Fathers and Sons
- Written By Ivan Turgenev
Fathers and Sons
- Ivan Turgenev
$19.99
A son brings home a guest. A country divides against itself.
Arkady Kirsanov comes home from university with a new set of convictions and a new friend. Bazarov calls himself a nihilist: he believes in nothing that cannot be tested, dissected, and proven. And he says so without apology, in the parlors and gardens of the Kirsanov estate, to men twice his age, some of whom built their lives on the very things he dismisses.
The visit unsettles everyone. Arkady’s father and uncle, decent men of the old generation, find their habits of feeling put on trial by a guest with no patience for sentiment, tradition, or art. Fathers watch sons drift out of reach. Sons discover that the convictions they imported so confidently do not survive contact with their own hearts. And in the presence of a woman he refuses to admit he wants, Bazarov’s own certainty begins to crack.
Ivan Turgenev wrote the first great novel of generational rupture, the argument between old Russia and new Russia staged as a dinner table quarrel. Bazarov became a lightning rod on publication — denounced by conservatives and alternately claimed and disowned by radicals — because Turgenev refused to let anyone win the argument cleanly. The novel that gave the world the word “nihilist” in its modern sense remains the sharpest portrait of what it costs a generation to believe it has outgrown the last one.
“We sit in the mud, my friend, and reach for the stars!”
About the Author
- Ivan Turgenev
Ivan Turgenev (1818–1883) was born into the Russian landed gentry, a class and system his fiction would later indict. His mother ran the family estate with a cruelty toward serfs that marked him permanently. A Sportsman’s Sketches, his early collection of stories, humanized serfs so persuasively that it’s frequently credited among the influences on Tsar Alexander II’s decision to abolish serfdom in 1861.
Turgenev spent much of his adult life in Western Europe, close to French and German literary circles, which left him perpetually suspect — too Western for the Slavophiles, too Russian for full acceptance abroad. That double cultural exile sharpened his ear for the argument at the center of Fathers and Sons: a country caught between its past and a future it could not yet name.
The novel’s publication in 1862 cost him readers on every side, and he never fully recovered his standing with Russia’s radical intelligentsia. History has been kinder than his contemporaries. Fathers and Sons is now read as the founding generational novel, a book against which Fyodor Dostoevsky and Turgenev’s other heirs measured their own depictions of ideas in collision with reality.
Ivanhoe, published in 1819, marked Scott’s turn from Scottish history to medieval England, and it became one of the defining works of his career. Scott researched armor, custom, and law with the same rigor he brought to invented dialogue, building a fictional framework sturdy enough to carry real historical weight, a method later novelists from Alexandre Dumas to Leo Tolstoy would draw on directly.
Financial ruin followed success. When his publishing house collapsed in 1826, Scott spent his final years writing at a punishing pace to settle debts that were not fully his own. He died at Abbotsford in 1832, having given the historical novel its shape and given literature its most durable Robin Hood image.
