Nikolai Petrovitch Kirsanov, a wealthy landowner, eagerly awaits the arrival of his son in town after he has been away for college for many years. Arkady, his son, arrives with an intriguing and mysterious friend named Bazarov. Bazarov, a man studying to be a doctor, turns out to be a nihilist who has no respect for the old useless traditions and institutions such as art, music, marriage, patriotism, and the like. When they arrive home to Marino, the country estates, Arkady finds the place drastically changed from his childhood due to his father freeing his serfs (workers) and the transition to a system where they will pay rent to the landowner rather than function as his personal servants. The transition isn’t going well; the farm land is slowly going to ruin and Nikolai is losing money.

While staying at Marino, Bazarov comes into conflict with Nikolai’s brother, Pavel. Pavel who is a well-dressed perfumed flop is an impotent leftover from an earlier generation of gentry who spends his time moping around the house because he has been unable to cope from an incident in the distant past in which the love of his life rejected him after a short love affair. The romantic Nikolai, who loves the Russian poet Pushkin and Romantic composers like Schubert, observes the changes in his son spawned by Bazarov’s nihilistic influence and feels depressed over the wide gulf between their beliefs that now separates him from his son.

Arkady  and Bazarov go off to the city to visit Arkady’s cousin who is a fairly high-ranking official in the Russian government. There they meet up with Odintsov at a dance his cousin holds. Odintsov is a woman that intrigues them and many other men at the dance. She invites them to stay with her, equally intrigued by Bazarov’s nihilistic ideas that rejects all principles and institutions as having values. Despite his nihilistic principles that reject such ideas as romantic foolishness and his better judgement that knows its a mistake, Bazarov finds himself falling in love with her. Arkady falls in love with the younger sister, Katya, who plays him Mozart and talks to him about literature. Bazarov confesses his love, but she doesn’t share his feelings. Or at least, she’s unwilling to give up her comfortable and ordered lifestyle to be with him.

The two young men then leave to visit Bazarov’s parents who dote on him and never leave him alone. Bazarov is constantly moody over his rejected feelings, while Arkady is starting to realize he doesn’t share all of Bazarov’s nihilistic views. The two friends begin to fight, first verbally, which almost ends in a physical altercation. Bazarov finds he cannot work and practice his science while his parents keep smothering him all the time. The two friends return back to Marino, Arkady’s house.

They aren’t there long when Arkady decides to leave and return to Odintsov because he cannot stop thinking of the younger sister, Katya. Bazarov goes about his experiments for awhile, then takes advantage of a growing relationship with Fenichka, the lover and servant of Nikolai, and kisses her one afternoon in the garden. Pavel witnesses this effrontery to his brother (and its implied he loves Fenichka too), and seeks to redress the dishonor by challenging Bazarov to a duel. Pavel cannot even do that right and he gets shot during the duel.

Bazarov decides after shooting Pavel that it is time to leave. He heads to Odintsov’s estates, unable to shake her from his mind. There Arkady who has been spending many days flirting and conversing with Katya asks her to marry him. Bazarov and Odintsov discuss each others feelings and the marriage proposal. The older sister eventually approves the marriage, while Bazarov sees no practical reason to reject it, but feels it salt in his wounds since the older sister won’t return his feelings and Arkady is effectively rejecting nihilism (meaning he fails on two ends).  In grief, Bazarov leaves his friend, telling him they will never meet again since he sees that Arkady much like his father has too much of the romantic in him and isn’t really much of a nihilist.

Bazarov returns home much to the joy of his parents. However, he is distracted and depressed, suffering over his unrequited feelings for Odintsov. Distracted by his grief, he accidently cuts himself in the process of cutting open a cadavder infected with typhoid. He contracts an infection and slowly dies, but not before seeing Odintsov one last time. On his death bed, he compliments her beauty, suggesting a softening of his earlier nihilistic views that would’ve rejected such romantic actions as a complimenting a woman you love on your death bed as absurd.

The title of the novel is derived from the older generation’s ideas as represented by the fathers and uncles (liberalism, religion, and romanticism) versus the newer generations rejection of those ideas (nihilism). Turgenev suggests that it is only natural that sons will reject the ideas of their fathers for newer shiner more cutting-edge philosophies and doctrines. This intergenerational gap is seen in Arkady’s relationship with his parents and Bazarov’s relationship with his parents. The difficulty and inability of fathers to understand the viewpoints of their sons does not prevent them from loving each other. By the end of the novel, the reader gets the impression that the wide gulf separating the fathers from their sons is crossed. Arkady moves more in the direction of his father’s romanticism, but he is more practical than his father, which suggests a leftover from the scientific side of nihilism, as evidenced by the end of the novel when Arkady is able to fix the problems on his father’s farm.

By the end of the novel, we also get the impression that Bazarov’s parents better understand Bazarov’s feelings in their increased willingness to give him space to work compared to his first visit, but I feel this impression misleading. The final image of the novel is the two parents visiting their son’s grave, down on their knees weeping and praying, despite a six months time gap. The narrator of the novel tells us in a beautiful ending:

“Can it be that their prayers and their tears are fruitless? Can it be that love, sacred, devoted love, is not all-powerful? Oh, no! However passionate, sinning, and rebellious the heart hidden in the tomb, the flowers growing over it peep serenely at us with their innocent eyes; they tell us not of eternal peace alone, of that great peace of “indifferent” nature; they tell us, too, of eternal reconciliation and of life without end.”

In these final lines, Turgenev seemingly rejects nihilism for good. In typical Russian fashion reminiscent of Doestoevsky’s ending of Crime and Punishment, Christianity appears as a final salvation and implied afterlife in the words ,”life without end.” Bazarov’s rejection of God and traditional ideas are themselves negated by his parent’s love and faith. The ending also suggests that Bazarov is wrong that traditional institutions have no value. At one point, he challenges Pavel to find him one institution of Russian life that shouldn’t be rejected and dismissed. The ending takes up that earlier challenge; it reminds us that if anything has value, then it is family and love. These institutions endure no matter what social changes and new ideas occur. This, too, echoes the meaning of the title, Fathers and Sons. There will always be fathers and sons that love each other, even when they have very different ideas about the nature of the world. The love of a father for his son transcends all all social changes.

Bazarov’s death is the rational conclusion of his nihilism. His philosophy negates his entire existence, including the rejection of medicine as important (despite him being a doctor).  The relationships of Pavel and the one of Bazarov parallel each other. They both suffer a similar fate in that these relationships destroy both men and their lovers reject them. Both Pavel who represents romanticism to its extreme and Bazarov who represents nihilism to its extreme suffer a similar fate in that neither of these perspectives are tenable in Russia in the long run. In the character of Arkady a middle ground is struck: practicality meets Romanticism.

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