Liberals, Radicals, and the Making of a Literary Masterpiece

Liberals, Radicals, and the Making of a Literary Masterpiece

Ivan Turgenev achieved greatness with a novel detested by almost everyone he cared about.

 

By Keith Gessen

The New Yorker, August 29, 2022

 

Ivan Turgenev’s “Fathers and Sons” angered his political allies, but his ability to see all sides served him well as a novelist.Illustration by Henning Wagenbreth

 

A newly minted university graduate heads home after a long absence, to the delight and trepidation of his widowed father, who waits for hours at the station. At last, the son arrives, handsome and grown-up. The father is thrilled. But the son has brought with him a friend, a tall, brusque, fierce-looking young man. This friend is clearly the senior one in the relationship, and the two have returned from the university with all sorts of notions. They are “nihilists,” they tell the father.

Their creed is to subject everything to withering scrutiny and critique. Things soon grow tense at the father’s house. At dinner and tea, where they are joined by the father’s well-dressed, old-fashioned brother, heated arguments break out. To make matters worse, the father’s estate is not flourishing. The peasants don’t like his new progressive management system. He was hoping his son would take an interest. Now he is not sure that he will.

 

This is the setup of Ivan Turgenev’s “Fathers and Sons,” or, more literally but less accurately, “Fathers and Children,” in a new translation by the husband-and-wife team of Nicolas Pasternak Slater and Maya Slater. The book was first published in 1862, in Russian, and the action takes place a few years earlier, in 1859, on the eve of the emancipation of the serfs and amid furious debates over the future of Russia.

 

The father on whose estate most of the action takes place is Nikolai Kirsanov; his son is named Arkady, and his son’s friend, and the book’s most vivid and memorable character, is named Bazarov. Bazarov is from a more modest background than Arkady—his father was an Army doctor, and he, too, has been trained in medicine—but he towers over his friend through his superior energy and intellect. He has built around his training a vast philosophical edifice. All that is not concrete and scientific is a distraction or, worse, an obfuscation; the country and its élites, like the Kirsanovs, are rotten; everything deserves to be torn down. “Show me a single institution in our modern life,” Bazarov says, “which doesn’t call for total, merciless destruction.” Though the label “nihilist” was largely a function of censorship—in its absence, the young men in the novel could simply have called themselves “revolutionaries”—it very much captured the rising generation’s iconoclasm and impatience.

 

The book caused a furor upon its publication. Young radicals felt targeted by the portrayal of Bazarov; liberals felt that the book gave the radicals too much credit; reactionaries believed that Turgenev had permanently discredited the revolutionaries. Turgenev found himself defending the book, in countless letters and conversations, against criticism from all sides. Meanwhile, St. Petersburg, then the capital, was burning. In May of 1862, just a few months after the publication of “Fathers and Sons,” a series of fires engulfed the city. The government blamed Turgenev’s nihilists; a number of young people, including some of those with whom he had sparred in print, were arrested. Some thought that Turgenev had in effect denounced them. He had been spending long stretches in Europe; now, embarrassed and discouraged, he decided to return there. In the years to come, he spent less and less time in his native land.

Tall, handsome, rich, and easygoing—“Nature has refused him nothing,” was how Dostoyevsky put it—Turgenev was also indecisive, inconstant, maybe even a bit unreliable. More than any other figure in Russian literary history, he embodied the tragedy of the middle, the failure of the golden mean ever to take root on Russian soil. Both conservatives (including Dostoyevsky) and radicals despised him for his watery European ideals. He quarrelled constantly with Tolstoy, despite many ties of family and friendship. Because of his willingness to coöperate with a government investigation of émigré radicals, he was estranged for years from his old friend Alexander Herzen. His ability to see the many facets of every person and every issue—“He felt and understood the opposite sides of life,” in the words of Henry James, who got to know him in Paris—served him well as a novelist. But this ability was less desirable in a political ally, or even in a pal.

