Fathers and Sons

I picked this up expecting a museum piece about Russian politics and found a novel about the difficulty of being loved by people you have decided not to need. That sounds like a modern complaint, but Turgenev got there in 1862, and he got there without raising his voice. The book is short, dry, and often very funny, and its central figure is a young man who believes he has outgrown everyone in the room.

The edition I read is the Penguin Classics translation by Rosemary Edmonds, which includes Isaiah Berlin's Romanes lecture, "Fathers and Children." Turgenev wrote the novel in the shadow of the emancipation of the serfs, and it appeared in The Russian Messenger in 1862, the year after the decree. He dedicated it to the memory of the critic Vissarion Belinsky, which tells you something about the argument he thought he was having. The book made the word "nihilist" a public label in Russia, and both sides of the political divide argued about whether Bazarov was a slander or a hero. Readers have been arguing ever since.

Two friends arrive at Marino

The novel opens in May 1859 with Nikolai Petrovich Kirsanov waiting at a posting station for his son. Nikolai is forty-four, a widower, a liberal landowner with two hundred serfs and a estate called Marino that he manages badly and loves sincerely. He has brought the carriage, and he keeps smoothing his clothes and worrying about dinner. When Arkady finally arrives, he brings a friend Nikolai did not expect: Yevgeny Bazarov, a tall medical student with long hair, a broad forehead, greenish eyes, and the manners of someone who has decided that politeness is a form of lying.

The first dinner sets the terms. Pavel Petrovich, Nikolai's older brother, appears in a dark English suit, with a starched collar and nails that are almost aggressively clean. He was a guards officer, he has lived abroad, and he cultivates the manner of a man who has seen everything and been disappointed by most of it. He asks Bazarov what he is, and Bazarov says he is a nihilist. Pavel has heard the word and dislikes it. Arkady explains that a nihilist is a man who does not bow to any authority and does not accept any principle on trust, no matter how much respect surrounds it. Pavel calls that empty and destructive. Bazarov says that in Russia the most useful thing a person can do right now is clear the ground.

The argument is not really about philosophy. Pavel has spent his life believing that refinement matters, that a good suit and a good quotation are evidence of a soul. Bazarov has spent his life learning that a frog's leg tells you more than a poem, and he says so at the table. He is rude to Nikolai, dismissive of Pushkin, and bored by the cello coming from the next room. He is also, by a wide margin, the most alive person in the house.

The estate, Fenechka, and the first cracks

Nikolai's household is gentle and a little sad. His wife died years ago. He has taken in Fenechka, the daughter of the estate's former housekeeper, and has a small son with her named Mitya. The arrangement is not exactly hidden and not exactly acknowledged. Arkady is delighted by his little brother; Bazarov teases him about it, and the teasing has an edge.

Bazarov settles in by collecting frogs and cutting them up. He is up before the servants, he works, he argues, and he treats the household as a laboratory. The servants like him, or at least they are amused by him. He talks to them as though they were children, which is its own kind of blindness, but he does not pretend to be their superior in the way Pavel does. Pavel watches him with growing hatred. It is not just ideology. Bazarov is young, and Pavel is not, and Pavel's careful self-possession looks expensive in a way that youth can expose.

Arkady slowly discovers that he is not the radical he thought he was. He loves his father. He likes Pushkin. He is moved by the garden at dusk, and when Bazarov mocks him for it, he laughs along, but the laugh costs him something. Turgenev is very good at this small betrayal. Arkady is not a hypocrite; he is a young man who has borrowed a personality because it made him feel taller.

Odintsova at Nikolskoye

The pair visit Anna Sergeyevna Odintsova, a wealthy widow who lives at Nikolskoye with her younger sister Katya. Odintsova is twenty-eight, composed, and self-possessed in a way that makes every other character look unfinished. She married an older man for security, was widowed early, and has since arranged her life so that no one can arrange it for her. She is interested in Bazarov because he is not afraid of her, and because he is clearly afraid of something.

Bazarov falls. He does not want to, and he argues with himself about it. He tells Arkady that a man who lets a woman take hold of him is a fool, then finds excuses to stay another day. Finally, in a scene that is almost painful to read, he tells Odintsova he loves her. He does it badly, as a demand rather than a gift. She does not mock him. She simply does not meet him. She says something to the effect that he has misunderstood her, and the door closes without a slam.

Her refusal is not cruelty. Odintsova has built a life out of not being swept away, and she is intelligent enough to see that Bazarov would consume her. What she feels is curiosity, perhaps a little tenderness, and the pleasure of being the one person in the room he cannot dismiss. Turgenev lets her keep her dignity. That is more than most nineteenth-century novelists would do.

Arkady, meanwhile, drifts toward Katya. She is quiet, plays the piano, and does not perform. Their romance is the least dramatic thing in the book and the most likely to last.

Bazarov's parents and the widening gap

Bazarov takes Arkady home to his parents' small estate. Vasily Ivanovich, a retired army doctor, is delighted to the point of nervous collapse. Arina Vlasyevna, his mother, is devout, superstitious, and so happy to have her son in the house that she cannot stop touching him. They have not seen him in three years. They set out his favorite jam and hover at the edge of rooms.

