Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev
I: Introduction
One hundred years before Nixon and the hippies, Ivan Turgenev wrote of a very different Sixties generational conflict than the one we remember today. His novel, Fathers and Sons, published in 1862, captures a period of radical overhaul in Russian society where two generations – one, that of aging aristocrats, and the other, their radical sons – seemed incapable of understanding each other.
For much of the early 19th century, Tsar Nicholas I ruled Imperial Russia with an iron fist. He was a notoriously illiberal and inflexible emperor who crushed dissent and resisted change. But when his son Tsar Alexander II ascended to the Russian throne in 1855, the government began a program of reform. Censorship loosened, leading to the publication of new newspapers, books, political pamphlets, and other works. His government permitted ideas, including Western notions of liberalism, to be discussed openly for a time.
In this period of relative openness, debate flourished. There were the liberals and progressives, who wanted to reform society gradually. Then there were their opponents, the reactionaries and traditionalists who sought to hold onto the features that had defined Russian society for so many decades: absolutism, holy aristocracy, the Orthodox church, Russian nationalism, and Slavic identity. And there were the radicals, who wanted to tear down the old institutions entirely and start society anew. The older generations who came of age under the repression of Nicholas I could not understand Russia’s youngest generations, who seemed willing to disregard all that was once held dear. The world was changing, and many felt they were being left behind.
Turgenev, himself a liberal in favor of Westernization, was an ardent opponent of the traditional Russian institution of serfdom. Yet even Turgenev, progressive as he was, found himself and his generation to be out of touch with, in the words of Rosamund Bartlett from the introduction to my copy of the book, the “single-minded new social types that seemed to thrive in the new Russia of Alexander II.” Fathers and Sons is Turgenev’s attempt to build a bridge of understanding between the old and new that were seemingly at odds. And with that lens, the book helped me better understand the generational conflicts of the 2020s.
II: The new nihilists
Fathers and Sons opens as Nikolay Petrovich, a minor, landed aristocrat, awaits the return of his son Arkady from his university studies in St. Petersburg. Nikolay Petrovich lives a relatively lonely life. His estate in the countryside keeps him far from the center of Russian life, and some years have passed since the loss of his beloved wife. Nikolay’s brother, Pavel Petrovich, and a peasant girl named Fenechka, with whom he has since fathered a child, are his main company.
The reunion between Nikolay and Arkady is a joyous one. But Nikolay soon notices something different about his son. In the year since he has gone to St. Petersburg, Arkady has encountered strange new ideas. He has also brought home a friend to meet the family: Bazarov. Arkady evidently admires this older man, a physician-in-training with little respect for tradition. Bazarov, and by consequence, his dutiful follower Arkady, proclaim themselves to be nihilists.
Nihilists?
“‘A nihilist,’ pronounced Nikolay Petrovich. ‘That comes from the Latin nihil, nothing, in so far as I can make out. So the word must mean a man who…acknowledges nothing, mustn’t it?’
‘Say rather, a man who respects nothing,’ interrupted Pavel Petrovich and returned to the butter.
‘Who approaches everything from a critical point of view,’ commented Arkady.
‘But isn’t that just the same?’ asked Pavel Petrovich.
‘No, it isn’t just the same. The nihilist is a man who bows down to no authority, who takes no single principle on trust, however much respect be attached to that principle.”
Much of the first half of the novel is occupied by Nikolay and Pavel Petrovich attempting to understand Arkady and his new friend’s strange ways. For the most part, they treat Bazarov well. But Bazarov is contemptuous of Nikolay and Pavel Petrovich. “Why should I indulge these provincial aristocrats!” he exclaims. “It’s all just vanity, dandyism, the little ways of a society lion.”
And though Nikolay and Pavel Petrovich are liberal by Russian aristocratic standards – they believe that Russia is due for reform – the nihilists à la Bazarov go immeasurably further. They believe that Russian society is sick and decrepit. Everything must be torn down and rebuilt anew according to what makes sense and what is logical. Aristocracy, liberalism, principles, progress, duty, parliamentarianism, Orthodoxy – all are ridiculous notions that must be rejected entirely.
Bazarov instead finds value in only what can be proven scientifically. “A decent chemist is worth twenty times any poet,” he tells Pavel Petrovich at one contentious tea session. Art is particularly worthy of Bazarov’s scorn. Through the eyes of the nihilist, it has been art that has promulgated archaic traditions by spreading “romanticism, nonsense, decay, [and] artist’s trickery.”
