Ottsy i deti Reading Order

Ottsy i deti (Fathers and Sons, 1862) by Ivan Turgenev is the novel that named an era and a generation: Bazarov, the nihilist who believes in nothing except science and the will to destroy the old order, was the most controversial literary figure of nineteenth-century Russia, simultaneously attacked by conservatives who saw him as a caricature of the new radicalism and by radicals who saw him as a slander on their movement. Turgenev himself described Bazarov as a tragic figure — a man who has cleared away everything he does not believe in and finds that he has cleared away too much; when Bazarov falls in love with Anna Odintsova, his nihilism fails him and he cannot act on his feelings, because feeling is exactly what his philosophy forbids. Fathers and Sons is the essential Russian novel for understanding the 1860s — the generation that came of age after the humiliation of the Crimean War and the Emancipation of the Serfs, who rejected the idealism of the 1840s generation (the fathers) in favor of science, materialism, and social revolution. Turgenev's other great novels — Rudin (1856), Home of the Gentry (1859), On the Eve (1860) — form a continuous portrait of the Russian intelligentsia in its successive phases, and Fathers and Sons is the summit. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky both read it and responded to it; the history of the nineteenth-century Russian novel runs through this book.