At the beginning of Fathers and Sons, Ivan Turgenev’s controversial novel examining the tensions underlying 19th-century Russia, the stage is set for an explosive inter-generational conflict. This will be between Arkady and his mentor Bazarov, who are youthful “nihilists,” and Arkady’s father and uncle, tradition-minded gentry who see themselves as educated and progressive. While the novel was controversial just for entertaining nihilist ideas (which Turgenev’s characters define as a rejection of all inherited principles), Turgenev actually undermines the utility of nihilism throughout the novel, before decisively rejecting it at the conclusion. Turgenev does this by portraying the nihilist Bazarov’s life as a tragic failure, and portraying Arkady’s family as ultimately happier—and more useful to Russia’s progress—because of its embrace of inherited tradition. By contrasting the characters’ lives in this way, Turgenev argues that, contrary to nihilist beliefs, individuals and society cannot meaningfully function without embracing tradition.
The younger generation’s nihilism is nonsensical even to Arkady’s relatively progressive father and uncle; they see it as antithetical to being “Russian” and thus unworkable for society. When Arkady explains Bazarov’s nihilism to his family, they see it as an embrace of essentially “nothing.” Nikolai points out that the word “nihilist” is derived from the Latin word “nihil,” meaning “nothing,” and Pavel adds that a nihilist “respects nothing.” In response, Arkady claims that a nihilist simply “looks at everything critically” and “does not take any principle for granted.” When Pavel asks whether such a position is necessarily a good thing, the most Arkady can say is that it’s good for some people and bad for others. He doesn’t have a clear vision for how nihilism can benefit society as a whole.
Pavel charges Bazarov with “living outside human society” and being un-Russian in his refusal to recognize principles. Russians, he argues, “hold tradition sacred, they are a patriarchal people—they cannot live without faith…” In other words, the essence of being Russian is to uphold traditional principles of patriarchal rule and religion, and submit to the authorities cherished by one’s forebears. Bazarov argues in response, “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, […] while all the time the real question was getting daily bread to eat, when the most vulgar superstitions are stifling us...” Bazarov, then, doesn’t hold any part of society sacred. While reformers occupy themselves with abstract questions, peasants are too superstitious and self-indulgent to make use of whatever freedoms they gain under reformist policies. He doesn’t care if his outlook is properly “Russian” or not, since that, too, is presumably a meaningless construct.
The end of Bazarov’s life is a failed search for meaning, even though he doesn’t recognize or acknowledge that he’s searching for something. After Arkady’s engagement, Bazarov, having rejected his own chance at love, returns to his parents’ home, but he quickly finds himself restless—his nihilistic mindset and rejection of tradition has left him in a state of meaningless unfulfillment. When Bazarov contracts a typhus infection in a moment of carelessness, his parents assure him that he’ll be cured, but he won’t hear of it: “You and mother must now fall back on your strong religious faith; here’s an opportunity of putting it to the test.” Bazarov speaks of his impending death as just another opportunity to do an experiment—his parents can find out if their faith can withstand sorrow or not.
Beginning to sink into delirium, Bazarov bids farewell to his would-be love, Anna Sergeyevna, saying, “My father will tell you what a loss I shall be to Russia . . . That’s bosh, but don’t disillusion the old man. […] And who is needed? The cobbler’s needed, the tailor’s needed, the butcher...” Ironically, Bazarov begins to acknowledge the emptiness of his own outlook just as his life begins to give way to nothingness. In contrast to his earlier confidence that “the times we live in […] should depend upon me,” now Bazarov suspects that it’s actually ordinary tradesmen who are the backbone of Russia and its best hope. His alleged greatness, then, is only valuable insofar as it might bring some comfort to his devoted parents. Thus, in contrast to his rejection of inherited tradition, he finds meaning in his death primarily in reference to his very traditional family.
At the end of the novel, things improve at Arkady’s estate of Maryino, which was initially falling into disrepair. This only happens after Arkady has tacitly rejected his former mentor’s nihilism and embraced traditional patterns of living. On this traditional foundation, progress has a fighting chance, too, albeit a halting one.Earlier, Bazarov mocked Arkady for choosing to marry, and Arkady’s marriage marked the end of their friendship. Bazarov says, “Your sort, the gentry, can never go farther than well-bred resignation or well-bred indignation, and that’s futile.” Bazarov sees Arkady’s marriage as nothing more than filling the “empty space” in his life with marriage; there’s no inherent goodness or meaning in the institution. But it’s only after marriage that Arkady’s life takes on a definite form and direction, as he takes an interest in the practical work of improving the farm—work which Bazarov would have earlier dismissed as useless. By ending the novel with Nikolai’s somewhat ineffectual but well-intentioned land reforms, not with Bazarov’s nihilism, Turgenev suggests that Russian society must find its way forward through more gradual measures, not radical ones that reject tradition.
By portraying Arkady’s life as ultimately conforming more and more to traditional Russian structures, and by portraying Bazarov’s more radical life as ultimately an empty tragedy, Turgenev finally repudiates nihilism as a harmful, ineffective way of viewing the world and argues that tradition plays an important role in the health of society.
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Tradition and Progress Quotes in Fathers and Sons
“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.”
“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.
“And so you have no feeling whatsoever for art?” she said, leaning her elbow on the table, a movement which brought her face closer to Bazarov. “How can you get on without it?”
“Why, what is it needed for, may I ask?”
“Well, at least to help one to know and understand people.”
Bazarov smiled. “In the first place, experience of life does that, and in the second, I assure you the study of separate individuals is not worth the trouble it involves. All men are similar, in soul as well as in body. Each of us has a brain, spleen, heart and lungs of similar construction; and the so-called moral qualities are the same in all of us - the slight variations are of no importance. It is enough to have one single human specimen in order to judge all the others. People are like trees in a forest: no botanist would dream of studying each individual birchtree.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
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.
