8 a perfect gentleman: In English in the original.
9 Slavophile: See chapter XII, note 10.
10 très distingué: Very distinguished (French).
11 bast shoe: Traditional peasant shoe made of bast, strips of the inner bark of lime trees; leather would either have been unavailable or too expensive.
12 temporarily in opposition: To the Tsar’s reforms.
13 the waters in Bohemia: Carlsbad and the other Bohemian spas were the height of fashion with the Russian upper classes.
14 Yelisevich: A fictitious name.
15 eternal reconciliation… life without end: These words echo the language of the Russian Orthodox service for the dead.
Afterword
Fathers and Sons, Turgenev’s most famous and certainly finest novel, has not aged even to this day. It is studied in Russian schools and, however strange this might appear, is loved by teenagers (although the majority of teenagers hate literature, even the classics). Its main hero, Yevgeny Bazarov, a provincial doctor’s son , is a popular character, and people know many of his sayings by heart. No one in Russia would be ignorant of the fact that Bazarov ‘dissects frogs’. The name of Bazarov has become a common noun (the noun bazarovshchina denotes crude materialism, rejection of art, etc.). It seems that the main reason for this is that Bazarov is a complete lout, a ‘nihilist’, rejecting all principles and all social norms and taboos – and this is what young people love. In the middle of the nineteenth century these characters were called ‘new people’, and indeed people like them had never been seen before in Russia – not in such large numbers.
I have called Bazarov the main hero, although perhaps this isn’t entirely true. His young comrade, Arkady Kirsanov, who reveres his morose friend, has equal claim to the epithet. But in personality Arkady is pale and ordinary in contrast with his coarse and colourful friend. The ‘fathers’ – the Kirsanov brothers, Arkady’s father and uncle – can also be called main heroes. Painstakingly, in loving detail, Turgenev describes these ageing men (they are over forty), who are of a vanishing generation, refined, noble and kind people who love art, but who are almost helpless in the face of the onrush of history and impending enormous social changes. The action of the novel takes place in 1859, two years before the Emancipation of the Serfs after 300 years of slavery and the great judicial reforms that made all citizens equal in the eyes of the law for the first time in Russia.
The Kirsanov family, Bazarov’s parents and the women in the novel – all the characters in fact – are accurately portrayed, with humour and in charming detail: one could imagine them miraculously acting out their dramas in real life. The subtle psychological prose of Fathers and Sons couldn’t be more appropriate for a sentimental novel of love. But into this world, so familiar, so well thought out and so deeply felt by him, the author brings a dark, insolent fellow with ideas – Bazarov – just like a horse into a drawing room. And even the author has no idea what’s going on in that horse’s head.
In the 1850s there appeared on the scene a generation of young people who categorically rejected anything connected with tradition, with the old way of life. These were the raznochintsy, children of impoverished or simply minor noblemen, priests or rich tradesmen from the lower classes (members of free city corporations). They saw themselves as ‘new people’, striving to conquer and refashion the old, stagnant world, overturn all hierarchies, rewrite laws and review all social relationships. Equal rights for women, the right to education, the serf question – all these issues demanded an urgent solution. Where should one begin? One should begin with everything – all at once!
To these young people the natural sciences – chemistry, botany, medicine – were of great importance. Chemistry explained the structure of nature, botany could help in increasing harvests, medicine cured people. Having mastered the laws of existence, man would learn how to put them to good use, and universal happiness would follow. Belief in progress had never been so strong; the road ahead had never seemed so broad and bright. And at the same time, parallel with this, nihilistic ideas – the rejection not merely of the old world but of everything in the world in general – became ever more popular among young people. All were agreed on the need for change, but there were different ways of achieving this. By reform or revolution? The eternal question that divided conventional fathers from their sons, reactionaries from radicals, the patient ones from rebels.
This was a generation remarkable in its own way, freedom-loving, untiring, generous, capable of rejecting leisure and prosperity for the sake of science and of helping one’s neighbour. It gave birth to many remarkable enthusiasts: jurists, scholarly scientists, doctors. But it also gave birth to terrorists: reformers and revolutionaries are born of the same mother.
