Fathers And Sons

In this masterly unromantic novel Turgenev drew a character Bazarov who served to express what he taught us to call Nihilism and made a movement into a man. In Russia itself the effect of the story was astonishing. The portrait of Bazarov was immediately and angrily resented as a cold travesty. The portraits of the “backwoodsmen” or retired aristocrats fared no better. Turgenev had indeed roused the ire of both sides only too surely.The Petrovitchs typical figures as he designed them of the Russian nobility were intended he confessed to breathe “feebleness nonchalance narrowness of mind.” His sense of fitness made him paint with extreme care these choice representatives of their class. They were the pick and if they were humanly ineffective what of their weaker kind? “Si la crême est mauvaise que sera le lait?” as he put it. The bitterest criticism came however from the side of the revolutionaries and incompatibles. They felt in Turgenev the sharper artistry and the intimate irony as if he had only used these qualities in dealing with the specific case of Bazarov; whereas they were temperamental effects of his narrative art. He was ready to assert himself one of the party of youth. He was at one with Bazarov he declared in nearly all his ideas a chief exception being Bazarov’s ideas on art which in truth are apt to be more crudely delivered than the rest of that iconoclast’s destructive opinions. Bazarov he said once and again was his favourite child.It is nearly forty years now (in 1921) since the novel appeared in The Russian Messenger a weekly which was the recognised exponent of the new movement. That proverbial period has lent a softer cast to the lineaments of the people in the group as time touches the canvas of the pictures in an old country-house gallery. But the interesting thing is to find that history in the large has terribly and irresistibly confirmed the history in little that Turgenev drew with a sure instinct for the potential anticipations of his saga.