Fathers and Sons (11 page)

‘I think,’ Bazarov objected, ‘that Raphael isn’t worth a brass farthing, and that they are no better than him.’

‘Bravo! Bravo! Do listen, Arkady… That’s how the modern young should talk! And indeed, if you think about it, they are bound
to follow you! Previously young people had to study; they didn’t want to be thought ignoramuses and so they were forced to
work. But now they only have to say “Everything in the world is rubbish” – and the world’s their oyster. The young are happy.
And with reason, they were once simply dimwits but now they’ve become nihilists.’

‘Now you’ve been let down by your vaunted sense of personal dignity,’ Bazarov said calmly while Arkady went red and his eyes
flashed. ‘Our argument has gone too far… I think we’d better stop it. And I’ll be prepared to agree with you,’ he added standing
up, ‘when you show me a single institution in our society, in the private or public sphere, which doesn’t demand total, unsparing
rejection.’

‘I will show you millions of such institutions,’ exclaimed Pavel Petrovich, ‘millions of them! The peasant commune, for example.’
¹²

A cold smile curled Bazarov’s lips.

‘Now, on the subject of the commune,’ he said ‘you’d better have a chat to your brother. I think he’s now come to know from
experience what the commune is like, and its collective responsibility, and the temperance movement, and little things of
that sort.’

‘Then what about the family, the family as it exists among our peasants!’ Pavel Petrovich shouted.

‘I think you’d better not look into that question either in too much detail. I imagine you’ve heard of incest between men
and their sons’ wives? Listen, Pavel Petrovich, give yourself a couple of days, you won’t hit on anything right away. Review
all the classes of our society and think very carefully about each one, while Arkady and I go and…’

‘Mock everything,’ Pavel Petrovich continued.

‘No, dissect frogs. Come on, Arkady. Goodbye, gentlemen!’

The two friends went out. The brothers remained alone and at first just looked at each other.

At last Pavel Petrovich spoke. ‘There you see modern youth! Those are our heirs!’

‘Our heirs,’ Nikolay Petrovich repeated with a heavy sigh. During the whole argument he’d been sitting as if he were on hot
coals, only giving the odd furtive, pained glance at Arkady. ‘Do you know, Brother, what I’ve remembered? I once had a quarrel
with our dead mamma. She shouted and wouldn’t listen to me. In the end I said to her, “You can’t understand me; we belong
to two different generations.” She was terribly offended, but I thought to myself, “What’s one to do? The pill is bitter but
it has to be swallowed.” Now our turn has come, and our heirs can say to us, “You don’t belong to our generation. Swallow
the pill.”’

‘You are much too indulgent and modest,’ Pavel Petrovich objected. ‘On the contrary I am convinced that you and I have much
more right on our side than these young gentlemen, although perhaps our language may be slightly old-fashioned,
vieilli
,
¹³
and we don’t have that arrogant self-assurance… And the modern young are so affected! You ask one, do you want red or white
wine. “I have an habitual preference for
red!” he answers in a bass voice and with such a pompous expression, as if the whole universe were looking at him at that
moment…’

‘Do you want any more tea,’ said Fenechka, putting her head round the door. She hadn’t been brave enough to come into the
drawing room while she could hear the argument.

‘No, you can tell them to take the samovar away,’ said Nikolay Petrovich, getting up to greet her. Pavel Petrovich brusquely
said ‘
bon soir
’
¹⁴
to him and went off to his study.

Half an hour later Nikolay Petrovich went into the garden, to his favourite arbour. His thoughts were gloomy. For the first
time he recognized how far he and his son had grown apart. He foresaw that with every day the distance between them would
become greater and greater. So there had been no point in his having spent whole days during those winters in St Petersburg
poring over the most recent publications; no point in his listening carefully to the conversations of the young; no point
in his pleasure at getting a word in during their heated discussions. ‘My brother says we are right,’ he thought, ‘and setting
all vanity aside, I do myself think they are further from the truth than we are, but at the same time I feel they have something
which we don’t, some advantage over us… Youth? No, not just youth. Doesn’t their advantage lie in their being less marked
by class than we are?’

Nikolay Petrovich sunk his head and rubbed his face with his hand.

‘But to reject poetry?’ he thought again. ‘Not to have a feeling for art, for nature…?’