It’s no surprise that these people not only rejected art but considered it a harmful obstacle, a social amusement, the leisure pursuit of idlers and old men who had outlived their time. The following attitude was typical: you shouldn’t paint pictures, as this is stupid and harmful; a painting could be useful only if, let us say, it offered an allegorical portrayal of a young girl in fetters racked with pain. This would arouse a desire in the spectator to free the girl, while she would symbolize the peasant question or scientific thought or the rights of women – each spectator would decide for himself. The main word would be ‘use’. What is useful is good. According to this attitude, such occupations as reading poetry or admiring a beautiful sunset or the sound of a cello would obviously be nothing short of idiocy.
And of course this view of the world struck the ‘fathers’ as prosaic, pragmatic, subversive, mocking and infinitely cynical. And the fathers, delicate creatures that they were, would be horror-stricken, while the children, being coarse creatures, wanted to spit at their finer sentiments. That is, everything happened as it usually does, only the change in generations on the eve of the 1860s in Russia was in fact a change in geological eras.
Turgenev was the first to introduce such an unusual hero as Bazarov into a novel. For one whose education and whole way of life were based in the world of the ‘fathers’, this new hero was, so it seems, not completely comprehensible in contradistinction from all – I repeat all – the other characters in the novel. A master of the art of psychological writing, Turgenev undertook something that did not easily yield to his powers of psychological analysis. Therefore it’s all the more interesting to observe how he attempts it. Turgenev is also a master of caricature and he brilliantly portrays that petty riff-raff clinging to modish ideologies, to the liberal Fronde – Sitnikov and especially Kukshina, the ‘liberated woman’, supposedly interested in everything scientific – embryology, for example – just as others are interested in hats and frills (at this period not to be interested in embryology was tantamount to appearing backward and provincial). These hypocritical people are in raptures over Bazarov and assume they are his equals. But for Turgenev, Bazarov is a real person, although infinitely alien and obscure. And far from providing his hero simply with his own particular outlook on the world, he provides him with a separate circulatory system, a separate nature. And he describes him not only externally, but from within, so that he ‘knows’ how he must feel.
Bazarov starts behaving rudely from the very second he appears before the reader. Immediately he’s rude to master and peasant: he reluctantly offers his hand to the hospitable Nikolay Petrovich, Arkady’s father, and calls the peasant by some offensive name. Arriving as an uninvited guest at Kukshina’s, Bazarov drinks his fill of champagne, after which he yawns loudly and leaves without saying goodbye. Raphael, he declares, is ‘[not] worth a brass farthing’. And the sky? ‘I look at the heavens only when I want to sneeze.’ On seeing the beautiful Anna Sergeyevna, Bazarov is enraptured, producing the celebrated phrase: ‘And what a splendid body!… I’d like to see it now on the dissecting table.’ In general he looks upon women pragmatically: if there’s a chance of ‘using’ them, then why not use them? Clever women tend only to be freaks. On the whole p
rinciples do not exist, only sensations. Likewise honesty is just a sensation. A chunk of meat is better than a chunk of bread. If you can eat it then eat your fill. When he’s out visiting Bazarov is rude to his amiable hosts and at home he’s rude to his parents. At times the reader wants to throw the book down and shout: someone hit him – anyone! But at the same time he is not malicious. The village boys love him – he’s on equal terms with them. They catch frogs together in order to dissect and study them: after all, discover how frogs are constructed and a doctor will discover how man is constructed, and Bazarov intends to become a doctor.
‘Aristocracy, liberalism, progress, principles,’ Bazarov was saying meanwhile, ‘goodness, what a lot of foreign… and useless words! A Russian doesn’t need them, even if they come free… We are guided by what we recognize as useful… The most useful course of action at present is to reject – and we reject.’
What do you do, then, the fathers ask.
