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Fathers and Sons (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) [NOOK Book]
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Fathers and Sons, by Ivan Turgenev, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:
All editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences—biographical, historical, and literary—to enrich each reader's understanding of these enduring works.
Youth rebels. It’s true today and it was true in Russia, in 1862, when Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons first appeared. At the novel’s center stands Evgeny Bazarov, medical student, doctor’s son, and self-proclaimed nihilist. Bazarov rejects all authority, all so-called truths that are based on faith rather than science and experience. His ideas bring him into conflict with his best friend, recent graduate Arkady Kirsanov, with Arkady’s family, with his own parents, and eventually with his emotions, when he falls helplessly in love with the beautiful Madame Odintsova.
Turgenev’s earlier A Sportsman’s Sketches had helped hasten the liberation of the serfs in 1861. But the complex portrait of Bazarov, whose goals he admired but whose rejection of art and embrace of violence he could not accept, enraged both right and left. The right saw Fathers and Sons as a glorification of radical extremists; the left saw it as a denunciation of progress. Even today, readers argue over Turgenev’s attitude towards Bazarov. But they can’t resist the novel’s power to grip the heart while engaging the mind.
David Goldfarb is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages at Barnard College. He has published numerous scholarly articles as well as the Introduction and Notes to the Barnes & Noble Classics edition of Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych and Other Stories.
From David Goldfarb’s Introduction to Fathers and Sons
Ivan Turgenev completed his best-known novel, Ottsy i deti, familiarly rendered in English as Fathers and Sons, in 1861 and published it in the following year, after the emancipation of the serfs in Russia, but he set the novel in 1859, immediately prior to this pivotal moment in Russian history. Though serfdom was already on the wane, as suggested by references in Turgenev’s novel to the quitrent system” adopted by progressive estate holders Nikolai Petrovich Kirsanov and Anna Sergeevna Odintsova, the legal abolition of serfdom marked the end of a manorial tradition and a vision of old Russia as defined by a class division that seemed to have emerged from the soil itself. The official end of serfdom marked social and intellectual divisions in many spheres of Russian life. The inteligentsia vigorously debated issues of Russia’s sense of modernity, its relation to the West and to Slavic traditions as they were then understood, the organization of the Russian family and position of women, and the reach of the Russian empire. A railway boom fueled economic development, brought the Russian provinces and colonial outposts closer to the major cities, and made Western Europe more accessible. The social and political debate of the 1860s would be reflected in one of the most productive eras of the Russian novel, yielding not only Fathers and Sons, but also Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s radical novel What Is to Be Done?, Dostoevsky’s The House of the Dead, The Notes from Underground, Crime and Punishment, and The Idiot, and Tolstoy’s War and Peace. All these novels struggled with the dilemma of the superfluous man” in Russian society and attempted to imagine the new man” who might abandon tradition, return to tradition, or make some compromise between old and new, Russia and the West.
Turgenev’s hero, Evgeny Bazarov, was at the center of this debate and was criticized roundly on all sides. Turgenev’s publisher Mikhail Nikoforovich Katkov, a former liberal who became more conservative with age, charged Turgenev with creating an apotheosis” of the young generation of radicals, having in mind figures like Nikolai Dobroliubov and Nikolai Chernyshevsky. Dobroliubov published in 1859 one of the most incisive critiques of the superfluous man” of the old aristocracy in the form of a critical essay praising Ivan Goncharov’s novel Oblomov. Chernyshevsky would publish What Is to Be Done?, his Fourierist utopian novel, written during his Siberian exile, in 1863, a year after the appearance of Fathers and Sons. (For Charles Fourier, see endnote 7.) The young radicals read Bazarov as a satirical caricature of themselves, and Turgenev defended himself against this accusation by repeating Katkov’s accusation. The key to the novel’s long-lasting success, perhaps, is precisely this ambiguity. Turgenev asserted in several letters and in a reflection on the novel published in 1869 that he did not know whether his new man” was good or bad for the future of Russia, but only that he was a new hero of our time,” alluding to Mikhail Lermontov’s novel of that title and adopting a stance in favor of a literary realism that strives for neutrality rather than ideological tendency.
