POLEMIKA TURGIENIEWA Z HERCENEM. POWIEŚĆ „DYM”
TURGENEV’S POLEMIC WITH HERZEN. THE NOVEL 'SMOKE'

Summary/Abstract: The subject of the present work is a discussion of the ideological polemic between Herzen and Turgenev which took place in the years 1862-1863 and which pertained to the estimate of the socio-political situation in Russia as compared to the traditionsof the bourgeois democracies of Western Europe and it also contains an analysis of the novel 'Smoke' resulting from that polemic. In that controversy the former “friends” explained to each other that there was more to divide them than to unite. Herzen evolved the conception of the so called peasant socialism in Russia and demanded working out Russia’s own way of development, distinct from that of Western Europe. Turgenev stuck to the guns of liberal occidentalism and he estimated the new ideas evolved by Herzen as a comeback of Slavofiliem. Turgenev returned to that controversy in the latter half of th esixties, most probably because of the activation of the camp of the conservative Slavofils. He directed his severe political satire of the 'Smoke' novel against the conceptions of the London group. Another pamphlet, an even more severe one he directed against the camp of the political reaction which consolidated since 1862 and was preparing for a take over of state authority. Those pamphlets were supplemented by his liberal occidentalist program (the so called Potugin questions). Those three political parts of his work Turgenev united by a love short story in which he returned to pessimistic interpretations of fate, manifested in Turgenev’s short stories of the fifties. He harmonized that short story in its tone of ideas and literary aspects with the political elements of the novel.

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