 

Turgenev was born in 1818 in Orel, about two hundred miles south of Moscow, in a wealthy but unhappy aristocratic family. His father, Sergei, was a military officer from an old Russian family that had fallen on hard times. A fine figure of a man, Sergei married a woman, Varvara Lutovinova, who was six years his senior and very rich, with several thousand serfs working her land. Sergei made it clear, the Turgenev biographer Henri Troyat tells us, that he had no intention of being faithful to her. Varvara accepted this arrangement and took out her frustrations on her children and her serfs.

 

Sergei died when Ivan was in his teens, and he remained in Turgenev’s memory a distant, slightly brutal figure. “I have never seen anyone more exquisitely calm, more self-assured or more imperious,” Turgenev wrote in the autobiographical novella “First Love.” “At times I would watch his clear, handsome, clever face . . . my heart would tremble, my entire being would yearn towards him . . . then, as if he sensed what was going on within me he would casually pat my cheek––and would either leave me, or start doing something, or else would suddenly freeze as only he knew how. Instantly, I would shrink into myself, and grow cold.” The work is about a teen-age boy on summer vacation with his parents who falls in love with a beautiful girl slightly older than himself, only to discover that she is already having an affair—with his father.

 

Turgenev’s mother, Varvara, was an even more insistent presence in his life. She came from a family of vicious landlords, and she more than kept up the tradition; she flogged and humiliated her peasants with alarming regularity. “I acquired my early loathing of slavery and serfdom by observing the shameful environment in which I lived,” Turgenev wrote. As he grew up and sought independence from his mother, including by living in Europe, she cut off his allowance; near the end of her life, she tried, unsuccessfully, to have her manager sell off and even ruin parts of the estate so as to devalue the prospective inheritance.

 

Turgenev studied history and philology in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and then Berlin, where he imbibed Hegel and roomed with a fellow-aristocrat, the future anarchist Mikhail Bakunin. He began his writing career early on, with a few long narrative poems, and soon gained entry into the literary world of St. Petersburg—particularly the circle of so-called Westernizers who had gathered around the critic Vissarion Belinsky.

 

These years, in the eighteen-forties, were difficult ones, Turgenev later recalled; censors would leave writers’ proofs marked up with red ink, “as if bloodied.” The start of Nicholas I’s reign, in 1825, had been met by a failed uprising of Army officers who came to be known as the Decembrists; its ending, three decades later, was accompanied by the humiliating Russian defeat in the Crimean War. The intervening years were a period of intense repression and censorship. The generation that came of age with Turgenev was aware of Russian backwardness and subjugation, but did not know what to do about it, or even, under conditions of police surveillance, how to talk about it.

 

One solution was Herzen’s: he went abroad, stayed there, and became the most influential Russian political writer of his age. But another solution was offered by Belinsky. A beloved figure and a tireless debater, Belinsky proposed to make literature and literary criticism a forum for the most important questions facing Russia and the world. Belinsky encouraged Turgenev’s early writing efforts, and Turgenev adored him. In one typically self-effacing passage, Turgenev recalled Belinsky’s passion for argument, and his own occasionally more earthly desires. “After talking for two or three hours, my youthful flightiness would take over, I’d want to rest, take a walk, eat some lunch,” Turgenev wrote. “ ‘We haven’t yet settled the question of the existence of God,’ he once bitterly rebuked me, ‘and you want to eat!’ ” Belinsky had reason to sense that time was short: he was racked for years by consumption, which finally killed him at the age of thirty-six.

 

Despite their temperamental differences, an admiration for Belinsky would continue to color Turgenev’s writing throughout his life. The Russian edition of “Fathers and Sons” is dedicated to his memory.

 

Turgenev’s first sustained effort in prose, “A Hunter’s Notebook,” usually translated as “A Sportsman’s Sketches,” begun in 1846 and published as a book in 1852, showed the imprint of Belinsky’s ideas as filtered through the mind of a born aesthete. It recorded the stories Turgenev had witnessed or heard as he tramped about the countryside near his family estate, shooting birds. A number of the stories are about the relations between serfs and their masters. Without ever saying so outright, Turgenev makes it plain that most of the masters are self-satisfied and ignorant brutes, while the serfs are ordinary people trying to go about the business of life.

