Turgenev is lesser-known compared to the stalwarts Dostoevsky and Tolstoy in (the Western version of) the Russian literary canon. What also sets him apart from his more famous counterparts is that he spent a lot of his life in Europe, in exile from Russian society. His writing is of a very realist bent, and he is often occupied with describing unfulfilled love and feelings of longing. Fathers and Sons is his most read work, and contains the famous character Bazarov, a young man at odds with society, coming to the fore with the generation of his parents, and society at large.
The story opens as student Arkady brings Bazarov home with him over a leave rom university. Bazarov shocks and surprises Arkadys father and uncle with his radical views on morality and tradition. The two later visit another estate and become friends with some women. Later they go on to Bazarovs family home.
I like the description of Russian society and how the ideas of nihilism (nigilizm) were embraced in Russian society. A lot of the book is dialogue between Bazarov and various characters. A notable passage is the discussion of nihilism between Bazarov and Arkady’s father and uncle. I liked the parts where Bazarov ridiculed the father and the Father tried to be up with the times, which is a phenomenon we see to this day. The whole notion of generational shifts interests me, and how those dynamics have changed over time. Someone from my generation (born in the late 1980s) will associate a lot of radical ideas with the 1960s but this book is a good reminder that these tendencies didn’t start there.
Another favorite part was the description of the folk beliefs of the peasant woman in the second half of the book (chapter 20):
Arina Vlasyevna was a genuine Russian gentlewoman of the olden times; she ought to have lived two centuries before, in the old Moscow days. She was very devout and emotional; she believed in fortune-telling, charms, dreams, and omens of every possible kind; she believed in the prophecies of crazy people, in house-spirits, in wood-spirits, in unlucky meetings, in the evil eye, in popular remedies, she ate specially prepared salt on Holy Thursday, and believed that the end of the world was at hand; she believed that if on Easter Sunday the lights did not go out at vespers, then there would be a good crop of buckwheat, and that a mushroom will not grow after it has been looked on by the eye of man; she believed that the devil likes to be where there is water, and that every Jew has a blood-stained patch on his breast; she was afraid of mice, of snakes, of frogs, of sparrows, of leeches, of thunder, of cold water, of draughts, of horses, of goats, of red-haired people, and black cats, and she regarded crickets and dogs as unclean beasts; she never ate veal, doves, crayfishes, cheese, asparagus, artichokes, hares, nor water-melons, because a cut water-melon suggested the head of John the Baptist, and of oysters she could not speak without a shudder; she was fond of eating—and fasted rigidly; she slept ten hours out of the twenty-four—and never went to bed at all if Vassily Ivanovitch had so much as a headache; she had never read a single book except Alexis or the Cottage in the Forest; she wrote one, or at the most two letters in a year, but was great in housewifery, preserving, and jam-making, though with her own hands she never touched a thing, and was generally disinclined to move from her place.
Another notable passage was the one where Bazarov discusses love with the woman at the estate, Mme Odintsov. It presents the problem of how to be, and picks apart some presuppositions of both rationalism and romanticism.
The estates are described as being in a state of the desuetude, with laborers who don’t respect the owner. It is a period in time which somehow mirrors our own. Emancipation of the serfs had happened in 1861, when presumably this was written, but I think it is set earlier. Bazarov thinks differently about the serfs: they should be free and able but not necessarily regarded particularly positively. Those views are at odds with both the traditional nationalist view and the supposed progressive view.
I can’t comment on the translation much, but the word “ejaculated” to describe dialogue comes across as somewhat uncomfortable. I guess the 2010 Michael Pursglove translation trumps this one by Richard Hare (1907-1966).
Kinship of all Species 