And he looked around him as if trying to understand how it was possible not to have a feeling for nature. Evening was now
coming on. The sun had gone behind a small aspen wood which lay a quarter of a mile from his garden and cast its seemingly
unending shadow over the motionless fields. A peasant
was trotting on his white horse down a narrow, dark track which ran by the wood; although he was riding in shade, his whole
figure was clearly visible down to a patch on his shoulder; his horse’s legs moved with a brisk regularity that was pleasing
to the eye. For their part the sun’s rays went into the wood and, penetrating the undergrowth, bathed the trunks of the aspens
in such a warm light that they looked like the trunks of fir trees; their foliage went almost dark blue while above them rose
the azure sky tinged pink by the sunset. Swallows were flying high; the wind had dropped; lingering bees lazily, sleepily
buzzed on the lilac blooms; a column of moths danced above a single protruding branch. ‘My God, how beautiful it is!’ thought
Nikolay Petrovich, and some favourite lines of poetry were about to spring to his lips when he remembered Arkady and
Stoff und Kraft
and fell silent. He continued to sit there and continued to indulge in the pleasurable, melancholy sport of solitary reverie.
He liked to dream – living in the country had developed that propensity in him. It was not so long ago that he was dreaming
like this while waiting for his son at the inn, but since then a change had happened, relationships that weren’t quite clear
had now been defined… so very clearly!

He thought again of his dead wife, but not as he had known her for many years, a good and careful housewife, but as a girl
with a slender waist, an innocently curious gaze and tightly plaited hair above a child’s neck. He remembered seeing her for
the first time. He was then still a student. He met her on the stairs of the apartment where he was living. He bumped into
her by accident, turned round to apologize and could only mumble ‘
Pardon, monsieur
’;
¹
she bowed her head, smiled and ran off as if she was frightened; then at the turn of the stairs, she gave him a quick look,
put on a serious face and blushed. And then his first shy visits, the half words, half smiles, the doubts and sorrow and outbursts,
and finally the breathless happiness… Where had all that gone? She became his wife, he was happy as few men on earth are…
‘But why,’ he thought, ‘couldn’t those first sweet moments last for ever and never die?’

He didn’t try to clarify his thoughts for himself, but he felt that he wanted to keep hold of that time of happiness with
something more powerful than memory; he wanted palpably to feel his Mariya by him again, to feel the warmth of her body and
her breath, and he already sensed that above him…

‘Nikolay Petrovich,’ came Fenechka’s voice from near by, ‘where are you?’

He shuddered. He felt no pain or guilt… He didn’t admit even the possibility of any comparison between his wife and Fenechka,
but he regretted she’d thought of looking for him. Her voice at once reminded him of his grey hairs, his age, his present
state…

The enchanted world into which he had entered, rising out of the cloudy waters of the past, shivered – and vanished.

‘I’m here,’ he answered, ‘I’m coming, you go in.’ ‘There’s the voice of class’ was the thought that flashed through his mind.
Fenechka silently looked at him in the arbour and disappeared, and he noticed with surprise that night had fallen since he
had started to dream. Everything round him was dark and quiet, and he saw before him Fenechka’s pale little face. He got up
and was about to return home; but the emotions in his breast couldn’t settle, and he started to walk slowly around the garden,
now pensively looking at the ground underfoot, now raising his eyes to the sky with its swarm of twinkling stars. He walked
a long time, till he was almost exhausted, but the anxiety in him, a vague, questing, sad feeling, still hadn’t gone. How
Bazarov would have laughed at him if he knew what was going on in his mind! Arkady himself would have censured him. Here he
was, a man of forty-four, an agronomist and landowner, in tears, tears for no reason. It was a hundred times worse than the
cello.

Nikolay Petrovich went on walking and couldn’t bring himself to go back into the house, into that peaceful and cosy nest,
welcoming him with all its lit windows. He hadn’t the strength to leave the darkness, the garden, the feeling of fresh air
on his face, that melancholy, that sense of uneasiness…

He met Pavel Petrovich at the bend of a path.

‘What’s the matter with you?’ Pavel Petrovich asked him.
‘You’re pale as a ghost. You’re not well. Why don’t you go to bed?’

