In the Library
Fathers and Sons
Ivan Turgenev, 1862
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 5 hours
- Translated by
- Translated by Constance Garnett
- Original
- Original ru
- Chapters
- Chapters 28
- Length
- Length 71k words
£1.99
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A nihilist is a man who does not bow down before any authority, who does not take any principle on faith.
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Joyce writes another young man who must reject his father's world to become himself.
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Crime and Punishment
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Crime and Punishment carries the same fight between a new nihilist generation and the old order, but it plays out as one man's guilt rather than a divided household.
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About the book
Bow to no authority, take no principle on faith, accept nothing you cannot weigh or dissect: that is the creed Yevgeny Bazarov carries into his friend's family estate, frog specimens in hand, certain that love and art and aristocratic honour are so much sentimental rot. Turgenev gave this young man's faith its name, nihilism, and built him so completely that radicals and conservatives alike read the book and felt betrayed. The wonder of it is the tenderness. Turgenev loves Bazarov even as he dismantles him, and the instrument of the dismantling is Anna Odintsova, a widow whose unhurried composure strips the materialist of his own and leaves him in love against every conviction he owns, appalled by what he feels. Here is the recognition that aches: the certainty of the young, and the moment it cracks. Read it for the man undone by the single thing he swore was an illusion, the feeling he could not lay open on a table.