zaddies and they kids

turgenev-pilled and loving it

image: made with DALL E

Hello friends—

A couple weeks ago, I read a new translation of Turgenev’s Father’s and Children, which you probably know as Fathers and Sons. I first read the novel a long time ago, as a young person who had recently taken to reading too much Sartre and Camus. I wanted to impress my French professor both with my ability to read French and also with the casual ease of my disaffection with life. He congratulated me on being able to read French, but he was not interested in my disaffection, at least not in the way that I had hoped he would be—sexually, I mean. Anyway, that semester, I spent a lot of time hanging out with people who smoked and drank, talking coolly about how empty the world was, and reading Beckett plays. When I first landed on Fathers and Sons as it was then known to me, I bounced off. I found it boring and not icy enough. Sentimental, I remember thinking, though I don’t think I knew what that word meant.

Coming back to the novel in my thirties and with genuine disaffection in my heart and no longer with any intentions to seduce French professors, I found that I really loved it both for the clarity and beauty of the sentences and also for its warmth. I’ve become one of those tiresome people who are moved by human feeling and clear language in a novel. It really does seem harder to write earnestly and directly about characters who have emotions and motivations. Harder to write a novel that is powered by the pitch and frequency of feeling and self-knowledge than it is to write a novel that is powered by, I don’t know, dull descriptions of contemporary alienation rendered in icily lyrical sentences. That is a false dichotomy, I am well aware. Don’t get all angry and tweet about it. I’m just thinking through my own responses to this novel and to other novels I have recently read.

Fathers and Children is about, well, fathers and their children, which is to say that it is a novel about the mutual dissatisfactions and misunderstandings that must necessarily occur between generations. Particularly in a society that has recently undergone social and political change. It is set in 19th century Russia, where the old class system is showing its age and fissures. There are the fathers, the Liberals, who believe that tradition can be salvaged and reformed, that the old ways of life can be made to serve the universal and common good, achieved through an education in the arts, sciences, and literature. A kind of standard Enlightenment humanism. And their sons, the Nihilists, who believe that there can be no reconciliation with the old ways and that everything must be broken down and swept aside to make way for the future. And in the background, of course, one has the true Conservatives, who believe that the West must be rejected in order to save Russia and return it to its true self.

These conflicts are immediately familiar in a broad morphological way. We recognize the relevant parties through analogy to our own moment and perhaps in our personal histories as well. Don’t all young people, upon realizing that the game is fixed and that our government is a scam, turn to cold, jaded cynicism and then full-throated fiery “burn it all down” anarchism before settling somewhere into liberal bourgeois comfort and then, in later life, a final betraying turn to conservatism? I mean, obviously, not everyone, but some people do. Many people do. Ask your parents.

This ideological conflict also describes a tension between historical frames. It is a conflict about the scale at which history occurs: the immediate, the medium term, the eternal. Of course, the joke is that history doesn’t happen at all. History is itself just a narrative frame made of events and interpretations of events. So I guess maybe it would be more accurate to say that the Nihilists, the Liberals, and the Slavophile Conservatives are really arguing about the speed at which change should occur within society and how much. The Nihilists want everything and now. The Liberals a little now, slightly more a little later, and slightly more than that a little later still. And the Slavophiles want change, but in the backward direction, and the change the want is a totalizing change, reverting the whole of society to an earlier stage of its development.

I find it all very interesting. Anyway.

Turgenev moves these ideological conflicts out of the abstract and into the domain where he shines: the drama of personal relationships. Here, the Kirsanov brothers, in their forties and fifties, typify the landed liberal elite. The younger generation, represented by the recently graduated Arkady and his friend Bazarov, are Nihilists. Immediately, there is conflict between Bazarov and the Kirsanov brothers, particularly Pavel Petrovich.

But before all of the conflict, we get one of those great Russian openings:

“Well, Piotr, no sight of them yet?”

It was the twentieth of May 1859. A gentleman in his forties appeared on the low doorstep of the inn just off the highway. Bareheaded, wearing a dusty coat and checked trousers, he was addressing his servant, a chubby-faced youth with a sparse pale beard and small blank eyes.

In just a few sentences we already know quite a lot. That this man is in his 40s, has a servant, but perhaps not a great deal of money. That he is bareheaded tells us that is a little absent-minded. Then we get to hear about Piotr, the servant.

Everything about this servant—the turquoise ring in his ear, the streaky pomaded hair, the courtly gestures—everything, in short, bespoke a member of the polished new generation. He cast a condescending eye over the road, and replied, “No, sir, no sight of them.”

It's a bit of a magic trick this opening because it deftly sets up the thematic conflict that will come to be the novel’s core. Already, we can see how the young are apt to view Nikolai Petrovich and his generation. We also come to understand the self-expressive individuality that defines this new generation, but also their reliance on external signifiers. The ring, the hair, the affected manners. Another thing I find interesting about Piotr is that he is doing an impression of Pavel Petrovich, which will only become clear later when we have met him.

