Read this if you…
- want the first novel to deal with the problem of Nihilism
- want one of the shortest Russian Classics
- look back at your younger years and feel you were a know-it-all fool
- are interested in generational conflict (it oddly holds up today)
Skip this if you…
- have an irrational hatred of Russia
The 
Take
Super short and sweet. Great exploration of generational divide, I totally see my younger self in bazarov. Very simple plot to explore some simple competing philosophies
The lineage through Fathers and Sons
- Hamlet by William Shakespeare. Fathers and Sons built on it. - 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
- Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin. Fathers and Sons built on it. - Bazarov and Odintsova descend from the "superfluous man" Pushkin first drew in Onegin — gifted figures who can't quite fit the life around them - Pushkin was Turgenev's inescapable idol; read *Eugene Onegin* first and the archetype behind *Fathers and Sons* comes into focus
- Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. Fathers and Sons built on it. - *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
- Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Fathers and Sons shaped it. - This is where "nihilism" entered the bloodstream — Turgenev's Bazarov gave the idea a face - Four years later Dostoevsky took those floating nihilist "incomplete ideas" to their violent extreme in Raskolnikov - Even the disciples carry over: *Crime and Punishment*'s Lebezyatnikov echoes Bazarov's caricatured followers, Sitnikov and Kukshina
- The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James. Fathers and Sons shaped it. - James read his Turgenev to pieces and talked with him in Paris — and credited Turgenev's method as the genesis of *The Portrait of a Lady* - Turgenev builds the novel around a single morally interesting figure; James borrowed that and made Isabel Archer the axis everything turns on - Reviewers in 1881 caught it immediately, comparing the two writers head to head
Depicted in Art
Half-length portrait of Turgenev in a dark coat, lit from the left, his face lined and grave, set against a plain dark ground.
Vasily Perov, 1872
An elderly couple, seen from behind, stand bowed at a small rural grave in a bare autumn cemetery; the mother in a dark patterned shawl, the father in a long coat holding his hat.
Vasily Perov, 1874
Art-deco book cover for the Catalan edition of Fathers and Sons, translated by Francesc Payarols.
1929
Recommended Editions
Peter Carson
Penguin Classics · 2009
Carson's posthumous Penguin (2009) with a Stoppard intro. Unobtrusive English that lets Turgenev's unhurried watching do the work. Bazarov reads as a plausible 1860s nihilist, not a contemporary edgelord.
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Notable Quotes
A nihilist is a person who does not bow down to any authority, who does not accept any principle on faith, however much that principle may be revered.
Screen & Stage
Fathers and Sons
Stage · 1987
Brian Friel
Posters via The Movie Database (TMDB)
- Osho, spiritual teacher, 1931–1990: Devoted multiple discourses to Bazarov as the archetypal nihilist — a man who has dismantled every inherited belief and arrived at a terrifying freedom he does not know how to fill. For Osho, Bazarov is the figure who clears the ground that a genuine spiritual life requires, and who then cannot take the next step.
- Henry James, American-British novelist, 1843–1916: "Turgenev is in a peculiar degree what I may call the novelists' novelist—an artistic influence extraordinarily valuable and ineradicably established."
- Joseph Conrad, Polish-British novelist, 1857–1924: "The clearest mind, the warmest heart, the largest sympathy—and all that in perfect measure."
- Vladimir Nabokov, Russian-American novelist, 1899–1977: He rated Turgenev below Tolstoy and Gogol, but held Fathers and Sons his best novel and Bazarov's death scene masterly.
- Gustave Flaubert, French novelist, 1821–1880: He admired Turgenev without reserve, counting Fathers and Sons among the books that proved his friend a master.
- Ernest Hemingway, American novelist, Nobel laureate, 1899–1961: He named Turgenev one of the greatest writers who ever lived, reading him 'completely' from Sylvia Beach's lending shelves in his Paris years.
- Willa Cather, American novelist, 1873–1947: She held Turgenev up as a touchstone of fictional excellence, a model of how a novelist suggests rather than catalogues.
- Peter Kropotkin, Russian anarchist philosopher, geographer & revolutionary, 1842–1921: "Bazarov is an admirable painting of the nihilist, but one feels that you did not love him as much as you did your other heroes."