From the beginning, Turgenev had conceived a novel which would be about modern Russia – not just about people from his own
patrician milieu living in present-day Russia, as in his previous novels, but about the single-minded new social types now
able to thrive in the new Russia of Alexander II. In his young country doctor Bazarov, on whom all the post-publication controversy
centred, Turgenev created the first fictional
raznochinets
. Bazarov is typical of his class in finding the old nobility irrelevant, and has no compunction about showing his lack of
respect for those senior to him. Breathing life into a character whose beliefs (about the value of art, for example) were
sometimes antithetical to his own was a courageous endeavour on Turgenev’s part. It is striking, for example, that the
raznochintsy
were of no artistic interest to the aristocratic and egocentric Tolstoy, who had entered the literary arena some ten years
earlier, nearly a decade after Turgenev, and who continued to focus on gentry and peasants in his fiction. The barriers between
social classes in Russia’s highly segregated society were now beginning to break down, but Turgenev was in the vanguard where
the depiction of this process in literature was concerned. Even more courageous was his desire to turn Bazarov into a real
hero, which went against the grain of the profiles of the flawed male protagonists of previous Russian novels (such as Pushkin’s
Eugene Onegin
, Lermontov’s
A Hero of Our Time
and Goncharov’s
Oblomov
). With a nod to the ironic title of Lermontov’s earlier masterpiece, Turgenev declared Bazarov to be truly ‘a hero of our
time’, behind whom it is hard not to see the shadow of the inspirational Belinsky (who was, of course, also a humble doctor’s
son). But creating his character proved fiendishly difficult, and involved keeping a diary in his name and imagining his reactions
to various contemporary issues. The ‘men of the 1860s’ would in time become instantly recognizable, but at the beginning of
the decade it is understandable that Turgenev could only intuitively feel the contours of this new
personality. With hindsight it is difficult to appreciate the challenge he faced in creating a three-dimensional character
proud to call himself a ‘nihilist’: Bazarov, after all, is still really only a prototype. As Turgenev wrote to the poet Sluchevsky
in April 1862, while the furore about the novel was at its height, ‘I dreamed of a tall, dark, wild figure, half grown out
of the ground, who was strong, angry, and honest, but still doomed to perish because of standing only on the threshold of
the future’. It is not surprising that Turgenev should mention in the same breath that he imagined Bazarov as a ‘strange offshoot
of Pugachev’, the leader of the Cossack uprising against Catherine the Great, for, as he explains earlier in the letter, ‘if
he is called a nihilist, you should read that as revolutionary’.
5
This is certainly how the great anarchist Mikhail Bakunin (a friend to Turgenev during his milder student days in Berlin)
understood Bazarov, exhorting Alexander Herzen in 1866 to appreciate the energy and strong will of the radical Russian youth.
As a pronounced Anglomane, Turgenev’s editor Mikhail Katkov may well have bridled at the portrayal of Bazarov’s foppish opponent
Pavel Kirsanov but he was truly shocked by Bazarov’s ‘force, power, superiority over the crowd’.
6
Katkov’s relations with Chernyshevsky and the editorial team at
The Contemporary
had become increasingly antagonistic since the late 1850s, and now here was Turgenev seemingly wanting to celebrate the enemy!
‘Even if Bazarov has not been raised to an apotheosis,’ Katkov wrote to Turgenev, ‘you have to admit, he has somehow managed
to end up on a very high pedestal. He really does crush everything around him. Every thing before him is either worn out rags,
or feeble and green.’
7
Katkov insisted Turgenev introduce revisions to the novel’s manuscript to render Bazarov’s portrait less positive, but in
so doing probably only fomented the critical storm which greeted the novel upon its publication.
The terms of the Emancipation Act the previous year had dissatisfied all sections of Russian society, leading to a wave of
demonstrations and arrests. Simultaneously, the introduction of ill-conceived university reforms prompted widespread student
protests in October 1861, particularly among those
raznochintsy
who could not afford to pay the new obligatory
fees and objected to compulsory attendance at lectures. The twenty-four-year-old Dobrolyubov had entitled his review of
On the Eve
for
The Contemporary
the previous year ‘When Will the Real Day Come?’, and there were huge expectations among the revolutionary youth that Turgenev’s
new novel would finally deliver an unequivocal positive hero on whom they could project their hopes and dreams. By March 1862,
when the novel was published, Dobrolyubov was no longer around to express their sense of betrayal at Bazarov dying, since
he himself had died of tuberculosis a few months earlier. (Interestingly, Turgenev’s character notes from the Isle of Wight
reveal that Bazarov was in fact partly modelled on Dobrolyubov, whom he respected.) In his stead, another critic wrote a withering
review, claiming that Turgenev had ridiculed Russian youth through his character of Bazarov. The young generation certainly
felt that the portrait of Bazarov was, in Turgenev’s words, ‘an insulting caricature, a slanderous lampoon’.
