Fathers and Sons (Deluxe Library Edition)
Translated by Charles Hogarth James
Published by: Engage Books
After graduating from the University of Petersburg, Arkady Kirsanov returns home to his father, Nikolay, with his friend, Bazarov. But Nikolay's brother, Pavel, soon becomes upset by the strange new philosophy called "nihilism" which the young men, especially Bazarov, advocate. Nikolay begins to feel uneasy around his son. To complicate this, Nikolay has taken a servant, Fenechka, into his house to live with him and has already had a son by her. Arkady and Bazarov visit a neighbouring province where they meet two women who begin to pull them apart.
Turgenev wrote Fathers and Sons as a response to the growing cultural schism that he saw between liberals of the 1830s and 1840s, and the growing nihilist movement. Both the nihilists (the "sons") and the 1830s liberals (the "fathers") sought Western-based social change in Russia. Additionally, these two modes of thought were contrasted with the Slavophiles, who believed that Russia's path lay in its traditional spirituality. Turgenev's novel was responsible for popularizing the use of the term nihilism, which became widely used after the novel was published.
Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev (9 November 1818 - 3 September 1883) was a Russian novelist, short story writer, poet, playwright, translator and popularizer of Russian literature in the West. Turgenev's artistic purity made him a favorite of like-minded novelists of the next generation, such as Henry James and Joseph Conrad, both of whom greatly preferred Turgenev to Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. James, who wrote no fewer than five critical essays on Turgenev's work, claimed that "his merit of form is of the first order" and praised his "exquisite delicacy," which "makes too many of his rivals appear to hold us, in comparison, by violent means, and introduce us, in comparison, to vulgar things." Vladimir Nabokov, notorious for his casual dismissal of many great writers, praised Turgenev's "plastic musical flowing prose," but criticized his "labored epilogues" and "banal handling of plots." Nabokov stated that Turgenev "is not a great writer, though a pleasant one," and ranked him fourth among nineteenth-century Russian prose writers, behind Tolstoy, Gogol, and Anton Chekhov, but ahead of Dostoyevsky. His idealistic ideas about love, specifically the devotion a wife should show her husband, were cynically referred to by characters in Chekhov's "An Anonymous Story." Isaiah Berlin acclaimed Turgenev's commitment to humanism, pluralism, and gradual reform over violent revolution as representing the best aspects of Russian liberalism.His first major publication, a short story collection entitled A Sportsman's Sketches (1852), was a milestone of Russian realism. His novel Fathers and Sons (1862) is regarded as one of the major works of 19th-century fiction.
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