Extract

We sit in the mud and reach for the stars.

A young nihilist arrives at a provincial Russian estate and announces that he believes in nothing, and the older generation, with its love of Pushkin and gentle liberalism, does not know whether to argue or weep. Ivan Turgenev published this novel in 1862, and it coined the word "nihilism," naming the rupture tearing Russian society apart. Bazarov is brilliant, abrasive, and finally tragic, a man whose negation cannot survive his own capacity to feel. Turgenev renders both generations with such fairness that radicals and conservatives alike attacked the book, the surest sign of its truth. The closing image, of an old couple weeping at their son's grave while nature goes on indifferent and eternal, achieves a pathos no ideology can answer.