8
Chernyshevsky, meanwhile, had been put under police surveillance for writing illegal anti-government tracts and inciting
the peasants to revolt. In July 1862, a few weeks after the government had succeeded in shutting down
The Contemporary
, he was arrested and imprisoned in the St Peter and Paul Fortress. Instead of reviewing
Fathers and Sons
, he wrote an inflammatory riposte in the form of his revolutionary novel
What Is to Be Done?
, which was smuggled out of prison and published in 1863.
The American scholar and diplomat Eugene Schuyler, who produced the first English translation of
Fathers and Sons
in 1867 (and met Turgenev later that year en route to become US consul in Moscow), summarized well the general reaction to
the novel in his foreword:
A tempest was raised in Russia by its appearance; passionate criticisms, calumnies, and virulent attacks abounded… Each generation
found the picture of the other very life-like, but their own very badly drawn. The fathers protested, and the sons were enraged
to see themselves personified in the positive Bazarof… Of course the more the book was abused, the more it was read. Its success
has been greater than that of any other Russian book.
9
The publication of
Fathers and Sons
was indeed a sensation, and not just in the Russian literary world. The novel was discussed all over the country, and according
to one of Turgenev’s contemporaries even caused a stir in sleepy provincial towns like Lenin’s home town of Simbirsk, where
no book had apparently ever made any kind of impact. As Avdotya Panayeva records in her memoirs, it was read even by those
who had not picked up a book since leaving school. Daughters threatened their parents they would become nihilists if they
were not bought new frocks and taken to balls, while the government condemned the doctrine of ‘nihilism’ as seditious. It
was recommended that young men should be forbidden from appearing in public with long hair and dark-blue spectacles, while
young women should be prohibited from appearing in public with short hair, and without chignons and crinolines.
In his 1917 study of Turgenev, Edward Garnett describes the novelist’s many critics as a ‘crowd of critical gnats dancing
airily around the great master and eagerly driving their little stings into his flesh’.
10
Turgenev definitely was stung by the vehemence of the attacks, so much so that when
Fathers and Sons
came to be published as a separate book (by an old-believer merchant and philanthropist who had set up his own company in
Moscow, every other publisher having shied away), he thought at first he should add a foreword to try and explain what he
had set out do. In the end he explained in his brief introduction that he had resolved the novel should speak for itself and
declared that he had not changed his views. As he wrote to Sluchevsky in April 1862, ‘My entire tale is directed against the
nobility as the leading class.’
11
Thus he could in ‘clear conscience’ place on the title page the name of his ‘unforgettable’ friend Belinsky. Towards the
end of the 1860s, however, Turgenev wrote a short essay on his novel as part of his
Literary Reminiscences
, in which he recounted the experience of being attacked on all sides – and was criticized on all sides for that too.
In truth, because Turgenev was an artist and not a pamphleteer, Bazarov emerges as a contradictory and ambivalent figure,
but this is of course precisely why he succeeds as a literary character, and why his creator exhorted readers to love him
despite his ‘coarseness, heartlessness, pitiless dryness and sharpness’.
12
As Turgenev later conceded in a letter to Annenkov, it was likely ‘no author really understands what he is doing. There is
a sort of contradiction here, which you
yourself
can never resolve, however you approach it.’
13
Rosamund Bartlett
1
Nikolay Mikhailovsky, ‘Iz “Pisem postoronnyago” (stat’ya po povodu smerti Turgeneva)’, in P. Pertsov, ed.,
O Turgeneve: russkaya i inostrannaya kritika 1818–1918
(Moscow: Kooperativnoe izdatel’stvo, 1918), p. 61.
2
Isaiah Berlin, ‘Vissarion Belinsky’,
Russian Thinkers
(Harmonds-worth: Penguin, 1979), p. 152.
3
Ivan Turgenev, ‘Instead of an Introduction’,
Turgenev’s Literary Reminiscences and Autobiographical Fragments
, tr. David Magarshack, with an essay by Edmund Wilson (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), pp. 92–3.
