Fathers and Sons Read online

  Turgenev began Fathers and Sons in a spell of bad weather during a stay in Ventnor on the Isle of Wight in August 1860. He did not find it an easy novel to write and was apparently evicted by his first landlady for smoking too much. Nevertheless, perhaps with the help of the sea view from his new lodgings on the Esplanade, he made progress. When he left three weeks later, he had made notes on his central protagonists, including physical characteristics and precise ages, and resolved that the action would take place in 1859. This was how his novels always began in his creative imagination: character before plot. Back in Paris that autumn, he sketched out the complete storyline. Then began the task of fleshing it out, which took place in fits and starts, between games of chess at the Café de la Regence. It is understandable why Turgenev should have only completed the first half before he left for Russia in April 1861. All that spring Turgenev and other liberals among the expatriates had been anxiously awaiting the long-expected Emancipation of the Serfs to be made official, and in his distracted state it must have been hard sometimes to concentrate on fiction. As soon as the Manifesto was published, Turgenev and others organized a service of thanksgiving in the Embassy church in Paris, and he wrote to friends that he had been reduced to tears by the ‘very clever and moving’ address given by the priest.4 Once back at his estate in Russia in May, Turgenev was able to focus again, and the first draft of Fathers and Sons was complete by the end of the summer. Next came the process of making revisions to the manuscript, on the recommendations of close friends like Pavel Annenkov and, more controversially, the editor of the journal where it would first appear – which was not The Contemporary.

  The Russian literary scene had changed significantly since Alexander II had become Tsar. As a result of the general loosening up of Russian intellectual life, Nekrasov had been able to appoint the radical critic Nikolay Chernyshevsky (1828–89) to the editorial board of The Contemporary. Both he and Alexander Dobrolyubov (1836–61), who joined the journal the following year, came from the same stock as Belinsky: they were raznochintsy, that is to say, educated members of the intelligentsia who came from non-noble stock, often being children of clergy (as in their case) or, like Belinsky, of doctors, who also occupied a low position in Russian society. They were much more extreme and dogmatic about the need for art to serve a political purpose, however. As ‘men of the sixties’ (‘shestidesyatniki’), as they came to be referred to, they were people who had come into the public arena with an expectation of being able to act. Thus they came from a new and very different generation from that of the liberal Turgenev and his contemporaries, whom they associated with the stagnant 1840s and aristocratic values, and dismissed as ineffectual idealists. The clash between these two generations is essentially the theme of Fathers and Sons and is most graphically represented in the relationship between Pavel Kirsanov and Bazarov. As a result of Nekrasov’s support of his radical younger colleagues, the left-wing political agenda of The Contemporary was now placed to the fore, at the expense of artistic criteria, and in 1858 the journal lost writers such as Turgenev, Tolstoy, Goncharov and Ostrovsky to the Moscow-based and still mildly liberal Russian Messenger (Russky vestnik). It was thus to its editor Mikhail Katkov that Turgenev submitted Fathers and Sons for its first publication in journal form, as he had already done with his most recent novel, On the Eve. When Fathers and Sons was finally published in early 1862 it filled pages 473 to 663 – Russian literary periodicals were not called ‘fat journals’ for nothing – of the February issue of Russian Messenger. Criticism from those who espoused the ideology of The Contemporary was an inevitability, but Turgenev had no idea quite how vicious it would be.