Bazarov is bored within a day. He loves his parents, and he cannot stand being loved so openly. He tells Arkady that his father's medicine is outdated, that his mother's piety is superstition, and that the whole household is a museum of the previous century. Then he leaves early, and his mother cries at the gate. Turgenev does not comment. He does not have to.

The visit also breaks something between the friends. Arkady defends his uncle and his father, and Bazarov tells him he is a sentimentalist in nihilist clothing. They nearly fight. Arkady is beginning to see that Bazarov's contempt is not a method but a temperament, and that it costs other people more than it costs Bazarov.

On the way back they stop at Nikolskoye, and Odintsova is polite and distant. Bazarov takes the hint and leaves almost immediately. He is not devastated in the way a romantic hero would be. He is angry, and he takes it out on everyone around him.

The kiss, the duel, and the death

Back at Marino, Bazarov kisses Fenechka in the summerhouse. She protests, and he stops, but Pavel has seen it. Pavel challenges him to a duel, and the scene is one of the best in the book because neither man believes in duels and both understand that they have no other language for what has happened. Pavel fires first and misses. Bazarov shoots him in the thigh, then remembers he is a doctor and starts treating the wound with the same hands that just made it. They agree to tell Nikolai they argued about politics.

Pavel's motive is not really Fenechka. Years earlier he fell in love with a married woman, a princess he calls R., and the affair ended badly. He resigned his commission, followed her abroad, and then watched her die, or disappear, depending on which memory he is nursing. He has been polishing that disappointment ever since, and Bazarov's offhand confidence looks to him like an insult to every sacrifice he made for a feeling. The duel is therefore a fight about a kiss, and also a fight about whether a life spent on one lost love is noble or merely wasteful. Pavel does not win the argument, but he does get to stand in a field at dawn with a pistol, which for him may be the same thing.

The duel clears the air in the way that violence sometimes does. Pavel tells Nikolai to marry Fenechka. Then he goes abroad to Dresden and settles into a life of solitary, well-dressed unhappiness. Nikolai marries Fenechka, and Arkady marries Katya, and the two households settle into a warmth that Bazarov would have called stagnation.

Bazarov goes home and helps his father with patients. He is not happy, but he is useful. He treats peasant children, argues with his father about methods, and lets his mother feed him. The household is proud of him in a way that makes him restless, and he keeps talking about returning to work he does not have. Then he performs an autopsy on a peasant who died of typhus, cuts his finger, and infects himself. The illness is pyaemia, blood poisoning, and it moves fast. On his deathbed he sends for Odintsova. She comes with a German doctor and stands by the bed while he tells her that she is beautiful, and that he is sorry for the things he said. She kisses his forehead. He dies the next day.

The last pages belong to his parents. They pray at his grave, and the fence is already falling down, and the birds come. Turgenev ends on that image, not on an argument, and it is the reason the book outlives its politics. The two old people have lost the future they spent their lives saving for, and the novel lets them keep their grief without turning it into a lesson.

The marriages in the epilogue are deliberately unheroic. Arkady runs the estate, marries Katya, and becomes a decent, slightly boring landowner. Nikolai marries Fenechka and is happy in a way that costs him some social standing. Pavel goes to Dresden, dresses well, and dies alone. Odintsova marries again, choosing comfort and control over passion, and the narrator notes that she has settled into the life she designed. Nobody is transformed. The world closes over the arguments, and the only person who wanted to break it open is under the ground.

What the book is doing

The generational conflict is not a simple left-versus-right. Nikolai and Pavel are liberals of the 1840s, men who believe in progress and good manners and gradual reform. Bazarov is a raznochinets, an educated commoner with no estate and no patience. He represents a generation that looked at its fathers' compromises and found them cowardly. Turgenev, who was a landowner himself, gives Bazarov most of the intelligence and almost none of the consolation.

Bazarov's nihilism is also a young man's armor. He dismisses love, art, and family because they can hurt him, and then he falls in love, misses his parents, and dies afraid. The novel does not punish him for this. It shows that his ideas were a way of surviving a world that had no place for a doctor's son with a large mind. His death is not a refutation of nihilism. It is just death, arriving on schedule, and it makes every argument in the book look small.

Pavel is the other side of the same coin. He has turned his whole life into a pose, and the pose has kept him from having one. Turgenev is kinder to him than Bazarov is, and the duel gives him a strange dignity. He is ridiculous, and he knows it, and he still gets up at dawn to defend a woman he barely respects.

The weaknesses are real. Bazarov's speeches sometimes sound like a pamphlet, and the women are seen mostly through what men need from them. Odintsova is the exception, but even she exists to test Bazarov. The political references are dated in their specifics, and a reader who does not know the difference between a serf and a household servant will miss some of the stakes.

The translation matters more than usual. Edmonds is plain and a little stiff, which suits the novel's refusal to be lyrical. A more modern translation may catch more of the humor. Either way, the book is short enough to read in a few evenings, and it leaves a mark that is out of proportion to its size.