Fathers and Sons is set in the Russian countryside in the spring and summer of 1859, two years before the emancipation of the serfs. Arkady Kirsanov, a newly graduated student, returns to his father's modest, poorly run estate, Maryino, bringing his friend and mentor Yevgeny Bazarov, a brusque, brilliant medical student of humble origins who calls himself a nihilist: he accepts no principle on authority and values only what is useful, especially natural science.
Author
Ivan Turgenev
Frequently Cited
“A nihilist is a man who does not bow down before any authority, who does not take any principle on faith, whatever reverence that principle may be enshrined in.”
“Nature is not a temple, but a workshop, and man's the workman in it.”