Because Turgenev himself was a cosmopolitan figure with perhaps the strongest international reputation of any Russian writer of his day, his position on such social issues was important. He was born in 1818 to an aristocratic family in Orel, and his father is thought to have been a possible model for the Romantic dandy in the Fathers and Sons, Pavel Petrovich Kirsanov. His mother was wealthy and notoriously cruel. Though Turgenev had a foot in the petty aristocracy, he was seen as a westernizer” with a politically progressive, literary realist vision. He came to prominence as a writer after Pushkin, Lermontov, and Gogol, but before Dostoevsky, Chernyshevsky, and Tolstoy. He would spend much of his career abroad in Paris and Baden-Baden in a close liaison with the opera star Pauline Viardot, greatly enhancing his European presence compared to other Russian authors, such that writers from the East in the latter half of the century would often be compared to Turgenev in the West. Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, for example, the Austrian author from Lemberg (now Lviv, Ukraine) of Venus im Pelz (1870; Venus in Furs), after whom masochism” was named, was called the Turgenev of Little Russia [Ukraine].” This was not a comparison that Turgenev particularly fancied.
Though Turgenev’s upbringing among the gentry might have made for an unlikely revolutionary career, his short prose work The Diary of a Superfluous Man (1850) captured the object of social critique that runs through virtually all of the major Russian novels of the nineteenth century, from Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin and Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time, through Gogol’s Dead Souls and Goncharov’s Oblomov and many of the works of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov. The idea of the superfluous man” seemed to apply to the lovable but ultimately ineffectual aristocrat Oblomov, living in the city on credit from his mismanaged estate and unable to lift himself from his couch to set things aright, as well as to Dostoevsky’s petty bureaucrats, unable to liberate themselves from the administrative mind-set of the Russian state. Could Bazarov, the leading man of Fathers and Sons (to call him a hero” or even a protagonist” would be prejudicial), a self-proclaimed nihilist” and a man of science, become the new man” who would lead Russia in the future, or would he become yet another ineffectual superfluous man” symbolizing Russian social and cultural stagnation?
Nihilism” in this context should not be taken in the modern sense of profound existential doubt.” Bazarov certainly believes in his existence and in the existence of all that can be perceived with the senses. He is an empiricist who believes in science and the principle that there is no truth beyond what is observable, or at least that we can have no knowledge of such things. Physics is metaphysics for this new nihilist. Arkady Kirsanov extends this scientific principle to a whole social philosophy in his definition for his uncle Pavel Petrovich: A nihilist is a man who does not bow down before any authority, who does not take any principle on faith, whatever reverence that principle may be enshrined in’.” This belief in the ultimate authority of science would challenge any claims about Romantic notions of the Russian soul,” Slavic brotherhood,” a metaphysical connection between the peasants and the soil, the existence of God, the divine source of the social and political order, the validity of emotional judgment, or the possibility of love as the expression of anything beyond biological necessity.
TheQuillPen
Posted March 31, 2009
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"Fathers and Sons" frequently ranks well in the category of great Russian literature. Upon reading it, I easily saw why. The novel's characters are diverse and offer a wide range of philisophical perspectives common of the time period. Turgenev's objectivity throughout the tale enhances his story-telling and accentuates the poignance of the issues presented. (This style later influenced Anton Chekhov, one of Turgenev's greatest admirers). The subject matter, despite having a strong connection to the author's time-period, does not feel dated at all. In fact, the generational rebellion and youth's rejection of authority, even wise authority, rings true especially today. The main character Bazarov's psychology and outlook on life in contrast to the people around him make for an intellectually intriguing book that leaves you to ponder whether any of the characters were really correct. From the beginning to the strangely effective anticlimactic ending, Turgenev's "Fathers and Sons" intrigues its readers.
1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Posted May 8, 2010
great book
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.GrendelsMom
Posted January 22, 2009
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My major complaint with the novel is that Bazarov failed as a character and cannot carry the novel. Turgenev was criticized by some for purposely depicting Bazarov as a caricature, but I do not believe that Bazarov was intentionally a buffoon. The novel reads as if Turgenev truly wanted to depict Bazarov as the prototype of a new generation and wrote the novel with a straight face. If Bazarov is merely a caricature, Turgenev wrote the story deadpan.
Bazarov can be mistaken as a caricature because the actions and words that are supposed to portray him in a intellectual and morally advanced manner only make him look like a conceited snob. I felt at times that Bazarov picked up his radical ideas only for attention. At parties and when a guest in others homes he ignores manners, condemns the then current state of Russian society, and rails against romanticism and aristocracy. However, throughout the novel he fails to live up to his beliefs. He falls in love (with a rich aristocrat), agrees to have the last rights performed before he dies, writes a letter to his love hoping she would come before his death, and sees no inconsistency between his hatred of the landed class and his living high off their riches. He sees himself as a man of the people but is unable to communicate with the serfs and the serfs see him as a fool.