  From the beginning, Turgenev had conceived a novel which would be about modern Russia – not just about people from his own patrician milieu living in present-day Russia, as in his previous novels, but about the single-minded new social types now able to thrive in the new Russia of Alexander II. In his young country doctor Bazarov, on whom all the post-publication controversy centred, Turgenev created the first fictional raznochinets. Bazarov is typical of his class in finding the old nobility irrelevant, and has no compunction about showing his lack of respect for those senior to him. Breathing life into a character whose beliefs (about the value of art, for example) were sometimes antithetical to his own was a courageous endeavour on Turgenev’s part. It is striking, for example, that the raznochintsy were of no artistic interest to the aristocratic and egocentric Tolstoy, who had entered the literary arena some ten years earlier, nearly a decade after Turgenev, and who continued to focus on gentry and peasants in his fiction. The barriers between social classes in Russia’s highly segregated society were now beginning to break down, but Turgenev was in the vanguard where the depiction of this process in literature was concerned. Even more courageous was his desire to turn Bazarov into a real hero, which went against the grain of the profiles of the flawed male protagonists of previous Russian novels (such as Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time and Goncharov’s Oblomov). With a nod to the ironic title of Lermontov’s earlier masterpiece, Turgenev declared Bazarov to be truly ‘a hero of our time’, behind whom it is hard not to see the shadow of the inspirational Belinsky (who was, of course, also a humble doctor’s son). But creating his character proved fiendishly difficult, and involved keeping a diary in his name and imagining his reactions to various contemporary issues. The ‘men of the 1860s’ would in time become instantly recognizable, but at the beginning of the decade it is understandable that Turgenev could only intuitively feel the contours of this new personality. With hindsight it is difficult to appreciate the challenge he faced in creating a three-dimensional character proud to call himself a ‘nihilist’: Bazarov, after all, is still really only a prototype. As Turgenev wrote to the poet Sluchevsky in April 1862, while the furore about the novel was at its height, ‘I dreamed of a tall, dark, wild figure, half grown out of the ground, who was strong, angry, and honest, but still doomed to perish because of standing only on the threshold of the future’. It is not surprising that Turgenev should mention in the same breath that he imagined Bazarov as a ‘strange offshoot of Pugachev’, the leader of the Cossack uprising against Catherine the Great, for, as he explains earlier in the letter, ‘if he is called a nihilist, you should read that as revolutionary’.5 This is certainly how the great anarchist Mikhail Bakunin (a friend to Turgenev during his milder student days in Berlin) understood Bazarov, exhorting Alexander Herzen in 1866 to appreciate the energy and strong will of the radical Russian youth. As a pronounced Anglomane, Turgenev’s editor Mikhail Katkov may well have bridled at the portrayal of Bazarov’s foppish opponent Pavel Kirsanov but he was truly shocked by Bazarov’s ‘force, power, superiority over the crowd’.6 Katkov’s relations with Chernyshevsky and the editorial team at The Contemporary had become increasingly antagonistic since the late 1850s, and now here was Turgenev seemingly wanting to celebrate the enemy! ‘Even if Bazarov has not been raised to an apotheosis,’ Katkov wrote to Turgenev, ‘you have to admit, he has somehow managed to end up on a very high pedestal. He really does crush everything around him. Every thing before him is either worn out rags, or feeble and green.’7 Katkov insisted Turgenev introduce revisions to the novel’s manuscript to render Bazarov’s portrait less positive, but in so doing probably only fomented the critical storm which greeted the novel upon its publication.

  The terms of the Emancipation Act the previous year had dissatisfied all sections of Russian society, leading to a wave of demonstrations and arrests. Simultaneously, the introduction of ill-conceived university reforms prompted widespread student protests in October 1861, particularly among those raznochintsy who could not afford to pay the new obligatory fees and objected to compulsory attendance at lectures. The twenty-four-year-old Dobrolyubov had entitled his review of On the Eve for The Contemporary the previous year ‘When Will the Real Day Come?’, and there were huge expectations among the revolutionary youth that Turgenev’s new novel would finally deliver
an unequivocal positive hero on whom they could project their hopes and dreams. By March 1862, when the novel was published, Dobrolyubov was no longer around to express their sense of betrayal at Bazarov dying, since he himself had died of tuberculosis a few months earlier. (Interestingly, Turgenev’s character notes from the Isle of Wight reveal that Bazarov was in fact partly modelled on Dobrolyubov, whom he respected.) In his stead, another critic wrote a withering review, claiming that Turgenev had ridiculed Russian youth through his character of Bazarov. The young generation certainly felt that the portrait of Bazarov was, in Turgenev’s words, ‘an insulting caricature, a slanderous lampoon’.8 Chernyshevsky, meanwhile, had been put under police surveillance for writing illegal anti-government tracts and inciting the peasants to revolt. In July 1862, a few weeks after the government had succeeded in shutting down The Contemporary, he was arrested and imprisoned in the St Peter and Paul Fortress. Instead of reviewing Fathers and Sons, he wrote an inflammatory riposte in the form of his revolutionary novel What Is to Be Done?, which was smuggled out of prison and published in 1863.

