A fascinating article about Turgenev in the Times

Turgenev and Russian national(ist) pride

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).

A son's a piece cut off

Fathers and Sons.

After three days,  Bazarov leaves.

After three years, three days is not much.

His father is in despair.

His mother says,

"What's to be done, Vasya? A son's a piece cut off. He's like a falcon: he comes and goes whenever he likes; while you and I are like mushrooms growing in the hollow of a log; we sit side by side and never budge. Except that I'll always be here for you, as you will for me."

It was the right thing to do

Fathers and Sons.

Basarov tells Arkady his (B's) father has had one of his peasants flogged, but it's all right, the fellow is a drunkard and a thief.

Revolutionary justice.

Bazarov has a moment of clarity

Fathers and Sons.

Arkady: "Russia will attain perfection when the poorest peasant has a house like that and each one of us should help bring that about."

Bazarov: "I've conceived a hatred for the poorest peasant . . . . those for whom I'm supposed to jump out of my skin and who won't even thank me for it . . . . Besides, what the hell do I need his thanks for? So, he'll be living in a fine white hut while I'm pushing up burdock; well, then what ?"

Omniscient observer

About Odintsova the narrator says, "Like all women who never managed to fall in love, she longed for something without knowing precisely what it was."

Fathers and Sons, Turgenev.

All the same, she rejects Bazarov after extracting a declaration of love from the fellow.

"No," she decided once and for all, "God knows where it might have led; one mustn't fool around with this kind of thing; serenity is still better than anything else on earth [sic]."

In this same few pages, Arkady meets and begins a quieter affection for her younger sister, Katya.

Those are the two most important events of the novel, and they fall at its exact center.

How formally pleasant. 

Anti-Feminism

Proudhon was an anti-feminist ?

Reading Fathers and Sons.

Turgenev off-handedly presents a physically unattractive, radical, liberated woman as a reader of Fenimore Cooper and an admirer of Emerson, who says that about the French anarchist.

Reportedly, Nietzsche was also a great fan of the American clerical essayist.

Makes sense.

How he flattered intellectuals !

Secular prophets, they conceive themselves.

Or secular mullahs, more like.

What a vast will to power in these people !

That is how they differ, these intelligentsia, as Marx practically admitted, from real philosophers.

One third of the way through it, the story is about fathers and sons; there are no fathers and daughters in it, though there are several women and one recognizes women have fathers.

The narrator tells us what the men think and feel, speaking almost only of what one could observe - what a man could observe - of the women.

Mostly he does not presume to venture inside their heads, or hearts.

For the censors ?

Bazarov to Arkady about Odintsova.

"Whoever she may be, simply a provincial lioness or an 'emancipated woman' like Kukshina, she still has the nicest pair of shoulders I've seen in a long time."

The next day after a visit he exclaims, "What a body ! Perfect for the dissecting table."

And then, in case you mistook him, "I tell you, she has a delectable body !"

A few days later, Bazarov says this to her, accounting for the difference between the stupid and the clever.

"We know more or less what causes physical ailments; moral illnesses result from bad upbringing, all the nonsense that gets stuffed into people's heads from childhood, in a word, the deformed condition of society. If you correct society you won't have any more illnesses."

Such stupidities have never deserted the left.

When the government of men has been replaced by the enlightened administration of things there will be no coercion and no need for prisons.

They say.

Fathers and Sons

For some, the greatest horror of adolescence is the growing realization that adults are just so totally full of shit.

 

It only starts with the idiotic hallucinations of religion and morality and extends well beyond both into a shocking plethora of beliefs about human nature, the inanimate world, and just about anything else you care to name that are abysmally, transparently stupid.

 

Not to mention that so much of all that is just a mess of bullying hogwash in aid of coercive control, and often downright dangerous to yourself.

 

Add all that to the shattering trials of puberty and there's no wonder at all that the young are profoundly alienated and many of them depressed to the point of suicide.

 

Could that be why so many young people find shockingly stupid ideologies attractive if only they justify smashing the adult world in which they were raised?

 

Yevgeny Vassilyich Bazarov.

 

Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky.

 

Sergey Nechayev.

 

Douglas MacArthur McCain.

 

I suppose the most telling thing is that no one has ever suggested this is a forgery.

 

The Revolutionary Catechism

 

As can be seen by googling, "nihilism" is a word with many meanings.

 

And there is this.

 

Nihilism

 

Just to be clear, the Russians were better off with the Czars, and the devils who killed Alexander II and others of their tribe teed up Russia for disaster at the hands of the Bolsheviks, or others like them, and about whom we can truthfully say that Russia and the world would have been vastly better off had they been drowned as infants.