‘This is what we do. At first, not so long ago, we were saying that our civil servants take bribes, that we have no roads, no trade, no proper courts of justice… But then we realized that to witter away about the sores on the face of society just isn’t worth doing, it only leads to trivial and doctrinaire thinking. We came to see that our so-called progressives and denouncers are good for nothing, that we’re spending our time on nonsense, talking about some kind of art, unconscious creativity, parliamentarianism, the bar and God knows what else, when what’s at stake is people’s daily bread, when we’re suffocating under the crudest superstition, when all our public companies are going bankrupt solely because there aren’t enough honest men, when the liberation the government is so concerned with will probably bring us little benefit because our muzhiks are happy to rob themselves in order to go and drink themselves silly in a tavern.’
All this is far from ‘loutishness’ and ‘sensations’, but a bitter, sober, intelligent and sad analysis of Russian society. Is Bazarov right? Yes. So what is to be done? Well, here we have one of those ‘cursed questions’ of life in Russia. What Is to Be Done? is the title of a novel by another Russian writer, Nikolay Chernyshevsky, which was for a century far more popular in Russia than Turgenev’s novel. Strictly speaking, Chernyshevsky’s work can’t be called a novel. It is poorly written, simply a load of verbal and thematic rubbish lumped together in one great heap, completely lacking any artistic merit and only of interest these days as a historical document. It is prolix, filled with bombast, and sings the praises of the life of these ‘new people’ and describing life in a commune; a great deal of attention is paid to the freedom of women. As I have said already, everything artistic was sincerely rejected at that particular epoch, in that particular environment, and it was Chernyshevsky’s novel that became a cult text for many succeeding decades rather than Turgenev’s. This was precisely that same girl in fetters – and literally so. Only, the fetters in the novel are reduced to garters that the ‘new’ heroine refused to wear for fear of making her legs look ugly. Chernyshevsky’s heroes solve their dilemma in the interests of revolution (the author wrote his book while in prison). Chernyshevsky himself was sent to Siberia and his novel banned. Turgenev, incidentally, couldn’t stand Chernyshevsky and called him ‘a man who stinks of bugs’.
Turgenev had no inclination at all to go to prison, and that’s why he leaves a great deal unsaid and unwritten. The possibility of interference by the censors prevented him from developing Bazarov’s character in more detail. But for all that, vague hints in the text at Bazarov’s revolutionary ways are very much in evidence. ‘You destroy everything,’ he is told. ‘But one must also build.’ ‘That’s not our concern,’ is his reply. ‘First one must clear the ground.’
This ‘clearing’ later turned into terrorism, explosions and arson – all this is in Dostoyevsky’s great novel The Devils, but that came later. The rejection of principles, of playing the cello and of women’s dignity – this destructive view of the world – is mirrored in the assassination of the Tsar Reformer, Alexander II, and, in the final reckoning, in the 1917 Revolution, and then in the nightmarish and bloody twentieth century in Russia – all that was even later. But meanwhile, on the threshold of 1862, Turgenev writes his novel, trying first to construct his comfortless hero at a time of great pressure from the censors, then trying to understand him. In my opinion he cannot decide what to do with him and therefore, without rhyme or reason, suddenly removes him from life and from the novel. Bazarov is successful at nothing – either in life or love And he harms no one except frogs. Those who wanted to dissect frogs ‘for everyone’s benefit’ would come later.
The reader will find contradictions in Bazarov’s character: it’s as if the hero is good and wicked, sensitive and insensitive at the same time – and, what’s more, in a combination that does not really ring true. This is particularly noticeable against the background of other characters. In what direction should Turgenev develop his character? One can see the difficulty the writer is having. Social analysis is closed to him – he doesn’t want to go to Siberia. Psychologically he quickly exhausts himself.
Of course, the publication of the novel gave rise to a scandal: the liberal public took offence and accused the author of libelling the new generation and everything that was best in Russia. This is and isn’t the case: the liberal public didn’t suspect what was in store for the country. The opening lightning flashes of the approaching storm, the harbingers of a terrible future – it was Turgenev who provided the first, albeit foreclosed, vision of what was to come.
Tatyana Tolstaya
(translated by Ronald Wilks)
Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons
(Series: # )
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