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 the story of disintegrating weakness, of the passion that saps and paralyses, 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 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 Tolstoy wanders and does not convince the reader, and at the precise point where Dostoevsky'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 equalize 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. IX "VIRGIN SOIL" CHAPTER IX "VIRGIN SOIL" The last words of _Virgin Soil_-- "A long while Paklin remained standing before this closed door. "'Anonymous Russia!' he said at last"--