Recommendations
Books Like Ottsy i deti (Fathers and Sons)
Books for readers who loved Turgenev's portrait of nihilism and the generational rupture
Ivan Turgenev's 1862 Fathers and Sons named the nihilist generation and created in Bazarov one of the most controversial literary figures of the 19th century. These eight books share its territory: the generational conflict between idealists and materialists, the intellectual who has cleared away too much and finds himself stranded, and the Russian tradition of the 'superfluous man' who cannot act on his convictions.
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The Brothers Karamazov
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Dostoevsky's direct response to Turgenev's nihilist generation — Ivan Karamazov is Bazarov's philosophical heir, a man who has thought his way to the edge of moral nihilism with tragic consequences.
- 2Buy on Amazon
Oblomov
by Ivan Goncharov
The other great Russian portrait of the generation that cannot act — Oblomov's passivity is the 1840s liberal's failure to engage with reality that Bazarov's nihilism was meant to replace; the two novels define the generational poles.
- 3Buy on Amazon
Rudin
by Ivan Turgenev
The Turgenev novel that precedes Fathers and Sons — Rudin, the brilliant 1840s liberal who cannot act on his convictions, is the superfluous man Bazarov explicitly displaces; essential context.
- 4Buy on Amazon
What Is to Be Done?
by Nikolai Chernyshevsky
The novel the nihilist generation wrote back to Turgenev — Chernyshevsky's 1863 utopian novel of the new people was a direct response to Fathers and Sons, and became the most influential novel in Russian revolutionary history.
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The Idiot
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Prince Myshkin is Turgenev's idealists of the 1840s pushed to their extreme — a man of pure goodness who cannot operate in the real world; the idealism that Bazarov's nihilism was supposed to replace.
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Buy on AmazonBuddenbrooks
by Thomas Mann
A family across four generations — Mann's portrait of the bourgeois generation that cannot sustain what the founding generation built shares Turgenev's melancholy interest in the gap between generations.
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Buy on AmazonThe Age of Reason
by Jean-Paul Sartre
Mathieu, a philosophy professor who has thought his way to freedom and finds that freedom is paralysis — the French existentialist equivalent of Bazarov's nihilist trap.
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Notes from Underground
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Dostoevsky's most direct attack on the generation that Fathers and Sons portrays — the underground man's savage self-parody is a philosophical response to Turgenev's nihilism.
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