Fathers and Sons

“In the province . . . Of course, you know better, gentlemen; how could we keep up with you? You are here to take our places. When we were young there was a so-called humoralist—one Hoffmann—and a certain Brown with his vitalism. They seemed quite ridiculous to us but they had great reputations in their day. Now with you someone new has taken the place of Rademacher, and you bow down to him, but in another twenty years no doubt it will be his turn to be laughed at.”

“Let me tell you by way of consolation,” said Bazarov, “that nowadays we laugh at medicine in general, and worship no one.”

“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!”

“He has gone, left us!” he faltered. “Gone, because he found it dull here with us. I’m a lonely man now, lonely as this finger,” he repeated again and again, and each time he thrust out his hand with his forefinger pointing away from the rest. Then Arina Vlassyevna came to his side and pressing her grey head to his grey head she said: “It can’t be helped, Vasya. A son is an independent person. He’s like a falcon that comes when he wills and flies off when he lists; but you and I are like the funguses growing in a hollow tree: here we sit side by side, not budging an inch. It is only I who will stay with you always, faithful for ever, just as you will stay with me.”

Supporting each other, they walk with heavy steps; they go up to the iron railing, fall on their knees and weep long and bitterly, and long and yearningly they gaze at the silent stone beneath which their son is lying; exchanging a brief word, they brush the dust from the stone, set a branch of a fir-tree right, and then resume their prayers, unable to tear themselves away from the place where they feel nearer to their son, to their memories of him.... But are those prayers of theirs, those tears, all fruitless? Is their love, their hallowed selfless love, not omnipotent? Oh yes! However passionate, sinful and rebellious the heart hidden in the tomb, the flowers growing over it peep at us serenely with their innocent eyes; they speak to us not only of eternal peace, of the vast repose of ‘indifferent’ nature: they tell us, too, of everlasting reconciliation and of life which has no end.