At the beginning of Fathers and Sons, both Arkady and Bazarov are reunited with their parents after years away, and both struggle to come to terms with the contrast between their university-educated, cutting-edge outlook on life and the more traditional ways still embraced by their families of origin. While Arkady initially feels superior and thinks it’s up to him to transform his father Nikolai’s way of life, by the end he’s assimilated back into his father’s household, and his family is thriving. Bazarov, however, resists such adaptation and dies unhappily, his family line dying out. Through this contrast between two episodes of generational conflict, Turgenev argues that families experience healthy growth when there is an attempt to negotiate and assimilate generational differences, whereas an attempt to make a clean break, as Bazarov does, is ultimately fruitless.
At the beginning of the novel, Arkady enjoys his newfound sense of educated superiority over his father, which ultimately creates a rift between them. When his father feels awkward about his lover, Fenichka, having moved in with him, Arkady responds in a rather condescending way, experiencing “a feeling of indulgent tenderness for his good, kind father, though mixed with a secret sense of superiority.” Arkady enjoys the position of being “enlightened” and allowing for his father’s choices. When Arkady catches sight of his father’s properties, his “heart [sinks]” and he thinks, “It just can’t go on like this: this must all be transformed…but how are we to do it, how should we begin?” Arkady’s reaction is symbolic of his overall perception of his father as backward, or at least as insufficiently progressive—his life has to be transformed, and Arkady is the one to do it.
Nikolai is distressed by the gulf that has opened between himself and his son, especially given his own attempts to remain informed and supportive of progress: “I have done well by the peasants, set up a model farm, so that all over the province I am known as a radical […] and yet here they are saying I’m over and done with.” Nikolai goes on to relate that, as he was reading Pushkin, Arkady had come up to him and, “with an affectionate look of pity on his face,” taken away the copy of Pushkin and handed him Stoff und Kraft, a 19th-century work of scientific materialism. The young son’s attempts to educate his father feel hurtful to Nikolai, especially given Nikolai’s efforts to go above and beyond to understand his son and keep up with developing ideas. The result is deepened alienation, not the closer relationship he’s longed for.
When Arkady and Bazarov visit Bazarov’s parents, a village doctor and his wife, Bazarov notices that his parents’ less “advanced” lives have something that he lacks. Bazarov’s refusal to compromise on the generational differences between himself and his parents does not lead to a better life for him—rather, it only makes him more aware of the void in his life.
Arina Vlassyevna, Bazarov’s mother, is portrayed as the epitome of “old school” devoutness and superstition, but nonetheless a treasure: she “was a true Russian gentlewoman […] Nowadays such women as she have ceased to exist. Heaven only knows whether this should be a matter for rejoicing!” In other words, Arina doesn’t fully belong in Russia as it’s emerging in the modern world, but as women like her fade into history, Russia loses something essential to its culture, too.
Bazarov acknowledges that his philosophically consumed life compares poorly to his parents’ happier one. “I’m thinking what a happy life my parents lead!” he tells Arkady. “[M]y parents […] are so busy, they don’t worry about their own insignificance. It doesn’t stick in their throat . . . whereas I . . . I feel nothing but depression and rancour.” Even Bazarov, then, who scorns much of his parents’ lifestyle and never overcomes a sense of estrangement from them before he dies, can’t help seeing that his rejection of their approach to life has cost him something he can’t regain—namely, the sense of purpose and contentment that comes of managing a household and embodying traditional roles.
Arkady is able to integrate back into his father’s lifestyle and enjoy a harmonious life by his side, while a listless Bazarov refuses to fit in and ultimately dies. This ultimately demonstrates the importance of respecting and assimilating with one’s family, rather than resisting generational differences. By the end of the novel, Arkady falls in love with Katya, marries, and moves home to Maryino, his father’s estate, to assist Nikolai in modernizing the farm. His own family begins to blossom alongside Nikolai’s, who has a new wife and young child himself. Arkady’s acceptance of Nikolai and integration into the traditional family structure ultimately allows him to live a meaningful life and continue his familial line.
Bazarov, by contrast, dies in his parents’ home, having never become comfortable there. Although Bazarov expresses appreciation for them on his deathbed, his parents are left to grieve their only child, and Bazarov’s nihilism symbolically dies, too, without being passed on to a future generation. Fittingly, then, given Turgenev’s favoring of Arkady, Arkady’s family shows promise of thriving twice as much as before—two weddings conclude the book, and both marriages yield sons of their own. This fruitfulness suggests that the effort to struggle with and assimilate generational differences, as painful and disruptive as the process might be, is ultimately healthy for families, strengthening them for generations to come.
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Generational Conflict Quotes in Fathers and Sons
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.”
“We saw that our clever men, our so-called progressives and reformers never accomplished anything, that we were concerning ourselves with a lot of nonsense, discussing art, unconscious creative work, parliamentarianism, the bar, and the devil knows what, while all the time the real question was getting daily bread to eat, when the most vulgar superstitions are stifling us, when our industrial enterprises come to grief solely for want of honest men at the top, when even the emancipation of the serfs - the emancipation the government is making such a fuss about - is not likely to be to our advantage, since those peasants of ours are only too glad to rob even themselves to drink themselves silly at the gin-shop.”
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.
“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.”
Arina Vlassyevna was a true Russian gentlewoman of the old school; she ought to have lived a couple of centuries earlier, in the days of Muscovy. Very devout and emotional, she believed in fortune-telling, charms, dreams and omens of every conceivable kind; she believed in half-crazy visionaries, in house-spirits, in wood-sprites, in unlucky encounters, in the evil eye, in folk remedies, in salt prepared on Maundy Thursday, and the imminent end of the world; […] Arina Vlassyevna was very kindhearted, and in her way far from stupid. She knew that the world is divided into the gentry who were there to give orders and the common people whose duty it was to serve—and so she felt no repugnance against servile behaviour and obsequiousness; but she was always gentle and considerate with subordinates, never let a single beggar go away empty-handed, and though she gossiped at times she never criticized anyone […] Nowadays such women as she have ceased to exist. Heaven only knows whether this should be a matter for rejoicing!
“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.”
“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.”
“We shall fire two shots and, as a precaution, let each of us put a letter in his pocket, holding himself responsible for his own demise […] So everything is arranged—By the way, I don’t suppose you have pistols?”
“How should I have pistols? I am not a fighting man.”
“In that case I offer you mine. You may rest assured that I have not shot with them these five years.”
“That is very comforting news.” Pavel Petrovich picked up his cane… “And now, my dear sir, it only remains for me to thank you and leave you to resume your studies. I have the honour to bid you good-day.’
“Until we have the pleasure of meeting again, my dear sir,” said Bazarov, escorting his visitor to the door.
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.