Thus, when Arkady spots Nikolay Petrovich reading some of the works of the great Russian poet Pushkin, in deference to Bazarov, he takes his father’s book from his hands and replaces it with a more appropriate German scientific work.
Nikolay and Pavel Petrovich are taken aback by this behavior. They try to keep up with the latest developments and debates, yet they are being left behind by a strange new generation. Pavel Petrovich, a proud man, concludes, not completely falsely, that Bazarov is simply disrespectful. Nikolay Petrovich, much shyer and more unsure of himself, and out of love for his son, concludes that it is in fact him who is the problem. “Either I’m stupid or it’s all nonsense. It must be that I’m stupid,” he says.
III: Against what does Bazarov rebel?
Bazarov’s rejection of everything appears to readers, both now and in 1862, to be the product of that impudent youthful tendency to believe that one has found all the answers that previous generations have not. And it is, to a degree. Upon the publication of Fathers and Sons, Turgenev faced relentless criticism from all sides. Bartlett writes, “Each generation found the picture of the other very life-like but their own very badly drawn. The fathers protested, and the sons were enraged to see themselves personified in the positive Bazarov.”
Yet consider for a moment exactly what it was that Bazarov was rejecting. Bazarov is, throughout almost all of Fathers and Sons, surrounded by members of the Russian aristocracy. And to be a member of the Russian aristocracy in the mid 19th century was to live on the profits of others’ work. Though aristocrats often held an officer’s post in the Imperial Russian Army or a position in the civil bureaucracy due to the status of their birth, the aristocracy’s source of power was its control of Russia’s land, and, by extension, the millions of souls who toiled to make that land bountiful. And though Imperial Russia lacked the railway connections and industry that were beginning to characterize Western Europe at the time, it had no shortage of two things: people or space.
Therefore, as an almost entirely agricultural economy, behind Germany or Britain in development, Imperial Russia developed unique social institutions. Well into the 19th century, Russia maintained a peculiar institution called serfdom, which lasted long after similar social relations had phased out in the West. Though not technically slaves, serfs were bound by law to the land on which they lived. The lord who owned that land had enormous power over his serfs. He could prohibit them from leaving the land, mortgage them for a profit, dispense with punishments, and control how they worked and lived. In many cases, though not everywhere in Imperial Russia, owners could sell their serfs separately from the land. Most importantly, the landlord could charge his serfs cash or labor rent for use of the land.
This generated enormous wealth for the one percent of Russian society lucky enough to claim membership in the aristocracy. The over 80 percent of society that was the peasantry (under half of which were serfs belonging to individual landlords), conversely, lived to serve. This system, which can have no other descriptor than that of exploitation, persisted for hundreds of years.
Then, between 1853 and 1856, Russia fought, and lost, the Crimean War against the combined forces of the Ottomans, France, the United Kingdom, and Sardinia-Piedmont. The defeat shocked Russia’s leadership, which was slowly beginning to realize just how far behind the rest of Europe they had fallen. Some, like Bazarov, concluded that the entire structure was rotten. For others, including Russia’s liberals, serfdom was easy to blame for Russia’s backwardness. It explained why the empire was so poorly organized and so poorly industrialized. It needed to be reformed.
Tsar Alexander II initiated that reform in 1861. That year, he signed into law the liberation of the serfs, freeing over 20,000,000 individuals from their legally enforced ties to the land. They now had the right – in theory – to marry and to purchase property freely; to travel from the land and to start businesses. But of course, the emancipation occurred on terms favorable to the aristocracy, which continued its domination of Russian society until the 1917 Revolution (former serfs had to dispense redemption payments as compensation to former landlords, for instance).
Would it be so absurd for Bazarov to look over this process of reform underway at the time of Fathers and Sons and conclude that other liberal reforms – the parliament or the bar – would be instituted in such a way that they would also protect the interests of the entrenched elite as well? That the sickness in Russian society extended beyond serfdom? That other institutions were at fault and should have been done away with? That art is not apolitical and can serve elite interests?