  The American scholar and diplomat Eugene Schuyler, who produced the first English translation of Fathers and Sons in 1867 (and met Turgenev later that year en route to become US consul in Moscow), summarized well the general reaction to the novel in his foreword:

  A tempest was raised in Russia by its appearance; passionate criticisms, calumnies, and virulent attacks abounded… Each generation found the picture of the other very life-like, but their own very badly drawn. The fathers protested, and the sons were enraged to see themselves personified in the positive Bazarof… Of course the more the book was abused, the more it was read. Its success has been greater than that of any other Russian book.9

  The publication of Fathers and Sons was indeed a sensation, and not just in the Russian literary world. The novel was discussed all over the country, and according to one of Turgenev’s contemporaries even caused a stir in sleepy provincial towns like Lenin’s home town of Simbirsk, where no book had apparently ever made any kind of impact. As Avdotya Panayeva records in her memoirs, it was read even by those who had not picked up a book since leaving school. Daughters threatened their parents they would become nihilists if they were not bought new frocks and taken to balls, while the government condemned the doctrine of ‘nihilism’ as seditious. It was recommended that young men should be forbidden from appearing in public with long hair and dark-blue spectacles, while young women should be prohibited from appearing in public with short hair, and without chignons and crinolines.

  In his 1917 study of Turgenev, Edward Garnett describes the novelist’s many critics as a ‘crowd of critical gnats dancing airily around the great master and eagerly driving their little stings into his flesh’.10 Turgenev definitely was stung by the vehemence of the attacks, so much so that when Fathers and Sons came to be published as a separate book (by an old-believer merchant and philanthropist who had set up his own company in Moscow, every other publisher having shied away), he thought at first he should add a foreword to try and explain what he had set out do. In the end he explained in his brief introduction that he had resolved the novel should speak for itself and declared that he had not changed his views. As he wrote to Sluchevsky in April 1862, ‘My entire tale is directed against the nobility as the leading class.’11 Thus he could in ‘clear conscience’ place on the title page the name of his ‘unforgettable’ friend Belinsky. Towards the end of the 1860s, however, Turgenev wrote a short essay on his novel as part of his Literary Reminiscences, in which he recounted the experience of being attacked on all sides – and was criticized on all sides for that too.

  In truth, because Turgenev was an artist and not a pamphleteer, Bazarov emerges as a contradictory and ambivalent figure, but this is of course precisely why he succeeds as a literary character, and why his creator exhorted readers to love him despite his ‘coarseness, heartlessness, pitiless dryness and sharpness’.12 As Turgenev later conceded in a letter to Annenkov, it was likely ‘no author really understands what he is doing. There is a sort of contradiction here, which you yourself can never resolve, however you approach it.’13

  Rosamund Bartlett

  NOTES

  1 Nikolay Mikhailovsky, ‘Iz “Pisem postoronnyago” (stat’ya po povodu smerti Turgeneva)’, in P. Pertsov, ed., O Turgeneve: russkaya i inostrannaya kritika 1818–1918 (Moscow: Kooperativnoe izdatel’stvo, 1918), p. 61.

  2 Isaiah Berlin, ‘Vissarion Belinsky’, Russian Thinkers (Harmonds-worth: Penguin, 1979), p. 152.

  3 Ivan Turgenev, ‘Instead of an Introduction’, Turgenev’s Literary Reminiscences and Autobiographical Fragments, tr. David Magarshack, with an essay by Edmund Wilson (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), pp. 92–3.

