Fathers and Sons — Commentary

In brief

On 20 May 1859, a landowner waits at a posting station for his son to come home from university (ch. 1). The son, Arkady, brings a friend: Yevgeny Bazarov, a doctor’s son and medical student who cuts up frogs, believes in chemistry and treats everything else as foolery. Over one summer Bazarov insults the household, falls in love against his principles, fights a ridiculous duel, goes home to his adoring parents, nicks his finger on a typhus corpse and dies. The book is barely two hundred pages long, and it was the most argued-over Russian novel of its decade.

It lasts because its author would not take a side. Turgenev was a liberal gentleman of the kind Bazarov despises, and he made Bazarov the strongest person in the book and then let him be broken by things no doctrine covers. He portrayed both generations so fairly that each decided it had been slandered.

The argument

The novel’s proposal is that a theory of life can be correct, useful and even admirable, and still fail at the first contact with love and death. Bazarov’s positions are not stupid. He says “A good chemist is twenty times as useful as any poet” (ch. 6), and in a country of serfs and idle landlords that was a serious thing to say. “Nature’s not a temple, but a workshop, and man’s the workman in it” (ch. 9). Asked what he and his kind actually propose, he replies that “At the present time, negation is the most beneficial of all”, and when Pavel asks whether he denies everything, says “Everything!” (ch. 10). Pavel, with his English clothes and his talk of principles, loses that argument, and so does the reader who came to see him win it.

Then Anna Odintsov enters. Love in the romantic sense, Bazarov has always held, is “unpardonable imbecility” (ch. 17). Now he stalks her rooms and ends by telling her “I love you like a fool, like a madman” with something close to rage (ch. 18). She is interested and declines, and that is the whole of the blow. Nothing has refuted him, but the system no longer describes the man holding it, and he knows it. By the haystack scene with Arkady he is saying “There are no general principles” and “There are feelings. Everything depends on them” (ch. 21), which is a catastrophic admission from a nihilist, and made almost in passing.

Death finishes the argument. The peasants he claims to understand think him “something of the nature of a buffooning clown” (ch. 27). On his sickbed he says “I was needed by Russia.... No, it’s clear, I wasn’t needed”, and then that the shoemaker is needed and the tailor is needed. He is a giant with nothing to lift, in his own word: “there were problems to solve, and I was a giant!” What makes this great rather than merely satisfying to his enemies is the way he dies, without faith, without self-pity and without pretending, and it is the most admirable thing anyone does in the novel.

The shape of the book

Twenty-eight short chapters make a simple figure of journeys: Maryino, the provincial town, Anna’s estate at Nikolskoe, the Bazarov parents’ cottage, then a repeat of the same circuit in a lower key. The first round is comedy and conquest. The second is failure: Anna is cool (ch. 22), the farm at Maryino is falling apart, and Bazarov kisses Nikolai’s young mistress Fenitchka in the arbour (ch. 23) and is called out by Pavel. Their duel, with Piotr the valet as frightened second, ends with a flesh wound and the nihilist dressing his opponent’s leg (ch. 24).

Under the circuit runs a second plot: Arkady’s release. He begins as a disciple, blushing with delight at each outrage. He ends engaged to Katya, Anna’s sister, a quiet girl who has seen through him and likes what she finds (ch. 26). His farewell from Bazarov is one of the book’s best pages: “you’re not made for our bitter, rough, lonely existence” (ch. 26), said without much contempt. The final chapter then does what Turgenev does best, six months on, in a few cool paragraphs. There are two weddings, Pavel alone in Dresden, Sitnikov still in Petersburg and “getting ready to be great”, and then a neglected graveyard and two old people (ch. 28).

The voice

Turgenev writes as a man who has looked and is not going to raise his voice. He gives no speeches of his own. His people talk, and we are left to weigh them, often by a single gesture: Nikolai overhears Bazarov calling him a man whose day is done and “remained two minutes motionless, and stole slowly home” (ch. 10). A cello playing Schubert’s Expectation drifts across the garden at the moment Bazarov is declaring nature a workshop, and Bazarov roars with laughter when he learns who is playing (ch. 9). The scene does not need commentary, and the novel’s tenderness, which is considerable, lives in such placements.

The landscapes do similar work. Nikolai’s evening in the arbour, with the light going on the aspens and his son growing more distant, is written with a love the argument can’t touch (ch. 11), and no one has refuted the evening by the end of it. Turgenev’s style was admired in the West for this restraint: Henry James wrote about him repeatedly and preferred him, in form, to his larger compatriots. The last sentences are the only place he allows himself to rise, as the flowers on the grave speak “of eternal reconciliation and of life without end” (ch. 28), after he has spent a page showing he knows how little such consolation is worth.

The word

Turgenev did not invent “nihilism”; the word was already in use in philosophy. He gave it its social meaning. Arkady defines it for his baffled elders at breakfast as “a man who does not bow down before any authority” (ch. 5), Nikolai helpfully supplying the Latin. Within a few years Russians were using it for a whole type of young person with a materialist reading list, and it soon spread beyond Russia; the radicals of the 1860s and 1870s, some of them violent, took or were given the name.

The novel’s ironies about this are already in place. Bazarov is the real thing, but he is surrounded by what followers look like: Sitnikov, who wants only to be noticed (ch. 12), and Evdoksya Kukshin, who dismisses George Sand as a “retrograde woman” for knowing no embryology (ch. 13). Bazarov’s own programme is mostly a reading list he has inherited, with Büchner’s Stoff und Kraft handed to Nikolai in place of his Pushkin (ch. 10). What he has that they lack is work, and the suspicion that the work may not matter.