From the modern perspective, Bazarov’s rejection of the aristocracy makes sense. We no longer accept as right that a tiny fraction of society has the God-given power, enshrined in law, to dominate the entirety of a country as a matter of principle, with different sets of rights and obligations than everyone else – despite our own real problems with inequality. When Bazarov shows contempt for Nikolay and Pavel Petrovich, he is showing contempt for two men who have for years essentially “owned” other human beings, their serfs, through their control of the land, however liberal their disposition.
If we encountered another person in 2023 who had previously “owned” other people in this same way, we too would probably view them as contemptuous. Of course, there is a danger in viewing 19th century characters through a 21st century lens, but Bazarov was certainly far ahead of his time in some regards.
IV: A representative of his time?
Turgenev opted to write about Bazarov in an attempt to understand the new men of the 1860s. Bazarov is a representative of his generation and their new ways of thinking. However, when they came of age, Bazarov’s generation did not tear down the structures of Russian society. Russia’s autocracy survived until 1917, 58 years after the events of Fathers and Sons – and at a point where Bazarov’s generation would be in their 70s and 80s (if they lasted that long). Evidently, many of Bazarov’s contemporaries would have fought to preserve the institutions that the generation supposedly detested. Despite being a symbol of his generation, Bazarov represented only a small part of it.
Chuck Klosterman describes this phenomenon in his recently released book The Nineties. He writes, “Within any generation, there are always two distinct classes: a handful who accept and embody the assigned caricature, and many more others who are caricatured against their will, simply because they happened to be born in any particular year.”
He gives the example of Courtney Love, who is thought of as a stereotypically 1990s figure. However, it was artists such as Shania Twain and Garth Brooks who were selling all the records through that decade.
Similarly, when we think of the 1960s, we imagine it to be a time of hippies and political radicalism. Yet it was much of this generation – for whom these descriptors often did not apply – who would grow up and vote for Ronald Reagan in a landslide in 1984. Christopher Hitchens described this phenomenon thusly:
“There were the people of the Sixties, and then there were the “sixty-eighters” or, if you wanted to be more assertively Marxist and internationalist about it, les soixante-huitards. I was one of those who desired to be a bit more assertively Marxist and internationalist about it. After all, to be a mere “Sixties” person, all you needed was to have been born in the right year, and to be available for what I once heard called ‘the most contemptible solidarity of all: the generational.’”
Yet, it is not wrong to suggest that even a small group, unrepresentative at the time, can embody a period by the ways their ideas influence the decades to come. In the 1960s, opposing the Vietnam War and marching in favor of racial and gender equality were seen as radical positions in much of the United States. Today, these positions are seen as common sense.
The nihilists did not seize hold of Russian society in 1862. However, another transformative ideology did take power in 1917: that of the Bolsheviks. We know how that story ended. Tens of millions died of starvation, millions more were condemned to executions and gulags, and half of Europe was locked behind an iron curtain for decades. The inheritors of Bazarov’s legacy failed in their attempt to remake the world in a new way. The promise of a more just world was never realized. As it turns out, simply destroying the old does not set the foundation for building the new. You can destroy culture, but you cannot easily replace it, because the creation of culture is not a top-down process.
Today, Bazarov still resonates because we know people, of all political stripes, who think that society can begin anew, again. Yet, towards the end of the novel, Bazarov begins to realize that there are flaws in his worldview. I return now to Fathers and Sons’ narrative with our main characters at the Petrovich estate.
V: Returning to the novel
After several weeks of staying with Nikolay and Pavel Petrovich, Bazarov decides to return to his own parents, and Arkady joins him. On the way, they stop at a local town and end up stumbling into the company of a widow named Anna Sergievna Odintsova with whom they stay for some time. Anna Sergievna is witty and owns a significant amount of property. She and Bazarov soon develop quite the rapport. Despite his earlier denouncements of love as the romanticism of fools, Bazarov finds himself confessing his love to Anna Sergievna. But she refuses to reciprocate the pronouncement, as she finds Bazarov’s worldview too depressing. Arkady, meanwhile, strikes up an interest in Anna Sergievna’s sister Katya, but decides to leave with Bazarov following his rejection.
The pair of friends arrive at chez Bazarov. His parent’s offer him a hero’s welcome, fawning over his every need. Bazarov, however, finds their presence irritating and decides to depart, breaking his parent’s heart in what is perhaps the saddest scene of the book. He and Arkady return to Nikolay and Pavel Petrovich – but Arkady soon leaves again to be with Katya Sergievna.