  4 Letter to Pavel Annenkov, 22 March (3 April) 1861, I. S. Turgenev, Polnoye sobraniye sochineniyi i pisem v tridsati tomakh. Pis’ma v vosemnadtsati tomakh, 2nd revised edition, vol. 4, ed. I. A. Bityugova and S. A. Reiser (Moscow: Nauka, 1987), p. 309.

  5 Letter to Konstantin Sluchevsky, 14 (26) April 1862, cited in Roman I. S. Turgeneva ‘Ottsy i deti’ v russkoy kritike, ed. I. I. Sukhikh (Leningrad: izdatel’stvo Leningradskogo universiteta, 1986), p. 29.

  6 Description of Katkov’s response in letter from Pavel Annenkov to Turgenev, 26 September 1861, cited in V. Y. Troitsky, Kniga pokoleniy: o romane I. S Turgeneva ‘Ottsy i deti’ (Moscow: Kniga, 1979), p. 21.

  7 Ivan Turgenev, ‘Po povodu “Otysov i detey”’, Roman I. S. Turgeneva ‘Ottsy i deti’ v russkoy kritike, p. 37

  8 Letter to Ludwig Pietsch, 22 May (3 June) 1869, Polnoye sobraniye sochineniy i pisem v tridsati tomakh Pis’ma v vosemnadtsati tomakh, vol. 9, ed. N. S. Nikitina and G. V. Stepanova (Moscow: Nauka, 1995), p. 223.

  9 Eugene Schuyler, ‘Preface’ to Ivan Turgenef, Fathers and Sons, tr. Eugene Schuyler (New York: Leypoldt and Holt, 1867), p. vii.

  10 Edward Garnett, Turgenev (London: Collins, 1917), p. 20.

  11 Roman I. S. Turgeneva ‘Ottsy i deti’ v russkoy kritike, p. 27.

  12 Ibid., p. 28.

  13 Letter to Pavel Annenkov, 1 January 1870 (20 December 1869), Polnoye sobraniye sochineniy i pisem v tridsati tomakh. Pis’ma v vosemnadtsati tomakh, vol. 10, ed. L. N. Nazarova and G. A. Time (Moscow: Nauka, 1994), p. 102.

  Further Reading

  The standard edition of Turgenev’s Russian text is the Soviet Academy of Sciences Complete Collected Works, I. S. Turgenev, Polnoye sobraniye sochineniy, Sochineniya, vol. 8 (Moscow and Leningrad, 1960–68; 2nd complete revised edition, Sochineniya, vol. 7, Moscow, 1981). In Turgenev’s Literary Reminiscences and Autobiographical Fragments (tr. David Magarshack, London, 1959) he expounds his literary credo; this translation has the bonus of an introductory essay by Edmund Wilson. Ivan Turgenev, Letters (ed. A. V. Knowles, London, 1983) is a useful selection. Alexander Herzen, My Past and Thoughts (tr. Constance Garnett, rev. Humphrey Higgens, introduced by Isaiah Berlin, London, 1968) presents Turgenev’s intellectual context. Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution (tr. Francis Haskell, London, 1960) explores the radical political ideas of the time. The Norton Critical Edition of Fathers and Sons by Michael R. Katz (New York, 1995) adds a selection of Turgenev’s own comments on the novel and of contemporary and more recent criticism, including Isaiah Berlin’s stimulating Romanes Lecture of 1970, ‘Fathers and Children: Turgenev and the Liberal Predicament’. The best biography of Turgenev is Leonard Schapiro’s Turgenev: His Life and Times (Oxford, 1978). April FitzLyon’s The Price of Genius (London, 1964), a biography of the singer Pauline Viardot, the love of Turgenev’s life, is also interesting. Among works of criticism see V. S. Pritchett’s The Gentle Barbarian: The Life and Work of Turgenev (London, 1977); also Richard Freeborn, Turgenev: The Novelist’s Novelist (Oxford, 1960) and Frank F. Seeley, Turgenev: A Reading of His Fiction (Cambridge, 1991).