 

The book created a sensation when it was published. Though the stories were relatively light and seemingly harmless when read on their own, taken all together they conveyed just how barbaric and disfiguring an institution serfdom was. The censor who approved the collection for publication was removed from his post. The future Alexander II, at the time the grand duke, later said that the sketches had convinced him of the evils of Russia’s peculiar institution. A decade later, he signed the declaration that emancipated all the serfs.

 

Edmund Wilson, writing in this magazine in 1957, argued that in these stories Turgenev had invented a new literary form: “No prose tale before Turgenev attempts, through sheer technical precision, not merely to tell a story but also to hit on the head a social and moral nail.” Turgenev was helped in this early achievement by the censorship—he could not have denounced serfdom outright even if he’d wanted to—but it was also his natural inclination as a writer not to preach.

 

 

 

Turgenev was thirty-three years old when “A Sportman’s Sketches” came out, and life was good. His despotic mother had died two years earlier, and he inherited a fortune, which he used liberally: he liked to eat well, going so far as to acquire a well-known chef for a thousand rubles, and he didn’t mind loaning money to his friends. Some people found him a little too eager to please, or distastefully vain; Tolstoy, who lived with Turgenev briefly in St. Petersburg, couldn’t stand how much attention he paid to his own grooming. But, from another perspective, Turgenev was principled and brave. In 1852, he had his first serious run-in with the authorities, after publishing a too praiseful obituary of Gogol, whom many viewed as a satirist of tsarism. This, on top of the politics of his stories about serfs, was too much for Nicholas I. Turgenev was arrested and spent a month behind bars in St. Petersburg, after which he was confined to his estate. The arrest, and the publication of his book, catapulted him to the forefront of Russian literature. Dostoyevsky, just a few years younger than Turgenev, was then serving a much longer and harsher sentence in Siberia; Tolstoy, a decade younger than Turgenev, was still busy losing money at cards.

 

Turgenev’s novels and stories in the next few years were a great success. “Rudin,” his first novel, painted a portrait of the idealistic but ineffectual intellectuals of the eighteen-forties, able to commit themselves neither in politics nor in love. (The title character, Dmitry Rudin, was based partly on Bakunin.) “A Nest of Gentlefolk,” a story of disappointed love, showed the old Russian nobility at their best, trampled in their finer feelings by less scrupulous people, but holding on to their morals and their dignity. Throughout this time, Turgenev also published stories and occasional essays. He was in his glory. “His art answered to the demands of everyone,” the great Russian literary critic D. S. Mirsky later wrote. “It was the mean term, the middle style for which the forties had groped in vain. It avoided in an equal measure the pitfalls of grotesque caricature and of sentimental ‘philanthropy.’ It was perfect.”

 

This love affair with the reading public could not last. The reception of Turgenev’s next novel, “On the Eve,” from 1860, was far less kind. Yet another tale about love and politics, this one begins with two young men, a sculptor named Shubin and a scholar named Bersenev, vying for the hand of a pretty young woman named Elena. She clearly prefers the serious Bersenev to the flighty Shubin, and all seems well except that Bersenev can’t stop talking about his amazing friend from school, Insarov. Insarov is a Bulgarian exile and a revolutionary, biding his time in Russia until he can return to his home country and lead his people to throw off the yoke of the Turks. Bersenev is adamant that Elena should meet Insarov; when she finally does, she falls in love with him, and they run off to liberate Bulgaria together. Insarov dies on the way, but Elena goes on without him. No one from her family ever sees her again.

 

Politically minded young readers were disappointed—especially by Insarov’s nationality. Why was he Bulgarian? “We understand why he can’t be Polish,” the radical critic Nikolai Dobrolyubov wrote, alluding to the burgeoning movement for Polish independence from the Russian Empire. “But why he isn’t Russian—in that lies the entire problem.”

