Fathers and Sons

Summary

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. Arkady's father, Nikolai Petrovich, a gentle, romantic widower who loves Pushkin and plays the cello, has a baby son with a young peasant woman, Fenichka. His brother Pavel Petrovich, a fastidious former guardsman and Anglophile living in the past after a doomed love affair, takes an immediate dislike to Bazarov, and the two clash over aristocracy, art and reform. Arkady and Bazarov visit the provincial town, where they meet a pair of comically 'progressive' hangers-on and the wealthy, cool, intelligent widow Anna Sergeyevna Odintsova. Bazarov, who scorns romance, falls passionately in love with her; she is intrigued but values her tranquillity and refuses him. Arkady, meanwhile, comes to love her shy younger sister Katya. Bazarov visits his own parents, a retired army surgeon, Vassily Ivanovich, who practises country medicine and venerates his son, and his pious, superstitious mother Arina Vlasyevna. He soon grows bored and leaves, hurting them. Back at Maryino, Bazarov kisses Fenichka, and Pavel, who has his own feelings for her, challenges him to a duel. Bazarov wounds Pavel slightly in the leg and dresses the wound himself. He returns home and helps his father with the peasants' illnesses. While carrying out a post-mortem on a peasant who died of typhus, he cuts his finger and, without proper disinfectant at hand, is infected. Knowing he is dying, he sends for Odintsova, who comes with a German doctor; he speaks to her tenderly and dies. Arkady marries Katya and becomes a capable landowner, Nikolai marries Fenichka, and Pavel leaves for Dresden. The novel ends at Bazarov's grave, where his old parents come to pray, and with the narrator's reflection that the flowers on the grave speak of reconciliation and life without end.

Top Lessons

• Ideas meet life

  Bazarov's nihilism is tested by love, family and death, which his theories cannot master. Turgenev shows the limits of ideology without simply dismissing it.

• Generations misunderstand each other

  Fathers and sons love one another across a gulf of values. The novel treats the conflict of generations with sympathy for both sides.

• Death as the great leveller

  Bazarov dies from a small cut during routine work, his genius unused. His death, faced with courage and tenderness, gives the novel its moral weight.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Bazarov is one of literature's most famous medical students, dissecting frogs to understand life and dismissing art for science. His father is a retired army surgeon running an old-fashioned country practice, and the contrast between generations of medicine runs through their scenes. The fatal episode, in which Bazarov cuts himself during an autopsy on a typhus victim and has no caustic to cauterise the wound, reflects the real danger of dissection wounds in the pre-antiseptic era (Lister's work began in the mid-1860s), and his clinical self-observation as the infection spreads is a remarkable portrait of a physician recognising his own death. Bazarov also dresses Pavel's gunshot wound after the duel. The father's grief and the mother's piety at the grave close the book.

• Ch. 3–5

  Bazarov collects and dissects frogs at Maryino to study physiology.

• Ch. 20–21

  Vassily Ivanovich's old-fashioned country practice and his pride in his son's modern medical training.

• Ch. 24

  After the duel, Bazarov examines and bandages Pavel's leg wound.

• Ch. 27

  Bazarov cuts himself during a post-mortem on a typhus victim; he describes his symptoms clinically, accepts his death and sends for Odintsova.

• Ch. 28

  Bazarov's old parents visit his grave.