Recommendations
Books Like Fathers and Sons
Best books to read after Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev
Ivan Turgenev's Fathers and Sons is a foundational Russian novel about the clash between liberal gentry and the nihilist younger generation, centered on the brilliant, uncompromising Bazarov. These recommendations extend the experience through Turgenev's other novels and through Russian fiction that shares its interest in generational conflict and the Russian intelligentsia.
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Rudin
by Ivan Turgenev
Turgenev's first novel — Rudin is a brilliant, eloquent man of the idealist 1840s generation who talks beautifully and cannot act. The predecessor to Bazarov and the most direct portrait of the generation that Bazarov is reacting against.
- 2Buy
On the Eve
by Ivan Turgenev
Turgenev's 1860 novel about a Russian woman who falls in love with a Bulgarian revolutionary — the immediate predecessor to Fathers and Sons, showing Turgenev's interest in the socially active younger generation and what motivates them.
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Crime and Punishment
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Raskolnikov's theory that extraordinary men are above ordinary moral law is a post-Bazarov development of nihilism — what happens when the rejection of conventional values is taken from sociology into individual moral action. Dostoevsky wrote Crime and Punishment in part as a response to Turgenev's nihilists.
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Anna Karenina
by Leo Tolstoy
Tolstoy's great novel is set in the same era and social world as Fathers and Sons — the Russian gentry in the 1870s, navigating the same tensions between tradition and modernity. Levin's sections of Anna Karenina are Tolstoy's answer to Turgenev's portrait of the intelligentsia.
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Oblomov
by Ivan Goncharov
The archetype of the 'superfluous man' — the Russian nobleman who cannot act, whose energy collapses into inertia — is the opposite of Bazarov and the type that Bazarov despises. Reading Oblomov alongside Fathers and Sons defines the debate between passive idealism and active nihilism in Russian literature.
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Dead Souls
by Nikolai Gogol
Gogol's satirical panorama of provincial Russian life is the landscape through which Bazarov and Arkady move — the world that nihilism is reacting against and hoping to transform. Reading both novels together gives the fullest picture of the Russian social world Turgenev is portraying.
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The Brothers Karamazov
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The fullest development of the post-nihilist Russian intelligentsia: Ivan Karamazov's philosophical nihilism and the Grand Inquisitor's argument, taken to their ultimate implications. Reading Turgenev and Dostoevsky together shows how the debates begun in Fathers and Sons are resolved (or not) in Dostoevsky's greatest work.
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What Is to Be Done?
by Nikolai Chernyshevsky
Chernyshevsky's 1863 novel — a utopian revolutionary novel about the new people — was the radical response to Fathers and Sons and the most influential novel on the Russian revolutionary movement (Lenin reportedly read it five times). Reading it alongside Fathers and Sons shows the intellectual debate that Turgenev's novel initiated.
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