The people

Bazarov

Gruff, plain, tall, red-handed, proud of a grandfather who ploughed the land, and rude on principle, Bazarov is drawn from the outside with an obvious fascination. Turgenev says he took him from a young provincial doctor who had struck him and who died shortly before 1860. He is at his most alarming with Arkady in the hay: “I’ll have you by the throat in a minute” (ch. 21), and it is not entirely a joke.

Pavel and Nikolai

The brothers are a beautifully divided pair of fathers. Pavel is a dandy and a stoic, whose life ended years ago over a Princess R—— and a ring engraved with a sphinx (ch. 7). His duel with Bazarov has less to do with honour than he thinks; he has fallen for Fenitchka because something in her recalls the princess, and by the end he begs his brother to marry her, a very great surrender (ch. 24). Nikolai is the soft-hearted one, reading Pushkin, playing the cello badly, losing money on his attempts to treat his peasants fairly. By the end “He is too soft-hearted for both sets” (ch. 28). That sentence could stand for Turgenev too.

Anna and Katya

Anna Odintsov is the novel’s most intelligent person, and possibly its coldest. She is twenty-nine, rich, widowed, curious, and she wants to be disturbed only up to a point. Her refusal is not a moral failure but a correct estimate, and when he is dying she comes, keeps her glove on when she gives him a drink, and kisses his forehead when he says “Breathe on the dying lamp, and let it go out” (ch. 27). Katya looks like an afterthought and turns out to have the keenest judgement in the household.

The old Bazarovs

Vassily and Arina are the book’s heart, and it is their chapters that readers remember. The retired army doctor, anxious to seem up to date, fusses and quotes Latin and is terrified of boring his son; the mother cries and cooks. Their love has no argument in it, and their son can’t answer it or bear it. He remarks that “life is a happy thing for my parents” (ch. 21), and that they are not to be found in the great world “if you look by daylight with a candle” (ch. 27). No fathers-and-sons debate touches that.

How it was made

The first idea came, Turgenev later wrote, while he was sea-bathing at Ventnor on the Isle of Wight in August 1860. He worked at it through the months in which Russia was moving to end serfdom, and the book appeared in Mikhail Katkov’s The Russian Messenger in 1862, the year after the emancipation decree, then as a separate volume. Setting the action in 1859, on the eve of that decree, puts the debate at the moment when reform was still being drafted. He dedicated the novel to the memory of Vissarion Belinsky, the radical critic of the previous generation who had encouraged his early work, and that dedication already asks who the real fathers of the Russian left were.

His aims are recorded in a letter of April 1862 to K. K. Sluchevsky, speaking for offended Russian students in Heidelberg: the whole novel, he says, is directed against the nobility as a leading class. It is a defensible reading and not the only one, and the even-handedness that makes it arguable is also why the book satisfied nobody.

Readers and critics

The reaction was a small civil war. Conservatives thought he had glorified a monster. The young radicals of The Contemporary, where Turgenev had once published, saw a libel on themselves; Maxim Antonovich’s review, “Asmodeus of Our Time”, called Bazarov a caricature. Dmitry Pisarev stood almost alone among them in taking the opposite line and embracing Bazarov as a model, so that “Bazarovism” became a label of its own. When fires broke out in St Petersburg in 1862, Turgenev recalled that an acquaintance greeted him on the street by blaming his nihilists for them. He was wounded, spent less and less time in Russia, and never recovered the audience he had had.

The strongest reply was a novel. Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done? (1863), written in prison, answered Turgenev’s lonely Bazarov with an entire cheerful community of new people, and it became a sacred text for Russian revolutionaries, Lenin among them. Dostoevsky took the other road and in Demons (1872) parodied Turgenev himself as the vain novelist Karmazinov, fawning on the young. Isaiah Berlin’s essay “Fathers and Children” gives the fairest modern account of Turgenev’s predicament, the liberal attacked from both sides and refusing to stop seeing both. That predicament has not gone out of date, and neither has the book.

Afterlives

Eugene Schuyler’s English version appeared as early as 1867. Brian Friel’s play Fathers and Sons opened at the National Theatre in London on 26 June 1987 and was revived at the Donmar in 2014; it is one of the best stage adaptations of a Russian novel in English, and Friel’s reshaping of the ending is worth comparing with the original. George F. Walker’s Nothing Sacred (1988) took the same story to the Canadian stage. British television made a version in 1971, and Pakistan Television adapted it in 1974 as Qurbatain aur Faasley. Its real afterlife, though, is the word, which every later argument about youth and belief has borrowed.

How to read it

Choose the translation. The free Garnett text used here is complete and readable, if a little Victorian, and it calls the book Fathers and Children, which is what the Russian title means. For study, Michael Katz’s Norton edition (1994) or Peter Carson’s (2009) is closer; Nicolas Pasternak Slater and Maya Slater’s (2022) is the most recent.
Read it in two or three sittings. The structure is musical, and the echoes between the two rounds of visits only work if you remember the first.
Do not choose a winner in chapter 10. The argument with Pavel is fun because both men are partly absurd, and neither is the novel’s last word.
Watch the servants and peasants. Their glances at the gentlemen, and at Bazarov, are the quietest comment in the book.
Stop on the last page. Decide whether you believe those flowers. Turgenev may not have.

Ivan Turgenev, A Nest of the Gentry (1859). The elegiac side of the same world, without the provocation.
Nikolai Chernyshevsky, What Is to Be Done? (1863). Clumsy and enormously influential; the answer the radicals wanted.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Demons (1872). The same fathers and sons, ten years on, with blood.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground (1864). The furious rejection of twice-two-makes-four, in reply to the scientific confidence Bazarov shares.
Brian Friel, Fathers and Sons (1987). A playwright’s reading that makes the household very funny and then very sad.