Bazarov, rather than returning to the home of the woman who rejected him, decides to stay with Nikolay and Pavel. This is despite Pavel Petrovich’s obvious dislike of him. Pavel Petrovich dislikes Bazarov so much that, after catching Bazarov trying to kiss Nikolay Petrovich’s lover Fenechka, he decides to challenge the nihilist to a duel by pistols. Bazarov denounces the idea of dueling as a foolish relic of the past but decides to participate in it anyway: “From a theoretical point of view, a duel is an absurdity. From a practical point of view, it’s another matter,” he says.
With this duel, the conflict between the two generations – the traditional, principled stock of the aristocracy, and the new men of the 1860s who reject all that came before – erupts into actual violence. Bazarov shoots Pavel Petrovich in the leg, who escapes from the duel with his life intact, though not his pride.
Bazarov returns to his father’s estate to practice medicine. Unable to stop thinking of Anna Sergievna, Bazarov makes a careless mistake and contracts an infection while performing an autopsy. His health rapidly deteriorates and he soon finds himself on his deathbed. His final action is to summon Anna, who kisses him and leaves before he succumbs to his illness. The confines of his ideology, nihilism, did not stop him from running towards love in his final moments. The novel ends as Arkady marries Katya, Nikolay Petrovich marries Fenechka, and Pavel Petrovich leaves to live the rest of his life in Germany, all living happily ever after.
VI: Generations of conflict
Bazarov’s death was one that made me feel genuinely sad. He spends the entire course of the novel denouncing every aspect of Russian society and generally being disrespectful to everyone. But he dies at the beginning of a more nuanced understanding of life. He begins to appreciate that simply rejecting everything may not be the right way to live; that there is value in the aesthetic and in love. That he came to this realization too late leaves open the question of what could have been for Bazarov’s life following his maturation.
His death felt like a loss. Despite the reader’s perception, other characters in the book treat him with pronounced deference. Arkady calls him a “selfless, honourable man.” Bazarov’s father proclaims that he “worships” his son. The force of his personality, his self-assurance, and his intelligence lend a likability to Bazarov that his kindness perhaps does not merit. One comes away viewing Bazarov not as a misanthrope, but more as a young man suffering from the youthful overconfidence that so many people have suffered from at one point or another.
We also mourn Bazarov for his role as the representative of a new generation. The core of the book is the conflict between those in favour of the great reforms of the 1860s, those who wished to go further, and the aristocracy that had thrived under Nicholas I. This was a real conflict. People who had lived all their lives under the false comfort of the stagnant Tsarist rule were suddenly confronted by sons and daughters who had been exposed to strange and exotic ideas from the West. And they did not know how to react.
VII: The more things change…
Fathers and Sons remains relevant because its central theme, that of generational conflict, never dies. Indeed, in the more than 160 years since it was published, the division between generations has only seemed to expand. Technology advances at an ever-faster rate and social norms evolve with every passing year. I often think of the 1960s, which nearly tore apart the United States, France, and much of the Western world, one hundred years after the heyday of Turgenev’s “men of the sixties.” The Civil Rights Movement, the protests against the Vietnam War, the free speech movement, second-wave feminism, rock and roll – all seemed to be the product of a new generation determined to overthrow the existing order and create a new world. Songs of this era emphasize this theme. Bob Dylan is the obvious example. As he sings in ‘The Times They Are A-Changin':’
“Come mothers and fathers throughout the land
And don't criticise what you can't understand
Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command
Your old road is rapidly agin'
Please get out of the new one if you can't lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin'”
Later in the decade, the call for generational solidarity took on a more militant tone. Take Jefferson Airplane’s track ‘Volunteers:’
“One generation got old
One generation got soul
This generation got no dissertation to hold
Pick up the cry
Hey now it's time for you and me
Got a revolution, got to revolution
Come on now, we're marching to the sea
Got a revolution, got to revolution”
Whatever you think of the 1960s counterculture and its legacy, the conflict between generations was real then, too. This was the decade where artists such as the Beatles or the Rolling Stones, beloved by the young then and everyone today, were considered dangerous subversives. Activists like Timothy Leary seemed hellbent on convincing America’s youths to try dangerous new drugs like LSD. The modern iterations of a multitude of modern rights movements – for Indigenous people, Latinos, free speech, the gay community – launched during this decade. As Rick Perlstein notes in his excellent book, Nixonland, we are still living with the generational culture wars that started in the 1960s.
