Fathers and Sons

"It is. You can read it in a long afternoon. It’s sublime in its literary style, even in translation. There’s a clarity and vivacity of characterization which makes the characters very memorable. It’s also a very contemporary book. The culture wars we’re having today were described by Turgenev in Fathers and Sons . It’s a book about a couple of students. Bazarov is the enigmatic character at the center of the book, who is brought back by his friend, Arkady, to his father’s estate after graduating from university. Bazarov is this natural scientist-type who doesn’t really believe in anything that doesn’t further the interests of the ordinary people. The dedication to the newly emancipated serfs is very much part of the landscape of this book. This book is the origin of the nihilist in its modern form: the ideological position that you reject all received ideas and philosophical assumptions. All that matters is the material world and improving the welfare of the ordinary people. So science is good; literature is a waste of time, I guess. Turgenev invents the nihilist in Bazarov. Arkady, his friend, is less dogmatic in his nihilism. Arkady and Bazarov are men of the 1860s, trenchant socialist materialists and they clash with the father and uncle who are men of the 1840s. The father’s generation are like Turgenev, liberals who might have philanthropic intentions, but don’t go out and join the revolution, whereas Bazarov’s generation would. There’s a political/cultural clash going on and I was taken aback by how much they were like arguments that I have with my own daughters. What I love about this novel is how ambivalent Turgenev’s own position is. He got attacked from all sides for this book. The lefties of the 1860s thought that he was slandering the Bazarovs of their world. The liberals of the 1860s thought that he was writing a dangerous revolutionary tract and painting the younger generation much too sympathetically. That’s part of the remit of realist writing—of which this is such a great example—that the writer himself is invisible. You’re trying to get reality itself onto a page. I don’t think that there is an authorial voice or position in the book and I think that’s part of its masterly achievement. You can see all points of view and where they’re coming from. That is one of the things I most admire about Turgenev, that ability to empathize and communicate worldviews in a very short book. Unlike Tolstoy, he doesn’t need a thousand pages to get it all out there. He can do it in a few sentences, and that’s just a wonderful achievement. No, there isn’t. By 1862, when this book comes out and the emancipation has taken place, certainly among all the liberal elements of the gentry—which are considerable—it’s been accepted for some time that there’s no moral defence of serfdom anymore. The problem then is, ‘What will be the place of this new citizenry, the newly emancipated serfs in this Russian society?’ That was the great challenge of the 1860s. That was why populism emerged so powerfully in that decade because it was a commitment to try and integrate the peasant into the world of the intelligentsia and the aristocracy as a nation, albeit at the level of literature and schooling. This book was really the first to respond to that challenge, but there were other books that came out at the time—like Chernyshevsky for example—with a much more radical vision of the new world they were to build. The other thing about Turgenev and this book is that it was the first novel to put Russian literature on the map. There had been translations of Gogol and Pushkin and, for me, Turgenev’s masterpiece is Sketches from a Hunter’s Album , which came out 10 years before and was badly translated into French. But Fathers and Sons really hit the big time. In Germany Turgenev suddenly became the most-read author. It established what a Russian novel was and held that position for 20 years until suddenly, in the mid-1880s, people discovered Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, and the big sprawling novel became what Russian novels were meant to be like."