fathers and sons (turgenev)

Turgenev’s novel has always felt like a lacuna in my reading. In a way it is an Austen-esque novel with an Austen-esque title. A novel that examines the petit bourgeois of the nineteenth century, their dreams, and frustrations, both romantic and pragmatic. Of course there’s a seismic difference in the way in which the respective writer’s country’s histories played out. Arkady gets his pleasant romantic finale,  but the book is dominated by the would-be anarchist, his friend Bazarov. It’s Bazarov’s fate which foreshadows the history that was to come, half a century later. It’s feasible to think that Arkady and his young bride, Katya, could have lived to see the revolution. So whilst the novel, published mid nineteenth century, is on the one hand a sentimental critique of bourgeois Russia, it is also prophetic. Bazarov himself is a man out of time, deluded as to the scope of his ambition and power, and revealed to be a child when faced with the realities of love, in the shape of the queenly Madame Odintsova. Arkady, who makes peace with his father and his way of living, is the survivor, supposed inheritor of a rural Austen-esque life of diligence and tranquility. There are, of course, other echoes. Of Chekhov’s mercurial landowners, Bely’s radical anarchists and Dostoyevsky’s extremists. Turgenev’s novel seems to exist in a state of suspended animation, half-way between two worlds. To an extent the novel surprised me with its moderation, its gentle examination of the lives and loves of a younger generation which is akin to the lives and loves of any younger generation, full of missteps, embarrassment and endings that could go either way. There’s something paternalistic in the novelist’s approach, and like any parent, it exudes love for each and every one of the book’s children, its characters.