Throughout the novel Bazarov is presented as the intellectual and morally(in a nihilistic sense) superior to Arkady. He often mocks Arkady for the lingering romanticism and aristocratic ideals that have survived Arkady's "education" by Bazarov. However, it is not any quality in Bazarov that makes him better than Arkady but a complete lack of pride or ability in Arkady to stand up to Bazarov. A few times Arkady manages to spit out a remark in response to Bazarov but throughout much of the novel Arkady serves as a punching bag until he gets tired of this role and abandons his supposed radicalism for the comforts of marriage and estate management. Next to Arkady a rock would appear bright. Bazarov is very capable of as he would say "negating," or finding fault with almost every topic that arises, but never offers any solutions. I understand that he is a nihilist and as such advocates for the tearing down of society, morals, religion, ect, but it gets tiresome to continually read Bazarov's diatrabes and have Arkady fawning over him. By placing Bazarov next to Arkady I believe that Turgenev intended him to appear as the revolutionary hero but utlimately he looks like an idiot.
The best part of the book, but one that does not quite redeem it, is Bazarov's death at the end. He dies a meaningless death of typhoid that he contracted from performing a meaningless autopsy. A fitting ending for a character that found meaning in nothing. At times Bazarov also makes you reconsider some of your values and society, but his poor character distracts from these situations.
If you want to experience Turgenev at his finest read A Sportsman's Notebook. He has few peers in the realm of short fiction.
gamerchick451
Posted December 30, 2008
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This novel offers a really rich story. I had to read this for a class and I'll admit i was not thrilled about it when I was assigned it. But yet again the quote "Don't judge a book by it's cover", held true. The character Razamov, is a great example of the nihilist view and is a very dynamic and alive. There is a great message in this book and has every bit of every thing a great story needs for everyone to enjoy it. The first chapter or so you might need to hold on but then it picks up into a rush of vivid literature. YOU MUST BUY THIS BOOK!
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Posted November 3, 2007
This book is phenomenal. It's nature is so vivid and it's characters so well put that I felt I was living in the story also. Bazarov's character is the most powerful character in this book, and signifies much about Nihilism in a whole. Other than the nihilist theme, this book contained great emotion, as in Bazarov's infection.
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Posted November 7, 2005
Fathers and Sons shows the timeless cycle of intergenerational rebellion and the resulting alientation of the generations. Written at the time of the emancipation of the Russian serfs, it deals with a self-proclaimed liberal father and his son, who under the influence of his brilliant friend, dismisses his father's liberal virtues as sentimentality. As with much Russian literature of the era, the story unfolds against a fascinating background with institutions and characters that are unfamiliar to Western readers.
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Posted August 6, 2005
FATHERS AND SONS treats Nihilism far more succinctly than any book I can think of and brought the idea to the ordinary mind through true to life characters that we can relate to. It is important because the ideas and methods of the most notorious Nihilists-Nechayev is considered to be very important by Al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations.
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Posted December 16, 2004
This novel deals with two main themes: On the one hand the natural conflict between different generations, and on the other the philosophy of nihilism, which professes a kind of utilitarianism based on natural science. Character opposition and plot structure is vital to interpreting the work; there is great irony in Bazarov's rather anticlimactic death. The world will go on without him. Turgenev is unfortunately stuck in the shadow of two other 19th century Russian realists...
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Posted April 24, 2004
I thought this book was really boring, sometimes it was interesting to read though. The end was much more interesting to read than the beginning
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Posted July 16, 2003
I just finished reading this book (in Russian, not in English :)). I think that, although lots of people simply say that 'it's a great book', it has a really deep message and meaning, and it's really not that easy to understand. But seriously, I liked this book! I think that it's quite different when you read the translation, though.
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Posted December 3, 2002
A wonderful masterpiece. Turgenev paints the nihilistic charector of bazarov in poetic and realistic way. One of the finest books I have ever read.
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Posted May 10, 2001
This book has a few interesting ideas, including the introduction of the word 'nihilism.' The main character is somehow a mix between a Mark Twain hero and Hamlet. Anyway, it reads fast; so read it -- fast.
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Overview
Fathers and Sons, by Ivan Turgenev, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:
All editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences—biographical, historical, and literary—to enrich each reader's understanding of these enduring works.Youth ...