 

Dobrolyubov’s review of the novel was seventeen thousand words long and appeared in Russia’s premier literary journal, The Contemporary, to which Turgenev had for years contributed and whose editor was a close friend. The journal had published “A Sportsman’s Sketches” and his first two novels; it had also been Belinsky’s home, and Herzen’s, and Tolstoy’s. But in the mid-eighteen-fifties, keeping up with advanced opinion, it had taken a sharp leftward turn. In this, it was led by two young literary critics, Dobrolyubov and Nikolai Chernyshevsky. Unlike Turgenev and Tolstoy and most other writers up to that time, Dobrolyubov and Chernyshevsky were not landed gentry; their fathers were priests, and both had graduated from divinity school. This set them apart socially, as well as politically, from the older literary generation.

 

The new radicals were impatient with their predecessors, and the death of Nicholas I and his replacement by Alexander II, a young, reformist tsar, only made them more so. As often happens, a little bit of reform led to calls for much wider reform. The younger generation was in no mood to wait on the Tsar’s good intentions. They were revolutionaries, and said so over and over, in very long book reviews, of which Turgenev was increasingly the target.

 

In later years, Turgenev claimed that “Fathers and Sons” was inspired by an encounter with a young Russian doctor on a train; the doctor amazed Turgenev by caring much more about his plans for curing cattle diseases than about literature.

 

But another model for Bazarov, which everyone recognized at the time, was Dobrolyubov, and by extension the other young radicals. Turgenev saw in them a crude but powerful materialism that counterposed the needs of the peasantry against the vague consolations of art. Turgenev’s friend Belinsky had proclaimed that art must have a social purpose; the new radicals were sometimes willing to dispense with art altogether. As Bazarov says, “A decent chemist is worth twenty poets.”

 

The final piece of the novel’s background was more personal than literary. Turgenev had never married. Like his earlier character Rudin, he had engaged in various flirtations that brought him to the brink of proposing—including with a sister each of Bakunin and Tolstoy—but he’d always pulled back. And, as was common, he had slept with serfs on his mother’s estate. By far his longest-lasting attachment, however, was to a married woman named Pauline Viardot, a celebrated French opera singer whom he had met in St. Petersburg in the early eighteen-forties and then followed around Europe; he often lived in the Viardots’ house, as a close family friend and occasionally Pauline’s lover.

 

But he did, in his early twenties, have an out-of-wedlock child, a daughter, with a woman on his mother’s estate.

 

Unofficially, he acknowledged the girl and took on financial responsibility for her. When she was eight years old, he sent her to France to live with the Viardots. In the eighteen-fifties, when he himself started to make a home in France, he and his daughter, now named Paulinette, began to spend more time together. Turgenev found it frustrating work. “She does not like music, poetry, nature—or dogs—and that is all that I like,” he complained to a friend back in Russia. This did not make her a bad person, Turgenev went on. “She replaces the qualities which she lacks by other, more positive and more useful qualities. But for me—between ourselves—she is Insarov all over again. I respect her, and that is not enough.” The invocation of Insarov, the Bulgarian revolutionary from “On the Eve,” coupled with the date of this letter (October, 1860, as Turgenev was beginning work on “Fathers and Sons”), led at least one prominent Turgenev scholar to argue that “Fathers and Sons” is also a book about Turgenev’s relationship with his daughter.

 

The book feels jagged at times. Bazarov insults and annoys the Kirsanov brothers—Arkady’s father, Nikolai, and uncle, Pavel—and then grows bored and persuades Arkady to go into town with him. There they drink and eat and meet a pretty aristocrat named Odintsova, with whom they both fall in love. “What a body!” Bazarov remarks. “I wish I had her on my dissecting table.” She invites them to her estate. This part of the book, where Turgenev returns to the familiar ground of people sighing over one another, is the weakest. But then Bazarov and Arkady go visit Bazarov’s family. It turns out that the fearsome Bazarov is worshipped by his parents. His mother breaks down in tears at the sight of him. His father annoys Bazarov with his solicitousness. When old Dr. Bazarov gets up the courage to ask Arkady what he thinks of his son, and when Arkady tells him honestly that he thinks Bazarov will be a famous man someday, the father is overcome with emotion. Naturally, Bazarov soon grows bored of his parents, and he leaves to see Odintsova and then even to visit the Kirsanovs again.