Nikolay Petrovich briefly explained to him his state of mind and went away. Pavel Petrovich walked to the end of the garden
and he too started thinking and he too lifted his eyes to the sky. But his fine, dark eyes reflected nothing but the light
of the stars. He wasn’t a romantic by temperament, and his soul, drily fastidious and passionate, misanthropic
à la française
, had no room for dreams…

‘Do you know what?’ Bazarov said to Arkady that same evening. ‘I’ve had a splendid idea. Your father was saying today he’d
had an invitation from that grand relative of yours. Your father isn’t going. Why don’t you and I slip away to *** – he was
asking you as well. The weather here’s turned pretty bad, but we can have a nice trip and look at the town. We’ll get five
or six days’ fun, and that’s it!’

‘And will you come back here?’

‘No, I must go and see my father. You know, he’s twenty miles from ***. I haven’t seen him or my mother for a long time. I
must give the old people some pleasure. They’re good souls, especially my father – he’s such a curious character. And I’m
all they’ve got.’

‘And will you stay with them long?’

‘I doubt it. I should think I’ll get bored.’

‘But you’ll come and see us on the way back?’

‘I don’t know… I’ll see. So that’s agreed? Are we off?’

‘I suppose so,’ Arkady said lazily.

At heart he was delighted with his friend’s proposal but he felt he had to hide his feelings. He wasn’t a nihilist for nothing!

The next day he and Bazarov left for ***. The young people of Marino were sad at their going; Dunyasha even burst into tears…
but the ‘old gentlemen’ breathed more easily.

The town of ***, to which our friends had set off, was under a ‘young’ governor, a man who was both a progressive and a tyrant
– something that is happening all over Russia. During the first year of his administration he managed to quarrel not only
with the marshal of nobility,
¹
a retired Guards staff captain, a breeder of horses and a great host, but also with his own officials. The ensuing row finally
took on such proportions that the ministry in St Petersburg found it necessary to send down a trusty pair of hands to sort
things out on the spot. The choice of the powers that be fell on Matvey Ilyich Kolyazin, the son of the Kolyazin who had once
been the Kirsanov brothers’ guardian. He was another of the ‘young ones’, i.e. he had only recently had his fortieth birthday
but was already on the road to political success and wore the star of an order on each side of his chest. One, it’s true,
was a foreign order, and not a very distinguished one. Like the governor, in whose case he had come to adjudicate, he had
the reputation of a progressive, and though he was already a high-flyer he was not like most high-flyers. He had the highest
opinion of himself, and his vanity knew no bounds, but he behaved simply, looked benignly, listened indulgently and laughed
with such good nature that on first meeting he could be taken for a ‘good fellow’. However, when it was called for, he knew
how to ‘shake things up’, as the phrase goes. ‘Energy is essential,’ he would say then, ‘
l’énergie est la première qualité d’un homme d’état.
’
²
But for all that he usually lost out and any official with a bit of experience could ride all over him. Matvey Ilyich spoke
with great respect of Guizot
³
and tried to impress on all and sundry that he wasn’t one of the tribe of out-of-date bureaucrats, slaves to routine, and
that no important manifestation in society could escape him… Words like that all came easily to his lips. He even followed
developments in modern literature – if only with a kind of pompous insouciance, just as a grown man meeting a crocodile of
urchins in the street will sometimes join them. In reality Matvey Ilyich hadn’t progressed much beyond the politicians of
Alexander I’s
⁴
time,
who, when preparing themselves for a
soirée
at Madame Svechina’s
⁵
(who was then living in St Petersburg), would read a page of Condillac
⁶
in the morning. Only his methods were more modern. He was an adroit courtier, a great schemer – and nothing else. He knew
nothing about business, he wasn’t intelligent, but he did know how to look after his own interests. In that no one could hold
him back – and that’s the main thing after all.

Matvey Ilyich received Arkady in the way of most enlightened high officials – amiably, even playfully. However, he expressed
surprise when he learnt that the relations he had invited had stayed behind in the country. ‘Your
papá
was always an eccentric,’ he said, playing with the tassels of his magnificent velvet dressing-gown. All of a sudden he turned
to a young official, all very properly buttoned up in his undress uniform, and exclaimed, with a worried air, ‘What is it?’
The young man, who had lost his tongue from the long silence, got up and looked at his boss with incomprehension. But Matvey
Ilyich, having confounded his subordinate, was no longer paying him any attention. Our high-ranking officials generally like
to confound their subordinates; the methods they use to achieve this aim are various. One such, which is widely used – ‘is
quite a favourite’,
⁷
as the English say – is this: the official suddenly ceases to understand the simplest words, as if he were deaf. For example,
he asks what day it is.