Arkady Nikolayevich Kirsanov Character Analysis

Husband and wife lived very comfortably and quietly: they were hardly ever apart—they read together, sang and played duets together at the piano; she grew flowers and looked after the chickens, while he went hunting now and again and busied himself with the estate, and Arkady grew and grew—comfortably and quietly like his parents. Ten years passed like a dream. In 1847 Kirsanov’s wife died. The blow nearly killed him and in a few weeks his hair turned grey. In the hope of somewhat distracting his thoughts he decided to go abroad . . . but then came the year 1848. Reluctantly he returned to the country and after a fairly prolonged period of inactivity he set about improving the management of his estate. In 1855 Nikolai Petrovich brought his son to the University; he spent three winters with him in Petersburg, seldom going out anywhere and trying to make friends with Arkady’s youthful fellow students. But this last winter he had not been able to go to Petersburg, and so we meet him, quite grey now, stoutish and a trifle bent, in this month of May 1859, waiting for the arrival of his son, who has just taken his degree as once he himself had done.

“Of course I ought to be ashamed,” Nikolai Petrovich replied, turning redder and redder.

“Stop, papa, stop, I implore you!” Arkady exclaimed, smiling affectionately. “What a thing to apologize for!” he thought to himself, and his heart was filled with a feeling of indulgent tenderness for his good, kind father, though mixed with a secret sense of superiority. “Please don’t,” he repeated again, unable to resist a conscious enjoyment of his own more emancipated outlook.

Nikolai Petrovich glanced at him through the fingers of the hand with which he was still rubbing his forehead and something seemed to stab his heart . . . But he immediately reproached himself for it.

“What is Bazarov?” Arkady smiled. “Would you like me to tell you, uncle, what he is exactly?”

“Please do, nephew.”

“He is a nihilist!”

“A what?” asked Nikolai Petrovich, while his brother lifted his knife in the air with a small piece of butter on the tip and remained motionless.

“He is a nihilist,” repeated Arkady.

“A nihilist,” said Nikolai Petrovich. “That comes from the Latin nihil - nothing, I imagine; the term must signify a man who . . . who recognizes nothing?”

“Say - who respects nothing,” put in Pavel Petrovich, and set to work with the butter again.

“Who looks at everything critically,” observed Arkady.

“Isn’t that exactly the same thing?” asked Pavel Petrovich.

“No, it’s not the same thing. A nihilist is a person who does not take any principle for granted, however much that principle may be revered.”

“But remember the sort of education he had, the period in which he grew up,” Arkady rejoined.

“The sort of education he had!” Bazarov exclaimed. “Everyone ought to educate himself—as I’ve done, for instance . . . And as to the times we live in, why should I depend upon them? Much better they should depend upon me. No, my dear fellow, all that is just empty thinking! And what are these mysterious relations between a man and a woman? We physiologists know what they are. You study the anatomy of the eye; and where does that enigmatic look you talk about come in? That’s all romantic rot, mouldy aesthetics. We had much better go and inspect that beetle.”

“And there’s no doubt these good peasants are taking your father in properly: you know the saying – ‘the Russian peasant will get the better of God himself.’”

“I begin to agree with my uncle,” remarked Arkady. “You certainly have a poor opinion of Russians.”

“As if that mattered! The only good thing about a Russian is the poor opinion he has of himself. What is important is that two and two make four, and the rest is just trivial.”

“And is nature trivial?” said Arkady, staring thoughtfully at the parti-coloured fields in the distance, beautiful in the soft light of the setting sun.

“Nature, too, is trivial, in the sense you give to it. Nature is not a temple, but a workshop, and man’s the workman in it.”

The rays of the sun on the farther side fell full on the clump of trees and, piercing their foliage, threw such a warm light on the aspen trunks that they looked like pines and their leaves were almost dark blue, while above them rose an azure sky, tinged by the red glow of sunset. Swallows flew high; the wind had quite died down; a few late-homing bees hummed lazily and drowsily among the lilac; swarms of midges hung like a cloud over a single far-projecting branch. “O Lord, how beautiful it is!” thought Nikolai Petrovich, and his favourite verses almost rose to his lips when he remembered Arkady’s Stoff und Kraft - and he restrained himself; but he still sat there, surrendering himself to the mournful consolation of solitary thought.

“I can see you’re still a fool, my boy. The Sitnikovs of this world are essential to us. I—I would have you understand—I need such louts. It is not for the gods to have to bake bricks! . . .”

“O ho!” thought Arkady, and only then in a flash did all the fathomless depths of Bazarov’s conceit dawn upon him. “So you and I are gods, are we? Or rather, you arc a god while I’m one of the louts, I suppose?”

“Yes,” repeated Bazarov gloomily, “you’re still a fool.”

“You have made me utterly and completely happy,” he said, still smiling all the while. “I ought to tell you, I . . . worship my son! I won’t even speak of my good wife—we all know what mothers are!—but I dare not show my feelings in front of him, because he doesn’t like it. He is against every kind of demonstration of feeling; many people even find fault with him for such strength of character, and take it for a sign of arrogance or lack of sensibility; but men like him ought not to be judged by any ordinary standards, ought they? […] And I not only worship him, Arkady Nikolayevich, I am proud of him, and the height of my ambition is that some day the following lines will appear in his biography: ‘The son of an ordinary army-doctor, who was able, however, to recognize his talents early in life and spared no pains for his education . . .’” The old man’s voice broke.”

“I’m thinking what a happy life my parents lead! At the age of sixty my father can still find plenty to do, talks about ‘palliative measures,’ treats patients, plays the bountiful lord of the manor with the peasants - has a gay time of it in fact; and my mother’s happy too: her days are so chockful of all sorts of occupations, sighs and groans, that she doesn’t know where she is; while […] here I lie under a haystack. . . . The tiny bit of space I occupy is so minute in comparison with the rest of the universe, […] And yet here, in this atom which is myself, in this mathematical point, blood circulates, the brain operates and aspires to something too . . . What a monstrous business! What futility!”

“I feel particularly sorry for your mother.”

“Why? Has she won your heart with her strawberries and blackcurrants?”

Arkady looked down at his feet. “You don’t understand your mother, Yevgeny. She’s not only a fine woman, she’s very clever really. This morning she talked to me for half an hour, and everything she said was so to the point and interesting.”

“I suppose she was expatiating upon me all the time?’

“We didn’t talk only about you.”

“Maybe as a detached observer you can see more clearly than I do. If a woman can keep up a conversation for half an hour, it’s already a good sign. But I’m going all the same.”

“I am now no longer the conceited boy I was when I first arrived here,” Arkady continued. “I have not reached the age of twenty-two for nothing; I still have every wish to lead a useful life, I still want to devote all my energies to the pursuit of truth; but I can no longer seek my ideal where I did before; I perceive it now . . . much closer to hand. Up till now I did not understand myself, I set myself tasks beyond my capacity… My eyes have recently been opened, thanks to a certain emotion … I am not expressing myself very clearly but I hope you will understand me . . .”

“You see what I’m doing: there happened to be an empty space in my trunk, and I’m stuffing it with hay; it’s the same with the trunk which is our life: we fill it with anything that comes to hand rather than leave a void […] And now, in parting, let me repeat . . . because there is no point in deceiving ourselves—we are parting for good, and you know that yourself . . . you have acted sensibly: you were not made for our bitter, harsh, lonely existence. There’s no audacity in you, no venom: you’ve the fire and energy of youth but that’s not enough for our business. Your sort, the gentry, can never go farther than well-bred resignation or well-bred indignation, and that’s futile.”