 

The fathers in “Fathers and Sons” are not the tyrannical or distant fathers of the previous generation—they are not Turgenev’s father. Nor are they the vicious serf owners of “A Sportsman’s Sketches.” They are loving, out of date, and ineffectual. In fact, they are liberals. And still they cannot communicate as they would like with their sons. Perhaps they are too soft. They spent their youth having long conversations about Hegel. Barred from genuine political action by an oppressive state, they turned in on themselves. When Bazarov sees Arkady’s father reading Pushkin, he scoffs. For Turgenev, who as a student had twice caught glimpses of Pushkin in St. Petersburg before the poet’s death, this was borderline sacrilege. But Bazarov is right! Maybe Nikolai Kirsanov should read something other than Pushkin while his estate falls into ruins.

 

And what of the sons? Arkady loves his father and seeks to find common ground with him; in the end, he gets married, returns home, and takes up the management of the estate. As for Bazarov, and Turgenev’s attitude toward him, you can see why people were confused. Bazarov is brilliant and dynamic; he says something interesting nearly every time he opens his mouth. He is also basically a decent guy—when he shoots Pavel Kirsanov in the leg after the older man challenges him to a duel, he immediately treats the wound. At the end of the book, he contracts typhus from a patient and dies, too young. (Dobrolyubov, Turgenev’s literary tormentor, died of tuberculosis in late 1861.) There are many things in the book that call forth sympathy for Bazarov in the reader.

 

At the same time, Bazarov is unaccountably rude. He yawns in people’s faces. (According to Chernyshevsky, Dobrolyubov had once cut short a conversation with the much older Turgenev, saying, “Talking with you is boring me.”) Bazarov is also, for a guy committed to science and the revolution, very horny. Of just about every woman mentioned in his presence, he asks, “Is she pretty?” He might say in his defense that the question cuts through a lot of romantic mumbo-jumbo. “Take a look at the anatomy of the eye,” he tells Arkady. “Where are you going to find that enigmatic glance you spoke of? It’s all romantic rubbish, moldy aesthetic rot.” (And then: “Let’s go and look at my beetle.”) But there are also direct political criticisms of Bazarov in the book. Much of the time, he speaks of the needs of the peasantry. He will dedicate his life to the people. Yet he is an élitist. Discussing with Arkady a silly progressive-minded aristocrat of their generation, Bazarov says, “I need fatheads like him. It’s not for gods to waste their time baking pots, is it now?” Arkady is shocked. “Only now,” Turgenev writes, “did he glimpse the bottomless depth of Bazarov’s vanity.” In the future, this vanity would reappear as Lenin’s theory of the revolutionary vanguard.

 

Turgenev was advancing, novelistically, a line of thought that runs through all his work. Beliefs are admirable, strong beliefs perhaps even more so. But there is a point at which belief can tip over into fanaticism. Turgenev had seen this with Belinsky, and in Bazarov he re-created and dramatized it. Bazarov loves nature but turns it into a science project, loves Odintsova but feels bad about it, and loves his parents but refuses to indulge this affection by spending time with them. All of this, from Turgenev’s perspective, is a mistake. It’s well and good, in other words, to talk about the existence of God and the future of the revolution, but you need to take a break for lunch.

 

 

The profound ambiguity of Bazarov’s character opened him to multiple interpretations. Most of the radicals were insulted by the way he was depicted—by his failure in love, and his flaws, and the fact that, in dying, he ends up being no more effective than the liberal fathers he disdains. “He is represented as a vulgar male animal,” one radical wrote, “who cannot keep his hands off any presentable woman.” Reactionaries, including the secret police, were delighted by what they saw as Turgenev’s biting satire. He has “branded our adolescent revolutionaries with the caustic name of ‘Nihilists,’ ” one agent cheered in a report to his superiors. But there were some radicals, like the essayist Dmitry Pisarev, who embraced the label and Turgenev’s depiction, calling themselves nihilists from there on out. Turgenev found limited understanding among his literary peers, but one notable figure, Dostoyevsky, was very taken with the portrayal of Bazarov. He wrote Turgenev to praise the book and later created an extreme version of Bazarov in the character of Raskolnikov, who murders a pawnbroker and her sister in “Crime and Punishment.”

