How Fathers and Sons drew on Don Quixote
A documented line of influence: Ivan Turgenev demonstrably engaged Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
Don Quixote
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra · 1605
RenaissanceThe influenced
Fathers and Sons
Ivan Turgenev · 1862
The Age of the NovelRelevance
6/10
On Fathers and Sons’s page
- Fathers and Sons sits inside a framework Turgenev drew from Cervantes — his 1860 essay "Hamlet and Don Quixote" set the idealist against the doubter
- The Quixote pole — conviction, self-sacrifice, idealism doomed to fail — is the archetype against which Bazarov is measured
- Reading Don Quixote first surfaces the type Turgenev is testing: the believer who would rather act and be broken than hesitate
On Don Quixote’s page
- Cervantes gave Turgenev one of his two master-types — in the 1860 essay "Hamlet and Don Quixote," the Don is the self-sacrificing idealist, all conviction and doomed altruism
- Turgenev praised Cervantes' "instinct of genius" and built a whole character theory on the Quixote/Hamlet split
- That framework is the lens critics use to read Bazarov and the generational clash of Fathers and Sons