In this masterly unromantic novel, Turgenev drew a character, Bazarov,
who served to express what he taught us to call Nihilism, and made
a movement into a man. In Russia itself the effect of the story was
astonishing. The portrait of Bazarov was immediately and angrily
resented as a cold travesty. The portraits of the "backwoodsmen," or
retired aristocrats, fared no better. Turgenev had indeed roused the
ire of both sides, only too surely.
The Petrovitchs, typical figures as he designed them of the Russian
nobility, were intended he confessed to breathe "feebleness,
nonchalance, narrowness of mind." His sense of fitness made him paint
with extreme care these choice representatives of their class. They
were the pick, and if they were humanly ineffective, what of their
weaker kind? "Si la crême est mauvaise, que sera le lait?" as he
put it. The bitterest criticism came, however, from the side of the
revolutionaries and incompatibles. They felt in Turgenev the sharper
artistry and the intimate irony as if he had only used these qualities
in dealing with the specific case of Bazarov; whereas they were
temperamental effects of his narrative art. He was ready to assert
himself one of the party of youth. He was at one with Bazarov, he
declared, in nearly all his ideas, a chief exception being Bazarov's
ideas on art, which in truth are apt to be more crudely delivered than
the rest of that iconoclast's destructive opinions. Bazarov, he said
once and again, was his favourite child.
It is nearly forty years now (in 1921) since the novel appeared in
_The Russian Messenger_, a weekly which was the recognised exponent
of the new movement. That proverbial period has lent a softer cast
to the lineaments of the people in the group, as time touches the
canvas of the pictures in an old country-house gallery. But the
interesting thing is to find that history in the large has terribly and
irresistibly confirmed the history in little that Turgenev drew, with a
sure instinct, for the potential anticipations of his saga.
But we should be wrong if we mistook its clear pervading realities
for those of a tract-novel, or a document of any one particular
generation. It is as its title declares in a sense another fable of
the inevitable coil and recoil of the two generations. The sympathetic
power of Turgenev is shown in his instinctive understanding of them
both. An aristocrat by training, he was saved as Tolstoi was from
sterilising his imaginative and dramatic powers by any sense of caste
and privilege. He loved the play of human nature, knew how to reckon
with its foibles, its pride, habitual prejudices, and all tragic and
comic susceptibilities. So he drew Bazarov, as a protagonist of the
revolt against the old order and the protective habit of age. When
Bazarov enters the house of Arkady's father, he is like Don Quixote
entering the inn of his direst probation. If the parallel seems a
trifle fantastic, it was yet one that Turgenev would let pass, since he
affirmed that Don Quixote himself was, in his inimitable extravagance,
a type of the eternal spirit of revolution. And one would like, if
there were room for it, to print as preamble to _Fathers and Sons_, the
essay in which its writer has compared the deeper essentials of Hamlet
and Quixote.
We must be satisfied instead to recall the direct event of the novel,
as it falls in his own record. The present writer, some years ago,
spent a spring at Ventnor in the Isle of Wight, and found the house
on the sea-brink in which he stayed had been occupied by Turgenev at
one time. Then and there it was, in 1860 and at Ventnor, that he had
the first idea of this novel; and it is scarcely being too fanciful
to think that he imagined the home environment and the spacious vista
of the Russian provinces more fondly and more freely, because of his
being at a long remove from them in that small and confined seaside
nook of Ventnor. Already, we must remember, the liberation of the serf
had taken place; and the ferment of liberal ideas was working in the
new generation. As we look back, we see in our wisdom after the event,
having realised Turgenev for the novelist he was--an artist who was
for ever adjusting the moment to the permanent in art--that it was
inevitable he should write this book, this tragi-comedy of age and
youth, of the old order and the new, the conservating fathers and the
revolutionary sons.