Fathers and Sons
by Ivan Turgenev
Summary
Arkady Kirsanov comes home from university to his father's small estate bringing his friend Yevgeny Bazarov, a medical student and self declared nihilist who dismisses art, tradition, and romantic feeling as sentimental waste and says so bluntly to everyone he meets, including Arkady's gentle father Nikolai and his elegant, dueling minded uncle Pavel. The clash between generations plays out largely through Pavel, who takes Bazarov's contempt for the old order as a personal insult and eventually challenges him to a duel after catching him kissing a servant girl, Fenechka, whom Nikolai loves; Pavel is wounded in the leg and the duel changes nothing either man actually believes. Bazarov's own convictions crack only once, when he falls for the wealthy widow Anna Odintsova and finds himself, to his own disgust, in exactly the kind of romantic feeling he has spent the whole novel mocking; she draws back from him, unwilling to risk her ordered life on so unpredictable a man. Arkady, less doctrinaire than his friend from the start, drifts away from nihilism and toward Anna's sister Katya, whom he marries and settles down with, taking over his father's estate. Bazarov, cutting himself accidentally while performing an autopsy on a peasant, contracts blood poisoning and dies at his parents' house, his convictions intact to the end even as the book quietly suggests how little those convictions equipped him to live.
Turgenev builds the whole novel around this argument between generations without ever fully taking either side, and Bazarov in particular resists being reduced to either a hero or a warning; he is arrogant, often genuinely brilliant, and finally undone by exactly the human feeling he refused to take seriously. The novel is compact and moves briskly, closer in pace to Turgenev's shorter fiction than to the sprawling social novels of his contemporaries, and it rewards a reader interested in ideas argued out through character rather than plot.
Historical Context & Significance
Fathers and Sons first appeared in full in the Moscow journal The Russian Messenger in early 1862, and Turgenev revised the text for a separate Moscow edition from Grachev later that year. The novel gave Russian a new word: Bazarov's self description as a nihilist, someone who rejects all authority not backed by empirical proof, entered wider use largely through the book, and a real Bolshevik revolutionary later took the name Vladimir Bazarov as a direct pseudonym drawn from the character.
Western novelists took the book seriously from early on; Gustave Flaubert, Guy de Maupassant, and Henry James all admired it, and it is often cited as the first Russian novel to gain real prominence outside Russia. Turgenev wrote it responding directly to the widening split he saw between the liberal reformers of his own generation and the more radical young nihilists coming after them, and Bazarov has remained the character critics return to first when discussing that generational argument in Russian literature.