Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Fathers and Sons, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Tradition and Progress
Nature vs. Materialism
Love vs. Nihilism
Generational Conflict
Summary
Analysis
Six months later, Maryino is in the depths of winter. Prokofyich is ceremoniously setting the table for seven. The week before, two quiet weddings had taken place in the parish church: Arkady’s and Katya’s and Nikolai’s and Fenichka’s. Today Nikolai is giving a farewell dinner for Pavel, who is setting out for Moscow on business.
The solemnity of Bazarov’s death contrasts with the joy of weddings, again suggesting that the surviving characters—especially Arkady—are Russia’s future, not Bazarov, and that love conquers nihilism.
Themes
Everyone around the table looks “handsomer and more virile.” Everyone is smiling, yet apologetic—feeling “a little awkward, a little sad, and, at bottom, very happy.” After the toasts, Katya quietly proposes a toast “to Bazarov’s memory” in Arkady’s ear. He squeezes her hand.
Even with lingering sadness over Bazarov’s death and Pavel’s departure, the Kirsanov household is full of life, in contrast to the dead end of Bazarov’s life.
Themes
Nowadays, Anna Sergeyevna has gotten remarried, because it seemed “the reasonable thing to do,” to a promising young lawyer with a kind heart; they live together in harmony, and perhaps will even love each other one day.
Anna’s resistance to love, and the aimlessness of her life, show some hope of resolving happily in the future; perhaps her striving with Bazarov helped prepare her for a more purposeful life open to love.
Themes
The Kirsanovs, Nikolai and Arkady, have settled down together at Maryino. Arkady has become “passionately engrossed” in estate management, and the farm is thriving. Nikolai has poured his energies into the land reforms and drives around making persuasive speeches to the peasants, yet his efforts fail to entirely please either the gentry or the peasants. Katya has had a baby son named Nikolai, and Mitya continues to thrive. Katya and Fenichka have become great friends.
Consonant with Nikolai’s hopes, Arkady at last follows in his footsteps and takes up an interest in the estate, arresting its decline. Nikolai continues to promote a reformist mindset, albeit with limited success, suggesting that the younger generation really is better attuned to progress. Either way, age and youth, tradition and progress, have come together in the Kirsanov family, and these principles promise to live on in the new generation.
Themes
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Meanwhile, in Dresden, a gray but still handsome and elegant man of about fifty can often be seen within Russian and English society. Pavel still does good works and attends the Russian church, but “life weighs heavily on him.” Madame Kukshin has gone to Heidelberg to study architecture, and Sitnikov continues to “gad about” Petersburg.
Other characters carry on much as they did before, although Pavel carries his grief elsewhere, suggesting that he no longer fits in to the thriving, forward-looking life at Maryino; he’s destined to always look backward, longing for what he couldn’t have.
Themes
In a small, melancholy graveyard in a remote part of Russia, there is a carefully tended grave where Yevgeny Bazarov lies buried. Often, a frail elderly couple can be seen weeping there. “However passionate, sinful and rebellious the heart hidden in the tomb,” the flowers growing atop the grave speak “of the vast repose of ‘indifferent’ nature: they tell us, too, of everlasting reconciliation and of life which has no end.”
Though the novel ends with a sorrowful scene of bereavement and loss, it also ends with hope. In contrast to Bazarov’s convictions, nature isn’t “indifferent”; it speaks of a life that defies mere scientific materialism, decidedly the opposite of nihilism. By allowing “nature” to have the final word, Turgenev condemns nihilism, but refrains from condemning Bazarov himself.
Themes
