How Fathers and Sons drew on Hamlet
A documented line of influence: Ivan Turgenev demonstrably engaged William Shakespeare’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
Hamlet
William Shakespeare · c. 1600
ShakespeareThe influenced
Fathers and Sons
Ivan Turgenev · 1862
The Age of the NovelRelevance
8/10
On Fathers and Sons’s page
- Bazarov is Turgenev's 'Hamlet type' made flesh — the figure he defined in his 1860 essay 'Hamlet and Don Quixote'
- Like the prince, Bazarov is a skeptic of pure negation whose corrosive self-awareness dooms him to unhappiness and an inability to love
- Read Hamlet first and the nihilist's tragedy snaps into focus as a very old shape in a new costume
On Hamlet’s page
- Turgenev turned Hamlet into a type — the skeptic of negation, paralyzed by his own self-awareness — in his 1860 essay 'Hamlet and Don Quixote'
- Two years later he poured that type into Bazarov, the brilliant nihilist whose egoism leaves him unable to love
- Fathers and Sons is Hamlet transplanted to provincial Russia: read the play and you've already met Bazarov's ancestor