4
Letter to Pavel Annenkov, 22 March (3 April) 1861, I. S. Turgenev,
Polnoye sobraniye sochineniyi i pisem v tridsati tomakh. Pis’ma v vosemnadtsati tomakh
, 2nd revised edition, vol. 4, ed. I. A. Bityugova and S. A. Reiser (Moscow: Nauka, 1987), p. 309.
5
Letter to Konstantin Sluchevsky, 14 (26) April 1862, cited in
Roman I. S. Turgeneva ‘Ottsy i deti’ v russkoy kritike
, ed. I. I. Sukhikh (Leningrad: izdatel’stvo Leningradskogo universiteta, 1986), p. 29.
6
Description of Katkov’s response in letter from Pavel Annenkov to Turgenev, 26 September 1861, cited in V. Y. Troitsky,
Kniga pokoleniy: o romane I. S Turgeneva
‘
Ottsy i deti
’ (Moscow: Kniga, 1979), p. 21.
7
Ivan Turgenev, ‘Po povodu “Otysov i detey”’,
Roman I. S. Turgeneva ‘Ottsy i deti’ v russkoy kritike
, p. 37
8
Letter to Ludwig Pietsch, 22 May (3 June) 1869,
Polnoye sobraniye sochineniy i pisem v tridsati tomakh Pis’ma v vosemnadtsati
tomakh
, vol. 9, ed. N. S. Nikitina and G. V. Stepanova (Moscow: Nauka, 1995), p. 223.
9
Eugene Schuyler, ‘Preface’ to Ivan Turgenef,
Fathers and Sons
, tr. Eugene Schuyler (New York: Leypoldt and Holt, 1867), p. vii.
10
Edward Garnett,
Turgenev
(London: Collins, 1917), p. 20.
11
Roman I. S. Turgeneva ‘Ottsy i deti’ v russkoy kritike
, p. 27.
12
Ibid., p. 28.
13
Letter to Pavel Annenkov, 1 January 1870 (20 December 1869),
Polnoye sobraniye sochineniy i pisem v tridsati tomakh. Pis’ma v vosemnadtsati tomakh
, vol. 10, ed. L. N. Nazarova and G. A. Time (Moscow: Nauka, 1994), p. 102.
The standard edition of Turgenev’s Russian text is the Soviet Academy of Sciences Complete Collected Works, I. S. Turgenev,
Polnoye sobraniye sochineniy
,
Sochineniya
, vol. 8 (Moscow and Leningrad, 1960–68; 2nd complete revised edition,
Sochineniya
, vol. 7, Moscow, 1981). In
Turgenev’s Literary Reminiscences and Autobiographical Fragments
(tr. David Magarshack, London, 1959) he expounds his literary credo; this translation has the bonus of an introductory essay
by Edmund Wilson. Ivan Turgenev,
Letters
(ed. A. V. Knowles, London, 1983) is a useful selection. Alexander Herzen,
My Past and Thoughts
(tr. Constance Garnett, rev. Humphrey Higgens, introduced by Isaiah Berlin, London, 1968) presents Turgenev’s intellectual
context. Franco Venturi,
Roots of Revolution
(tr. Francis Haskell, London, 1960) explores the radical political ideas of the time. The Norton Critical Edition of
Fathers and Sons
by Michael R. Katz (New York, 1995) adds a selection of Turgenev’s own comments on the novel and of contemporary and more
recent criticism, including Isaiah Berlin’s stimulating Romanes Lecture of 1970, ‘
Fathers and Children
: Turgenev and the Liberal Predicament’. The best biography of Turgenev is Leonard Schapiro’s
Turgenev: His Life and Times
(Oxford, 1978). April FitzLyon’s
The Price of Genius
(London, 1964), a biography of the singer Pauline Viardot, the love of Turgenev’s life, is also interesting. Among works
of criticism see V. S. Pritchett’s
The Gentle Barbarian: The Life and Work of Turgenev
(London, 1977); also Richard Freeborn,
Turgenev: The Novelist’s Novelist
(Oxford, 1960) and Frank F. Seeley,
Turgenev: A Reading of His Fiction
(Cambridge, 1991).
The Russian title of Turgenev’s novel,
Ottsy i deti
, means ‘Fathers and Children’. But the large majority of its translations in all languages have been titled
Fathers and Sons
or its equivalent from the start, often with Turgenev’s knowledge and presumably approval. It is reasonable to assume his
children were male. Moreover the Russian of ‘Fathers and Sons’ sounds awkward. But it should be noted that Isaiah Berlin referred
to the novel as
Fathers and Children.