Fathers and Children is a philosophical novel that examines a phenomenon as old as time minus one generation: offspring disagree with their maker. Perhaps it is this alone that we as humans can point to as the source of strife in our world, why there is unhappiness. After all, we are individuals and therefore unique, however humans are products of our time. Time itself, the time when we are born, shapes our thinking.

In Fathers and Children (or Fathers and Sons), Turgenev pitches two generations against one another as a representation of intellectual ideology overturning, and moreover, he weaves the story around some very important history: the 1848 revolutions of Europe and the 1861 abolition of serfdom in Russian. Note that the novel’s setting is 1859 and so the readers of the time (novel published in 1862) would have known what huge changes were on the horizon in just two years time.

Essentially there are two parties: the older generation (Pavel/Nikolay) and the younger generation (Bazarov/Arkady). Both generations possess some nuance with their ally. Within the older generation Pavel’s perspective caters to aristocratic manners and more conservative political, social, and Western philosophy whereas Nikolay adopts a more practical liberal reforming tone pertaining to his land’s agricultural needs (serfs). Bazarov argues that the petty nuances of older generations and their minute changes are not enough—it all needs to be destroyed before anything can be put into its place (Star Wars’s Sith anyone?).

The first half of the novel holds tightly to the debate when two young men come home from university fully baptized in collegiate waters. Nihilism is their everything, or rather, their nothing 😉:

'Aristocratism, liberalism, progress, principles, Bazarov was saying meanwhile. 'Just think of it, all these foreign, and quite futile, words! They would be of no use as a gift to the ordinary Russian.'

and:

'The motive force behind our actions that which we recognized to be useful,' pronounced Bazarov. 'at the present time the most useful thing is negation — so we deny —'

'Everything?'

'Everything.'

But as the pages turn, so do the minds of both generations as ideology meets real world example and… cough… experience. Perhaps life doesn’t need to be nothing. Perhaps the wheel of time does need to turn.

A character that I love is Anna Sergeyevna Odintsova. I think Turgenev characterizes her as someone who bridges the gap between the two generations because she’s both worldly like the older generation and interested in entertaining Bazarov’s philosophy. But more than that, she simply knows. As a widow she’s rich, independent, and bored; Odintsova carries both youth and experience. In the story, her estate lays between both Arkady’s and Bazarov’s parents’ homes—she is the middle ground both literally and metaphorically. It is at her estate that a story of absolute sides turns from black and white to gray.

'I am very curious to see a man who has the courage to believe in nothing.'

I have spoken not a thing about Turgenev’s prose and its beauty. While I think Fathers and Sons is less pretty than his novella First Love, the book ends with a gorgeous line that speaks for the entire work:

However passionate, sinning, and rebellious the heart hidden in the tomb, the flowers growing over it peep serenely at us with their innocent eyes; they tell us not of eternal peace alone, of that great peace of “indifferent” nature; tell us too of eternal reconciliation and of life without end.