Understand in about 6 minutes
A young nihilist who believes in nothing but science and his own will visits two country households, where the generation he scorns, the woman he cannot stop loving, and his own body in the end all refuse to bow to his theory.
Idea map
Mental models
Bazarov says nature is not a temple to be revered but a workshop in which a person is the workman. Everything, including people, is matter to be studied and used rather than admired.
It is a clean test for the materialist outlook: ask whether something is being treated as sacred or as raw material. The novel then shows what such an outlook leaves out.
When pressed on what nihilists will build, Bazarov answers that construction is not their business; the ground wants clearing first. Negation is offered as a complete program in itself.
It names a familiar trap in reform and argument: the energy to tear down can outrun any account of what should replace what was destroyed.
Bazarov claims that people are like trees in a forest, so that no one need study each individual; types and physiology explain enough. The book quietly disputes this by making every figure stubbornly particular.
It exposes the cost of reducing persons to categories. Turgenev's answer is the sharply drawn individuals who refuse to fit the type, including Bazarov himself.
Summary
Arkady Kirsanov comes home from university bringing his admired friend Yevgeny Bazarov, a medical student who calls himself a nihilist. They arrive at the modest estate of Arkady's gentle, music-loving father Nikolai, who farms his land uneasily after freeing his serfs, and of Nikolai's polished, aristocratic brother Pavel. From the first meal it is clear that the older men and the young guest belong to different worlds.
Bazarov's creed is plain negation. A nihilist, Arkady explains, bows to no authority and takes no principle on faith. Bazarov trusts only natural science and usefulness: a good chemist, he says, is worth far more than any poet. He scorns art, romance, gentlemanly honour, and reverence of every kind, and he insists that the urgent work of the day is to destroy and clear the ground, not to construct. Pavel, defender of principles and tradition, clashes with him again and again.
Away from Maryino the two friends meet Anna Sergyevna Odintsov, a calm, intelligent, wealthy widow. Bazarov, who has mocked love as romantic foolery, falls into a violent passion for her, and when he finally confesses it the feeling is fierce, painful, almost like hatred. She draws back, unwilling to risk her composure, and he leaves wounded and angry with himself. Arkady, meanwhile, quietly turns from Bazarov toward Anna's younger sister Katya and a gentler, more ordinary happiness.
Bazarov goes home to his adoring, simple parents, the old army doctor Vassily and the pious Arina, whose tenderness he cannot return without embarrassment. Returning to Maryino, his needling of Pavel ends in an absurd, almost bloodless duel that exposes how little the grand quarrel has changed anyone. The strong, self-sufficient man is increasingly isolated: estranged from his disciple, rebuffed by the woman he loves, unable to live easily among either the fathers or the people he claims to serve.
Back at his parents' house, Bazarov cuts himself while dissecting a peasant dead of typhus and contracts the infection. Facing death with grim clarity, he sends for Anna, admits that Russia perhaps never needed him after all, and dies. The novel closes six months later with marriages and a fragile peace among the survivors, and then at Bazarov's village grave, where his old parents weep and the flowers speak of a reconciliation and a life without end that no theory could supply.
Key concepts
Selected Quotes
A good chemist is twenty times as useful as any poet,
We shall destroy, because we are a force,
I was needed by Russia.... No, it's clear, I wasn't needed.
Source
Source text: Project Gutenberg edition of Fathers and Children by Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev, translated by Constance Garnett.
HTML text: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/30723/pg30723.txt
Project Gutenberg states that this ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever.
First published in Russian in 1862; the Project Gutenberg edition reprints Constance Garnett's English translation.