Works from the school curriculum raise many questions not only among schoolchildren. To make it easier to understand Russian classics, the Kultura.RF portal has prepared a series of publications. In the new material we tell you what the novel “Fathers and Sons” by Ivan Turgenev is about, and analyze the book, the images of the characters and their motives. Read what nihilism is, how the work reveals the conflict of different generations, and why Evgeny Bazarov was unlucky in love.
What is this book about?
The novel takes place in the spring of 1859, several years before the peasant reform of Alexander II. The plot begins with the arrival of medical student Evgeny Bazarov, the main character of the work, at the estate of his friend Arkady Kirsanov. Soon Bazarov enters into polemics with the older Kirsanovs - brothers Nikolai and Pavel. Arkady's father, Nikolai Kirsanov, loves art, is interested in progressive ideas and is in love with his housekeeper's daughter Fenechka. His brother Pavel Kirsanov is a retired military man, proud and self-confident. The older Kirsanovs cannot be called inveterate conservatives, but their ideas are too moderate and old-fashioned for “new people.” Bazarov perceives their liberal views as very limited and criticizes them.
Ivan Turgenev himself described the main idea of “Fathers and Sons” to the playwright Konstantin Sluchevsky as follows: “My whole story is directed against the nobility as an advanced class. Look at the faces of Nikolai Petrovich, Pavel Petrovich, Arkady. Weakness and lethargy or limitation. An aesthetic feeling forced me to take specifically good representatives of the nobility in order to prove my theme all the more accurately: if cream is bad, what about milk?
Roman Turgenev dedicated to the urgent turning point in Russian society. In the middle of the 19th century, an ideological dispute between generations and classes flared up in the country - older liberal nobles and young nihilistic commoners. This confrontation formed the basis of the main conflict of the novel and became its leading theme. Vladimir Nabokov wrote: “The novel depicts a moral conflict between virtuous, weak-willed losers of the 40s. and a new generation of young strong revolutionaries - “nihilists”.