 

The book’s publication right as the radical movement reached its early apogee, as well as Turgenev’s remarkable quality of insight, gives it an uncanny position in Russian literature and life. In the period of reaction that followed the fires of 1862, the revolutionaries whom Turgenev had in mind when he wrote the book were crushed. Chernyshevsky and Pisarev were both arrested and sent to prison, as Dobrolyubov no doubt would also have been, if he’d lived; Pisarev drowned, possibly on purpose, not long after his release, and Chernyshevsky, banished to Siberia for two decades, became a broken man. When their mantle was picked up by, among other people, Vladimir Lenin, it was with a more conspiratorial, more determined flavor. Lenin worshipped Dobrolyubov and Pisarev for their iconoclasm and admired Chernyshevsky’s novel “What Is to Be Done?,” written in prison in response to “Fathers and Sons.” He had nothing but contempt for Turgenev. But think of Lenin’s famous remark about music—that he loved listening to it but tried not to listen too much, since it made him want to pet people on the head, whereas now was a time to smash people’s heads. Was he echoing Pisarev, or Chernyshevsky, or, in fact, Bazarov, who gives his final verdict on the liberal gentry in his farewell to Arkady?

You gentry will never manage to get beyond noble resignation or noble indignation, and those are no good to anyone. You won’t fight, for instance—though you think you’re such gallant fellows—but we want to fight. No! Our dust will burn your eyes out, our mud will spatter your clothes—you’re just not up to our level, you can’t help looking admiringly at yourselves, you enjoy scolding yourselves, but we’re bored with all that. We need other people to attack! Other people to crush!

 

Is it art if it makes everyone mad? Not necessarily, but in this case yes. The new English translation, at least the seventeenth, is workmanlike and literal, with some inspired moments. It is also highly readable, and can occasion another look at the book, for those who’ve read it before, or a first look for those who haven’t. I was surprised at my own reaction. When I first read “Fathers and Sons,” I was in college; all I cared about were the sons, their willingness (in Bazarov’s case) to die for their beliefs, their certainty. Reading the book again, twenty-five years later, I found myself rooting for the fathers. What might they do to bridge the divide? And why were their sons so mean to them, after all the fathers had done? Sure, they weren’t perfect, but they were doing their best!

 

That, of course, I see now, is what the book is about. This rupture between parents and their children is what happens, over and over, with every new generation; there is nothing for it, no remedy, no answer. Who is right in “Fathers and Sons”: the fathers or the sons? They’re both right, and they’re both wrong, and neither will ever understand the other.

 

Turgenev never got over the stormy reception accorded “Fathers and Sons” in Russia. He was abroad when it was published and afterward returned rarely. After the publication of his next novel, “Smoke,” in 1867, a mild love story in which one of the characters is a fervently anti-Russian Russian émigré, he had a final falling-out with Dostoyevsky, who came to see him in Baden-Baden and then told friends that Turgenev had declared himself a German. Turgenev spent most of the eighteen-seventies in Paris, where he became close to Flaubert. He was always welcomed and admired in Europe, seen as the representative there of all Russian literature. But in Russia itself, for nearly two decades, he was out of favor.

 

Only toward the end of his life, when tastes back home began to change and some of the old arguments were forgotten, did Turgenev find a gentler reception on his infrequent trips to Russia. Students held celebratory banquets for him; two young men recognized him at a train station and bowed to him on behalf of the Russian people for his authorship of “A Sportsman’s Sketches.” He died in France in 1883. Henry James attended the farewell ceremony at Gare du Nord, before Turgenev’s body was sent back to Russia. Two years earlier, revolutionary terrorists had finally succeeded in assassinating Alexander II. Turgenev’s funeral, in St. Petersburg, was a major cultural event, for which the police made scrupulous preparations, in case the creator of Bazarov might bring out a crowd of Bazarovs and cause a fuss. ♦

 

 

 

 

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Keith Gessen is the author of the novel “A Terrible Country.” He teaches at Columbia Journalism School.