Turgenev Fathers and Sons Reading Order

Ivan Turgenev's Fathers and Sons (1862) is the novel that introduced the word 'nihilist' into the world's vocabulary and remains the finest literary treatment of the conflict between generations that literature has produced. At its center is Yevgeny Bazarov, a self-described nihilist and medical student who believes in nothing but empirical science and the need to clear away the dead lumber of Russian tradition, and his friend Arkady Kirsanov, whose idealism cannot quite keep pace with Bazarov's pitiless negation. When they visit Arkady's father and uncle at the Kirsanov estate, Bazarov's contempt for the older generation — their romanticism, their liberalism, their faith in beauty and poetry — detonates a conflict that is simultaneously philosophical, political, and deeply human. Turgenev's great achievement is to make Bazarov both right and wrong: right that the old world is dying, wrong that nothing replaces it. It is the most politically contentious Russian novel of the nineteenth century and one of the most psychologically precise.