At any rate, the introductions continue, and we find out a little more about the living situation of Nikolai Petrovich:

His name is Nikolai Petrovich Kirsanov. He owns a good estate ten miles from the inn—an estate of two hundred souls, or (as he now puts it, having shared the land out with his peasants and set up a “farm”) five thousand acres of land.

Here is another early clue as to what the novel’s concerns will be in the end. At first, it is an estate, but then we get the clarifying aside in his own words more or less that it is now a ‘farm’ with the land having been shared out. To me, the sentence is remarkable because it demonstrates not only the economic and social ‘progression’ in Russia at that moment, going from estate to ‘farm,’ but it also captures some of the attitude about this so-called progress because it puts the ‘farm’ into parenthesis. You can almost hear him gently correct himself, amused at this new-fangled way of thinking, before going on with the point he was making, as if the new system has not quite settled. And all that in one sentence!

Then we get the long history of the Kirsanov brothers, particularly Nikolai, culminating in the set of events that have brought him to be waiting for his son outside in 1859:

In 1847 Kiranov’s wife died. The blow almost felled him: his hair turned gray over a few weeks. He planned to go abroad to take his mind off things . . . but this was 1848, and travel was unthinkable. He had no choice but to return to his country estate, and after quite a long period of idleness he conceived the idea of improving his property. In 1855 he took his son off to university, spent three winters with him in Petersburg, scarcely leaving the house but trying to get to know Arkady’s fellow students. The winter after that, he was unable to come, and here we see him in May 1859, already gray-haired, stout, and slightly bent, as he waits for his son to arrive—now a university graduate as he himself had once been.

There is enough in this passage for a whole novel. His wife dying, the grief turning his hair white, the foiled plans to go abroad because, well, in 1848, the nations of Europe were, uh, violently tearing apart their social order and getting themselves un petit republic. The winters in St. Petersburg with his son, trying to get to know him, feeling alienated just the same. And then, the two of them apart for the first time really, the winter of 1858. That little bit about the missed winter becomes quite important because it is over the course of that winter that Arkady, truly free of his father for the first time in his life, has come under the spell of his fellow peers, in particular, Bazarov. You can’t help but to think that the story of the novel might not have happened if not for that missed winter. For a couple reasons, both because Arkady might not have fallen in with Bazarov, but also because while Arkady was in St. Petersburg, Nikolai Petrovich was at home. Doing what, you might wonder. WELL. We will get to that. But had he not been doing those things over the winter 1858, the other half of the novel’s events might not have come to pass either. It’s all rather elegantly composed.

Then, Arkady arrives, and we get this really lovely response from Nikolai Petrovich to close the first chapter:

Nikolai Petrovich sprang up and stared out at the road. A carriage appeared with three post-horses harnessed abreast; in the carriage he glimpsed a student’s cap band and the familiar outline of the face he loved.

“Arkasha! Arkasha!” cried Kirsanov, breaking into a run and waving his arms. Moments later his lips were pressed to the dusty, sunburned, beardless cheek of the young graduate.

Perhaps I am sentimental, but I found this really moving. I feel like I’ve spent the last several years writing about difficult, brutal families. Also reading about difficult, brutal families. And it was nice to be reminded that people do sometimes love each other. I think in the 19th Century and into the early bit of the 20th Century, it was still possible to believe that people could love each other. That they could express this love. That one could depict this expression in art without fear. Indeed, that one must depict this expression of love in art if one is to be a real artist. That to express love in art is not the enemy of complexity or thought. I don’t know, I found it really affecting, but perhaps that is because I am so poisoned by the late capitalist alienation that has become the default aesthetic and emotional framework of contemporary life. Also because no one hugged me as a child.

What I will say about this moment in the novel is that captures Nikolay’s perspective of his son. Here, he is Arkasha. He is beardless, sunburned, dusty from travel. He is like a child still. He does not speak or answer back. What matters is Nikolai Petrovich’s profession of feeling. Directed outward at his son. It is for that reason that when the next chapter opens with Arkady’s response, you get the sense of the novel handing the baton over to the young men and Nikolai Petrovich must reconfigure his understanding of his son not merely as a boy but as now a grown man, a peer, an equal in a sense:

“Do let me shake off this dust, Papa,” said Arkady cheerfully, answering his father’s endearments in a resonant young voice, a little hoarse from his journey. “I’ll get you all dirty.”

“Never mind, never mind,” repeated Nikolai Petrovich with a loving smile, patting his son’s overcoat collar and his own coat a couple of times. “Let’s have a look at you, let’s have a look,” he went on, stepping back, and then immediately hurried over to the inn, calling out, “This way, this way, and let’s have the horses straightaway.”

Nikolai Petrovich seemed far more agitated than his son—in fact he seemed slightly at a loss, even shy. Arkady stopped him.

