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
During the drive home, Nikolai and Arkady get reacquainted. Arkady, though filled with “almost childish delight,” keeps trying to shift the conversation from the emotional to the commonplace, though he can’t help kissing his father affectionately. He begs his father to “make a fuss” of Bazarov, whom he’s only recently befriended. Bazarov, he explains, is studying natural science and hopes to take a degree in medicine.
Arkady feels conflicted, wanting to express his delight over his homecoming yet also wanting to seem more mature and restrained, perhaps because Bazarov—whom he doesn’t even know that well— is there. This suggests that Bazarov’s presence will be an ongoing source of tension in the household.
Themes
When they pass some of Nikolai’s peasants on the road, Piotr sneers that the peasants are probably headed to the tavern in town, but the coachman, “of the old type who disapproved of the modern outlook,” remains silent. Nikolai tells Arkady that the peasants are giving him trouble this year; they won’t pay their tithes. He asks Arkady whether he’s beginning to take an interest in farming, but Arkady evades the question.
Generational divides exist among the peasants, too, with the older generation seeming to uphold traditional folkways while the younger generation critiques them. Nikolai’s reformist move to divide his land among his peasants hasn’t gone smoothly, either, signaling the ongoing class divide. Arkady avoids weighing into these questions whatsoever for right now.
Themes
Arkady admires the fresh country air, and Nikolai remarks that everything about one’s birthplace seems special. Arkady replies that it makes no difference where a person is born. Nikolai gives Arkady “a sidelong glance” but is silent for the next half mile. Finally he resumes talking about changes at Maryino, his estate. He no longer keeps freed serfs around the house, for instance, and his new bailiff is a paid townsman. When Nikolai doesn’t want Piotr to understand him, he speaks in French.
Nikolai detects a subtle shift in Arkady’s outlook—his defensiveness about a fairly harmless comment—but it’s unclear what it means. Even as Nikolai highlights some of the reforms he’s making on his estate, he uses French—the language often used by the Russian aristocracy—to keep his servant from understanding him, showing that class divides are still very present even as they’re being reduced by reformist policy.
Themes
With embarrassment, Nikolai, still speaking in French, tells Arkady that, while a “stern moralist” might object to his frankness, he has always had his own ideas about father-son communication. Though Arkady would rightly blame him, he goes on, “that girl of whom you have probably already heard—” “Fenichka?” Arkady casually objects. Nikolai blushes and asks Arkady not to say her name aloud. He explains that he’s taken Fenichka into the house. He can change this, though, for Bazarov’s sake.
Nikolai has always favored openness with his son, showing again that he’s not overly strict himself. And his apparent relationship with an unmarried woman shows that he isn’t, in fact, a “stern moralist.” But he’s also uncomfortable with Arkady’s casual attitude about his relationship and doesn’t want his servants to disrespect him for it. There’s not just tension between father and son, but tension within Nikolai’s own mind, too, about his choices.
Themes
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Arkady urges Nikolai not to worry about awkwardness for Bazarov’s sake—Bazarov is “above all that.” With surprise, Arkady says that his father, who’s blushing redder and redder, shouldn’t be apologetic or ashamed. Arkady’s “heart was filled with […] indulgent tenderness,” as well as “a secret sense of superiority.” He cannot resist “a conscious enjoyment of his own more emancipated outlook.”
Arkady sees his new friend Bazarov as rising above superficial proprieties, and he wants to embody the same tolerant attitude—namely rejecting the institution of marriage. Moreover, it gives him pleasure to appear tolerant of his father, as well. Being free of societal restraints, he thinks, makes him more liberated than his father—a novel feeling, which also hints at more generational conflict to come.
Themes
Nikolai feels something “stab his heart,” but he “reproached himself for it” and changes the subject as Maryino’s meadows come into view. The country is “not in the least picturesque.” It comprises sloping fields, occasional copses, and sparse ravines, “reminding one of the way in which the old maps showed them in the time of Catherine.” There are streams, hamlets with rickety huts, peeling barns, and neglected churchyards. Seeing all this, “slowly Arkady’s heart sank.” “It just can’t go on like this,” Arkady thinks, “thus must all be transformed […] how should we begin?”
Nikolai senses, again, the divide that has opened between himself and his son. The reference to “Catherine” with regard to Maryino’s appearance refers to the 18th-century empress Catherine the Great, under whom the serf-reliant landholding system had been especially strong. The implication is that the estate has scarcely modernized in the last hundred years, to Arkady’s chagrin. In Arkady’s eyes, his home, the work of his father’s hands, can’t just be embraced; it has to be “transformed.”
Themes
Even as Arkady reflects on the estate’s disrepair, however, the beauty of spring is evident—shining trees, singing larks, and whitening rye. Nikolai optimistically tells his son what a good life they’ll share—“we must draw close to one another now, get to know each other properly.” Observing the beauty of the day, Nikolai begins to quote a line from Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, but a shout from Bazarov, requesting a match for his pipe, interrupts him. Arkady begins to smoke a cigar, and Nikolai discreetly averts his nose from the acrid smell. A quarter of an hour later, the vehicles pull up in front of Maryino, which the peasants call “The Farm-without-any-land.”
Turgenev often describes the persistent beauty of the natural world, even in the midst of human shortcomings—here, beauty can’t be repressed, even if the farm is in bad shape. Nature prompts Nikolai’s optimism about his relationship with his son, and prompts a quote from his beloved Pushkin (a founder of the Russian literary tradition who’d flourished a generation earlier); but his words are pointedly cut short by the younger men, disrupting the tentative sense of generational harmony.
Themes
