesthetic standards and its universal qualities of understanding.</p> </div>