Fathers and Sons

Arkady Kirsanov comes home from university to his father's estate, bringing his friend Bazarov, a medical student who believes in nothing but science and calls himself a nihilist. Bazarov dissects frogs, mocks art and the aristocratic manners of Arkady's uncle Pavel, and ends up fighting a duel with him, until he falls in love with a cool, intelligent widow and discovers feelings his theories cannot explain.

Published in 1862, the novel made the word nihilist famous and angered both the older and the younger generation, who each felt caricatured. Bazarov is one of the great characters of Russian fiction, and the quarrel between parents and children it describes never goes out of date.

Ivan Turgenev (1818–1883) grew up on an estate in central Russia owned by his tyrannical mother, who controlled thousands of serfs. He studied in Berlin, and his Sportsman's Sketches, with their sympathetic portraits of serfs, made him famous; an obituary of Gogol earned him a month in detention and exile to his estate.

He spent much of his life abroad, following the singer Pauline Viardot, whom he loved for forty years, and became a friend of Flaubert and a bridge between Russian and Western literature. His novel Fathers and Sons gave the world the word nihilist.