Fathers and Sons
SynopsisPlot
When a young graduate returns home he is accompanied, much to his father and uncle's discomfort, by a strange friend "who doesn't acknowledge any authorities, who doesn't accept a single principle on faith." Turgenev's masterpiece of generational conflict shocked Russian society when it was published in 1862 and continues today to seem as fresh and outspoken as it did to those who first encountered its nihilistic hero.
Story
About this book
Ivan Turgenev published Fathers and Sons in 1862, setting most of the action on a Russian country estate where two generations measure each other and find little agreement. Arkady Kirsanov, a young graduate, brings his friend Yevgeny Bazarov home. Bazarov calls himself a nihilist, meaning he rejects inherited truths in art, religion, and politics and trusts only what scientific experiment can confirm. Arkady's father and uncle belong to an older, more genteel liberal tradition, and the friction moves from polite unease toward open argument.
The novel appeared at a tense moment in Russian intellectual life, and the response was immediate. Readers on the political right accused Turgenev of glorifying nihilism, while critics on the left read Bazarov as a hostile caricature of progressive youth. The disagreement over how the character should be understood, whether admired, pitied, or simply observed, has continued since.
This Oxford World's Classics edition presents a translation commissioned specially for the series, the first to work from Turgenev's own working manuscript, which came to light only in 1988. Earlier translators had no access to those draft pages, so small choices of wording and emphasis differ here.
