Turgenev’s “New Manner”

With Dym begins decline of Turgenev's novelistic art. Such customary view of Turgenev's fifth novel as expressed by L. V. Pumpianskii in his well-known commentary of 1930. ' Not every critic has shared it. Turgenev's contemporary Strakhov considered novel one of his most notable achievements,2 while Soviet critic S. M. Petrov has perceived in it evidence of the enrichment of his talent.3 Since both these assessments, however, were prompted less by novel as a whole than by individual sections or aspects of it, they may almost be viewed as endorsing Pumpianskii's criticism of work for its lack of organic unity. Pumpianskii distinguishes between four autonomous spheres in Dym attack on left-wing intelligentsia, attack on official set, monologues of Potugin, and love story4 and perceives little significant connection between them, particularly between first three and fourth. The principal reason, he contends, for this lack of cohesion unsuccessful experiment of separating hero of plot (Litvinov) from ideological hero (Potugin).5 His conclusion supported by Richard Freeborn who has argued that novel contains no single hero comparable to Rudin, Lavretskii, or Bazarov whose problem unites both ideological and personal issues in fiction.6 Accordingly, neither Pumpianskii nor Freeborn inclined to identify Litvinov with central theme of novel. In Freeborn's view, work is not portrait of a hero or heroine like Turgenev's preceding novels, but the portrait of a society complemented by history of relationship between Litvinov and Irina,7 while sole unifying element recognized by Pumpianskii indictment of Russian mirages symbolically denoted by novel's

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