A word enters the language at a breakfast table.
"What is Bazarov?" Arkady looked amused. "Shall I tell you what he really is, Uncle?" "Please do, nephew." "He is a nihilist." "A what?" Nikolai Petrovich asked, while Pavel Petrovich stopped dead, his knife with a dab of butter on the tip arrested in mid-air.
The butter on the knife is why Turgenev is Turgenev. A generation is being announced, and what the novelist watches is a middle-aged gentleman's hand stopping in the air above his toast.
Fathers and Sons was published in 1862, the year after the emancipation of the serfs, and it did something very few novels have done: it named a political type that did not yet know it had a name, and the type took the name up. Within months "nihilist" was in the newspapers, in the police reports, and in the mouths of the young men it was supposed to describe. No Russian novel has ever been fought over harder, and the fight began at once — Pisarev in Russkoye Slovo claiming Bazarov as the portrait of a new man, Antonovich in Sovremennik denouncing the book as a slander on the younger generation. Both were reviewing the same pages.
This Progress volume, in the Russian Classics Series, carries two novels: Fathers and Sons (1862) and A Nest of the Gentry (1859). Both are translated by Bernard Isaacs and illustrated by Konstantin Rudakov. The copyright leaf records a first printing in 1951 and this second printing in 1974 — a translation already twenty-three years old when it was reissued, which is worth knowing, since Isaacs's English has the slightly starched quality of the early fifties and renders Bazarov's slang more politely than Turgenev wrote it.
The jacket sells the book like this:
Today, just as a hundred years ago, readers derive an inimitable delight from Turgenev's novels... Another amazing thing is Turgenev's ability to raise his readers to a higher moral plane.
And it quotes Saltykov-Shchedrin: after reading Turgenev "one breathes more easily, believes more readily, and feels more warmly."
Note what is not there. No class, no emancipation, no 1860s, no nihilism. The most politically contested novel in Russian literature is offered to the foreign reader as a source of moral uplift and easier breathing. That is a choice, and we will come back to it, because the volume's own preface does something a great deal more interesting.
The volume opens with eleven pages headed "Ivan Turgenev", signed Yuri Mann — a real scholar, best known for his work on Gogol, and not a hack. What he does in his first paragraph is the most sophisticated move this series has yet met in a commissioned preface.
He begins with Turgenev's own statement of method:
"...To achieve a reproduction of the truth, the reality of life accurately and powerfully is the greatest happiness for a writer, even if this truth does not coincide with his own sympathies."
And then Mann:
This statement was not just a declaration, for in striving for the truth Turgenev sometimes came up against his "own sympathies" — both political and social — and overcame them.
Readers of this series should recognise that immediately, because it is Engels. In the 1888 letter to Margaret Harkness, Engels argued that Balzac — a legitimist, a monarchist, a man whose sympathies lay entirely with the doomed aristocracy — nonetheless "was compelled to go against his own class sympathies and political prejudices", saw "the necessity of the downfall of his favourite nobles", and described them "as people deserving no better fate". That, said Engels, "I consider one of the greatest triumphs of Realism, and one of the grandest features in old Balzac." The writer's honesty about what he sees defeats his own politics. (The letter is in Marx and Engels On Literature and Art, also reissued in this series, where a reader can check the argument at its source.) Lukács built a career on the idea. It is a genuine and powerful piece of Marxist criticism, and Mann deploys it properly rather than decoratively.
Applied to Turgenev it does real work. He was a liberal gentleman of the landowning class, a Westerniser, temperamentally appalled by the young men of the 1860s — and he produced in Bazarov a figure so much larger than his author's distaste that the radicals claimed him. Mann is entitled to the argument and makes it well.
So this introduction is not going to complain that the preface is crude. It is going to ask what the argument leaves out, which is a different thing.
