Fathers and Sons

About the book

Arkady returns home with his friend Bazarov, a medical student who rejects inherited authorities and describes himself as a nihilist. Their arrival unsettles Arkady's father Nikolai and brings Bazarov into pointed conflict with his uncle Pavel. Arguments about art, science, social position, and useful work give the generational divide a visible language, but Turgenev also tests ideas through friendship, family attachment, and desire. Encounters with Anna Odintsova make emotional experience harder to contain within a confidently declared philosophy. The novel grants neither inherited gentility nor youthful negation an entirely secure position. Its intimate scale allows readers to watch public disagreements become personal vulnerabilities, as characters discover how much their chosen principles depend on feelings and relationships they have not fully understood.

• Generational conflict
• Conviction and feeling
• Family attachment

Why read it

For an intimate novel in which a celebrated conflict of ideas becomes inseparable from the characters' emotional exposure.

Novel · translated by C. J. Hogarth