Like the Sixties – both the 19th and 20th century variations – we now find old and new generations seemingly unable to understand the other. The Millennials and the Gen-Zs (the oldest of whom are now closer to 30 than they are 20) blame the Boomers for all the world’s ills, while the Boomers view the new generations as sensitive and lazy.
However, perhaps the real generational divide today is between those who remember life before the internet and those who have known nothing but. It is between those who remember what it was like to live an analog existence and those who have had exposure to the dark corners of the web, and by extension, the strange, niche ideas that it propagates, from a young age.
The divide between generations seems to be accelerating. Gen-Zers now drink less, go out less, have fewer contacts with friends, are more anxious and depressed, and get their driver's licenses later in life than previous generations. In place, they spend more time online than all those who came before them. For older people, their online habits are often difficult to understand. Gen-Zers are more approving of socialism than Boomers or Gen X, for instance, and are less proud to be American.
New technologies like AI threaten to further accelerate this gap. What sort of things will Generation Alpha, those born after the 2010s, do, think, and believe, having been raised around enormously disruptive tools like GPT-4 and DALL-E?
VIII: Time advances, but culture stands still
As the pace of change accelerates, it simultaneously feels that cultural time is standing still. The late Mark Fisher and building on the work of earlier philosophers such as Jean Baudrillard, argued that 21st century life is haunted by lost futures that have been eliminated by technological progression, capitalism, and cultural repetition. Whereas throughout the 20th century, there seemed to be a logical cultural progression from one decade to the next, in the 21st century, Fisher argued, this process has stopped. Culture has settled into a stasis of endless repetition. Our movie theaters are dominated by remakes and sequels. Our streaming platforms are increasingly dominated by older songs. Fisher writes, “To be in the twenty-first century, is to have twentieth-century culture on high-definition screens.”
Look at the biggest film releases scheduled for 2023: Scream IV, John Wick: Chapter 4, Dungeons and Dragons, Tetris, The Super Mario Bros. Movie, Fast X, Transformers 7, Indiana Jones 5, Mission Impossible 7, Saw X, another remake of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and so on. The newer generations are consuming the same recycled content as their parents.
Klosterman, in the aforementioned The Nineties, dived deeper into this perception, arguing that the 1990s were the last distinctive decade that felt like they had a specific feeling of place and time. I too have a pet theory – that the way we remember a decade consists not only of the attitudes of the monoculture, but also the counterculture’s reaction to that and the relationship between the two. We remember the 1950s not only for white picket fences and the nuclear family, but also for the bubbling movements of Civil Rights and the Beatniks that would challenge the whole system in the decade after. Bazarov, and those who thought like him, were the counterculture of the 1850s and 1860s.
But in the 2020s, the internet has destroyed the ability to have both a monoculture and a counterculture. There’s just too much content out there. Moreover, the history of the 20th century, where utopian movements in China, the USSR, and other places descended into hellscapes, destroyed the perception that society can be remade from the ground up for a long time (and perhaps for good reason). Bazarov wanted to destroy Imperial Russia’s traditional institutions, like the aristocracy, because he wanted to build something more just and more scientific, in their place. We may no longer truly believe it is possible to build something better – we believe only that we can tinker with what we already have. There is no longer a sense of cultural progression. Newer generations lash out, wanting to tear things down, but are unable to come up with a viable alternative to build in place. A sense of directionless-ness is the result.
IX: Conclusion
In Bazarov’s age, the liberal reforms of Tsar Alexander II would be stripped back following an assassination attempt on the Tsar in 1881. His successor, Alexander III, was highly reactionary. For a time, it appeared that Bazarov’s generation had failed to remake Russia. Yet almost 60 years later, the inheritors of his line of thought would embark on a disastrous attempt to put their own revolutionary ideas into practice.
We do not know what reverberations our modern generational conflicts will have years from now; how the radical ideas of the present – embodied by the politically active Gen-Zer – will influence society’s thinking 30 or 50 years from now. What we can say, however, is that one novel by Ivan Turgenev, written over 160 years ago, reminds us that modern conflicts of misunderstanding are nothing new. It helps us to understand the history of the 19th and 20th centuries, our own experiences of generational conflict, and the world we live in today. For that, we can be thankful.