Here is Mann on why Bazarov achieves nothing:
Bazarov was by no means against the progressive ideas of his time, as some readers imagined. But the standards he set were so high and his nature was so restless that he was always finding himself in the position of a maximalist whom no concrete political slogans could satisfy: neither the liberal's hope in reforms (he saw the narrowness and emptiness of liberalism), nor the idea of peasant communes (he saw what was behind this, and knew that a commune was anything but a cell of socialism, as the Utopists believed), nor enlightening propaganda (which he considered insufficient). Maximalism doomed Bazarov to idleness.
Read that carefully, because it is doing something under cover of praising him.
Every rejection Mann lists is correct. Liberal reform was narrow; the peasant commune was not a cell of socialism, and the Populists who thought it was were wrong; propaganda alone was insufficient. Bazarov is right about all three, and Mann concedes it. Then the conclusion: "Maximalism doomed Bazarov to idleness." His failure is attributed to his nature — to being a maximalist, restless, pitched too high.
But the reason a man in Russia in 1859 who had correctly rejected liberalism, the commune and mere propaganda had nothing left to do was not his temperament. It was that the thing he needed did not yet exist. There was no organised working class in Russia in 1859 and no party; there were a few hundred students, some émigré printing presses, and the peasantry. Bazarov is idle because history had not yet supplied the instrument, and Turgenev — to his enormous credit — shows exactly that and refuses to invent one.
To call this maximalism is to make a political vacancy into a personality defect. And the reason a Soviet preface of 1974 might prefer the psychological explanation is not hard to see: the historical one raises the question of what a revolutionary is to do when no instrument exists, which is a question with a considerable afterlife.
There is one more sentence of Mann's worth holding up, because it gives the whole game away in parentheses:
As though to prove to the revolutionary youth how unbiased he was (and actually suppressing his class prejudices and sympathies) Turgenev readily and with great feeling portrayed revolutionaries...
Actually suppressing his class prejudices. The Engels argument says the writer's honesty defeats his sympathies without his intending it — that is what makes it a triumph of realism rather than a change of mind. Mann's parenthesis converts it into something Turgenev did deliberately, which is a claim about his politics rather than his art, and a much weaker one. The apparatus cannot quite leave the writer alone with his own achievement.
He is named four hundred and seventy-six times, and he is one of the few characters in fiction who genuinely changed how people behaved.
His creed arrives in pieces, thrown across drawing rooms. On art: "A decent chemist is twenty times more useful than any poet." On the Russian people, to Arkady, who has just accused him of a bad opinion of them:
"What's the odds! The one good thing about the Russian is the rotten opinion he has of himself. What really matters is that two and two make four, the rest is nonsense."
That is not a line a Soviet edition would have chosen for its jacket. It is also, as anyone who has read Russian nineteenth-century literature knows, uncomfortably well observed.
And then the sentence everything else hangs on. Arkady, gazing at fields in low evening sun, asks whether nature is nonsense too:
"Yes, nature is nonsense, too, in the way you understand it. Nature's not a temple but a workshop, and man in it is a workman."
It is the most famous sentence Turgenev wrote and it became a slogan for two generations — printed on posters, quoted in engineering schools, set as an examination question. What is almost never quoted is what Turgenev does with the next line. A cello starts up in the house:
Somebody was playing feelingly, if inexpertly, Schubert's Expectations, and the sweet melody floated silver-toned on the air. "What's that?" Bazarov said in amazement. "It's my father."
The workshop is announced, and the temple answers from an upstairs window, badly played, by a decent middle-aged man. Turgenev does not adjudicate. He simply puts the cello immediately after the slogan and lets the reader hold both. That is the novel's method throughout, and it is why both sides could claim it in 1862.
There is a duel in Fathers and Sons, between Bazarov the nihilist and Pavel Petrovich the Anglophile dandy, and it is the most quietly devastating thing in the book because neither man is allowed to be ridiculous alone.
Pavel Petrovich, who has spent the novel defending principles, aristocracy and the necessity of form, provokes it over a servant girl and conducts it with immaculate correctness. Bazarov, who has spent the novel declaring that two and two make four and the rest is nonsense, accepts — and then, having shot the man, immediately turns doctor and dresses his wound. The materialist's professional reflex overrides his politics within seconds. The aristocrat's code survives his own blood being spilt for it.
