FATHERS AND SONS
BY
IVAN S. TURGENEV
Translated from the Russian by C.J. Hogarth
LONDON & TORONTO
PUBLISHED BY J.M. DENT & SONS LTD & IN NEW YORK
BY E.P. DUTTON & CO
1921
INTRODUCTION
In this masterly unromantic novel, Turgenev drew a character, Bazarov,who served to express what he taught us to call Nihilism, and madea movement into a man. In Russia itself the effect of the story wasastonishing. The portrait of Bazarov was immediately and angrilyresented as a cold travesty. The portraits of the "backwoodsmen," orretired aristocrats, fared no better. Turgenev had indeed roused theire of both sides, only too surely.
The Petrovitchs, typical figures as he designed them of the Russiannobility, were intended he confessed to breathe "feebleness,nonchalance, narrowness of mind." His sense of fitness made him paintwith extreme care these choice representatives of their class. Theywere the pick, and if they were humanly ineffective, what of theirweaker kind? "Si la crême est mauvaise, que sera le lait?" as heput it. The bitterest criticism came, however, from the side of therevolutionaries and incompatibles. They felt in Turgenev the sharperartistry and the intimate irony as if he had only used these qualitiesin dealing with the specific case of Bazarov; whereas they weretemperamental effects of his narrative art. He was ready to asserthimself one of the party of youth. He was at one with Bazarov, hedeclared, in nearly all his ideas, a chief exception being Bazarov'sideas on art, which in truth are apt to be more crudely delivered thanthe rest of that iconoclast's destructive opinions. Bazarov, he saidonce and again, was his favourite child.
It is nearly forty years now (in 1921) since the novel appeared inThe Russian Messenger, a weekly which was the recognised exponentof the new movement. That proverbial period has lent a softer castto the lineaments of the people in the group, as time touches thecanvas of the pictures in an old country-house gallery. But theinteresting thing is to find that history in the large has terribly andirresistibly confirmed the history in little that Turgenev drew, with asure instinct, for the potential anticipations of his saga.
But we should be wrong if we mistook its clear pervading realitiesfor those of a tract-novel, or a document of any one particulargeneration. It is as its title declares in a sense another fable ofthe inevitable coil and recoil of the two generations. The sympatheticpower of Turgenev is shown in his instinctive understanding of themboth. An aristocrat by training, he was saved as Tolstoi was fromsterilising his imaginative and dramatic powers by any sense of casteand privilege. He loved the play of human nature, knew how to reckonwith its foibles, its pride, habitual prejudices, and all tragic andcomic susceptibilities. So he drew Bazarov, as a protagonist of therevolt against the old order and the protective habit of age. WhenBazarov enters the house of Arkady's father, he is like Don Quixoteentering the inn of his direst probation. If the parallel seems atrifle fantastic, it was yet one that Turgenev would let pass, since heaffirmed that Don Quixote himself was, in his inimitable extravagance,a type of the eternal spirit of revolution. And one would like, ifthere were room for it, to print as preamble to Fathers and Sons, theessay in which its writer has compared the deeper essentials of Hamletand Quixote.
We must be satisfied instead to recall the direct event of the novel,as it falls in