Fathers and Sons

Fathers and Sons

The novel turns out not to be political at all, really.

In fact, the book is actually about the perfectly ordinary subjects of novels without a word to say about politics, boys and girls, men and women, the young and the old, marriages and deaths.

Bazarov states his views frankly in private conversations with people who can’t be expected to share them and in fact don’t, as well as with the admiring Arkady, who at first swallows it all whole.

And there is little to see in those views that wasn’t already put on the table by the various schools of positivism that cropped up from the time of the French Revolution, and after.

He is a materialist and an atheist with a wholly naive faith in science and though he claims to condemn all of society’s existing institutions it is clear he does not condemn education or the practice of medicine, and he supplies no canonical list of exceptions or qualifications.

He talks tough and says his only business is to destroy, without a thought for what should be built in its place. 

But Bazarov never does anything to further these views and he and his interlocutors never raise or discuss the specific questions of terrorism, violence, and bloody revolution.

According to Wikipedia, at this time (the book was published in 1862, the action takes place in 1859) in Russia the Nihilist movement had not yet adopted political action.

But no one would have to wait long, and the action would become violent very quickly.

Russian Nihilism

Nihilist revolution

The Norton Critical Edition of 1996 has lots of interesting material about the controversy the book’s publication brought about in Russia, including an essay by Turgenev and excerpts about it from some of his letters, and a review by Pisarev, himself a Nihilist of the "younger generation."

It would not be long before he, too, endorsed "smashing everything" without the need for any notion of or plan for what should come after the smashing; after that lots of literal and figurative bomb-throwers would quote him.

Generally, younger people and those who thought themselves to be Nihilists considered Turgenev's book unfavorable to the movement.

Older people and people opposed to Nihilism are distraught that it is too sympathetic.

It will be another decade before we have Dostoevsky’s treatment of Nihilism, Demons (aka The Possessed).