Turgenev lets both of them keep their dignity and takes it from both of them at once. A duel in 1862 was already an anachronism and both men know it; they fight anyway, because the one has no way to express contempt except through the forms he despises and the other has nothing left but forms. Neither position survives contact with the other, and the novel does not tell you which loses.
This is where an introduction from our tradition has to be careful. It is tempting to read the duel as the aristocracy's obsolescence, and it is that. But Turgenev gives Bazarov no better instrument than a pistol either, and the scene is as hard on the negation as on the thing negated. He is not writing the funeral of one class from the standpoint of another. He is writing two men who cannot do anything with each other except shoot, in a country where nothing else was yet available.
Bazarov cuts himself dissecting a typhus case and dies of it — a death with no meaning at all, which is the point.
Turgenev gives him a last request to the woman he loves and cannot have, and then five words:
"That's all!" he murmured and sank back on his pillow. "Now ... darkness...."
And then the scene that settles what kind of writer Turgenev was. The dying atheist is given the last rites:
During the ceremony of Extreme unction, when the consecrated oil was applied to his chest, one eye opened and it seemed as though, at the sight of the priest in his vestments, the fumes of incense rising from the censer and the candles in front of the icons, something akin to a shudder of horror flitted across the livid face of the dying man.
One eye opened. The materialist is anointed while unconscious, by parents who love him, and his body objects on his behalf. Turgenev is not scoring a point for religion or against it. He is recording that a man's convictions do not protect his corpse from his family, which is true, and that the family's love is not made less by it, which is also true.
The second novel in this volume is three years older and a quieter thing altogether: Lavretsky returning from abroad to an estate, a woman he cannot marry because his wife is not dead after all, and a renunciation.
It is worth reading here for a specific reason. Written in 1859, two years before the emancipation, it is the fullest portrait Turgenev made of the class he came from — its cultivation, its uselessness, its self-knowledge — and of what that class did with its remaining time, which was mostly to feel things exquisitely. Read it before Fathers and Sons and Bazarov's contempt stops being a pose. He is looking at these people.
And the class content is not buried, whatever the jacket says about moral planes. The novel's finest single line comes when Lavretsky, in a Paris hotel, discovers that his wife has been unfaithful. What rises in him is not the injured husband of French drama. It is his pedigree:
he wanted to go to them and say: "You shouldn't have played jokes on me; my greatgrandfather used to hang the muzhiks up by their ribs, and my grandfather was a muzhik himself" — and then to kill them both.
Great-grandfather hanging serfs by the ribs; grandfather a serf. Both in one bloodline, both available as a threat, surfacing together in a rented room in Paris in front of a wife and her lover. That is the Russian gentry explaining itself in a single sentence, and it tells you more about what the emancipation was about to undo than any amount of breathing more easily.
Turgenev then does the characteristic thing. Lavretsky does not say it, does not kill anybody, writes a letter instead, and spends a paragraph pleased with a phrase he has composed. The violence stays in the bloodline where it came from, and what comes out is a well-turned sentence. Nobody has ever been harder on that class, and he was of it.
The refusal to resolve.
Fathers and Sons survives because Turgenev would not do what both his critics demanded, which was to declare. Pisarev read it and found a hero; Antonovich read it and found a libel; Mann in 1974 reads it and finds a triumph of realism over class sympathy. All three are reading a novel that declines to tell them which it is, and that declining is the achievement.
For our tradition the book is useful in a way neither the jacket's moral uplift nor the preface's Engels quite captures. Bazarov is the record of a correct negation with nothing to attach itself to — a man who saw through liberalism, populism and propaganda in 1859 and had, in consequence, nothing whatever to do. Every movement has produced such people, and what becomes of them is not a matter of temperament. It is a matter of whether there is an organisation for them to join.
Turgenev could not supply one, and had the honesty not to pretend. He gave Bazarov a scalpel cut instead, and the cello playing upstairs.