Fathers and Sons
The original generational conflict novel. A nihilist son returns home and clashes with his liberal father in 1860s Russia. The word "nihilism" entered common use from this 1862 book. Turgenev meant Bazarov as a critique; young Russians adopted him as a hero. The author lost control of his own creation, which is its own kind of literary achievement.
The free thinker will not entertain anyone else’s thought, which readers call hypocrisy and one calls being “a complete tosser.” The nihilism is more posture than argued position, and Turgenev never makes it work harder. The romances, Bazarov with a widow and Arkady with her younger sister, sit beside the ideological conflict without adding to it. Readers who arrive without 1860s Russian politics say the quarrel lands as abstract rather than felt. Then a closing chapter ties up the whole cast in a few tidy pages, a lurch away from the ambiguity before it. “All over the shop,” one reader concludes. Even a sympathetic critic grants “it’s hard to find a forceful hero.”
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
