We invite you to an evening with eminent scholar and translator Donald Rayfield, who will discuss his new translation of Ivan Turgenev’s novel, Smoke (New York Review Books, 2026), which scandalised Russian society upon its publication in 1867. Rayfield will be joined in conversation by Bryan Karetnyk.
Smoke is, at first glance, a classic tale of doomed, reckless love. Its hero, Grigori Litvinov, is an intelligent if unremarkable young man, returning home from his agronomical studies in Germany to marry and take over his father’s neglected estate. He stops off en route in Baden-Baden. There, he meets an unsettling mix of compatriots – monarchists and anarchists, generals and soldiers, diplomats and countesses – including his old flame, Irina. Litvinov jilts his fiancée and plans to elope, and dark clouds begin to gather over the resort town…
Smoke ignited a firestorm in the Russian literary and political worlds. Turgenev was condemned for disrespecting social mores and the motherland, and for depicting Russian expats as backward, hypocritical people with beliefs as fleeting as smoke. Young revolutionaries and elderly nobility alike found themselves in the novel – and were furious. Yet the book is more than simply a caricatureish satire, or a psychological love story. Its depiction of a world in transition, a world of political radicalism and distraction, feels resonant today.
Donald Rayfield OBE is Emeritus Professor of Russian and Georgian at Queen Mary University of London. A distinguished historian, linguist, and literary scholar, Rayfield has translated a wide range of Georgian, Russian, and Uzbek literature, including Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls and Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Stories for NYRB. He is the author of numerous influential historical works including Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia (Reaktion Books, 2012) and ‘A Seditious and Sinister Tribe’: The Crimean Tatars and Their Khanate (Reaktion Books, 2024) which was shortlisted for the Pushkin House Book Prize 2025.
Bryan Karetnyk is an Affiliated Lecturer in the Department of Slavonic Studies, University of Cambridge. He is a writer and translator whose recent translations include major works by Gaito Gazdanov, Irina Odoevtseva, Boris Poplavsky and Yuri Felsen. He is also the editor of the landmark Penguin Classics anthology Russian Émigré Short Stories from Bunin to Yanovsky. He is a regular contributor to the Financial Times, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Spectator.
5a Bloomsbury Square London WC1A 2TA