The doting father! So excited! Arkady letting him fuss a little, but also, gently taking control of the situation because he isn’t here just to be spoken at, after all. Not merely here to be groomed and kissed. But also, not not here for those reasons, after all, he is an only son. Much beloved and looked after. However, Arkady doesn’t want his friend Bazarov to get the idea that he is not totally committed to their Nihilist beliefs. So his stopping his father is a two-fold gesture. The way that when you bring someone new around people who have known you for your whole life, you have to perform two selves. That old self and the new self who you have been trying on for size. That first time you’re home again on your own terms after you’ve discovered something crucial about yourself, and you’re subjected to all the old pressures to conform to who you used to be even as you have new convictions that you want to try out on everyone.

At the estate (the ‘farm’), we meet Pavel Petrovich—brother to Nikolai and uncle to Arkady—in this incredible introduction:

“Yes, I need to clean myself up,” replied Arkady, moving toward the door. But just at that moment there came into the room a man of medium height dressed in a dark English suit, a fashionable low cravat, and kid shoes. This was Pavel Petrovich Kirsanov. He looked about forty-five; his short-cropped gray hair shone with a dark luster like new silver; his face, bilious-looking but unwrinkled, was finely and delicately chiseled, with uncommonly regular and clean lines. He must once have been extremely handsome. His clear, dark, almond- shaped eyes were particularly fine. The whole person of Arkady’s uncle, with its aristocratic elegance, had preserved its youthful grace and that striving upward from the ground which generally disappears after one’s twenties.

Pavel Petrovich withdrew his shapely hand with its long pink fingernails from his trouser pocket—it looked even more beautiful against the snowy whiteness of his sleeve, fastened with a single large opal—and offered it to his nephew. After first giving him a European handshake, he kissed him three times in the Russian manner—that is, he touched Arkady’s cheeks three times with his scented mustache—and said, “Welcome.”

Pavel Petrovich makes quite the striking contrast to his brother both in dress and in affect. Here he is in his English suit with his fragrant mustache and fine dark eyes. His clean hands, the white sleeves, the delicately maintained nails, the opal, the European manners. Here is a man of the elite, a true representative of its values unlike the rumpled figure cut by Nikolai Petrovich. We get some of Bazarov’s immediate dislike when he later says:

“He’s an odd fish, that uncle of yours,” said Bazarov, sitting in his dressing gown by Arkady’s bedside and puffing at a short pipe. “What a dandy, in the depths of the countryside! Those fingernails, those fingernails—he should get them framed!”

“Of course, you don’t know,” answered Arkady, “but he was quite a lion in his day. I’ll tell you his story sometime. He used to be very handsome, women went crazy over him.”

“Well there you are! It’s all for old time’s sake, then. Sadly there’s nobody out here for him to fascinate. I couldn’t take my eyes off him. He has such amazing collars, they look as if they’re made of marble, and then that perfectly shaved chin! Honestly, Arkady Nikolayich, it’s a bit ridiculous, isn’t it?”

“I suppose so. But he’s an excellent man all the same.”

“A museum piece! But your father’s a fine chap. Wastes his time reading poetry and hasn’t a clue about managing his estate, but he’s a good sort.”

“My father’s a wonderful man.”

“Have you noticed how shy he is?”

Arkady nodded—as if he himself wasn’t shy.

“A strange business,” Bazarov went on, “these elderly romantics!

They work up their nervous systems to a pitch of excitability—and that throws them off-balance. Anyway, I’m off. My room has an English washstand, though the door won’t shut. All the same, that’s something to be encouraged—an English washstand, that’s progress!”

I love this passage for a few different reasons. Perhaps most obviously is how funny it is. Bazarov has the curt, dismissive attitude of the recently educated snob. He finds the idea of a dandy in the country ridiculous, something to be made fun of, because, well, who is Kirsanov trying to impress? It’s the country! He sees it as an example of the pointless affectations of the liberal elite. They spend all their time grooming and putting on European airs and notions of “liberty” while affecting no real material change in the lives of the people they rule over. He’s roasting them! I mean, it’s hilarious. And poor Arkady is trying to mediate while also preserving face in front of his friend.

The other thing I love about the passage is that it concretizes many of the conflicts of the novel. Bazarov considers the Kirsanov brothers to be romantics and therefore pointless. There’s an English washstand, but the door doesn’t close. So yes, the conflict between the liberals and the nihilists, but also the conflict between Bazarov and Arkady. Bazarov is hardline while Arkady is more moderate. In the same way, Pavel Petrovich is hardline while Nikolai is more moderate. The novel is richer for this because the characters end up arguing with people who are more or less on their “side,” revealing all the ways that there are no true dichotomies in life. There are only individual points of view and interpretations of ideology.

Another of my favorite moments in the novel is the first argument over nihilism at breakfast. We’ve already established that Pavel Petrovich and Bazarov do not like each other, and here Pavel is needling his young nephew by inquiring about what he and his friend Bazarov believe:

“No, it isn’t the same. A nihilist is someone who doesn’t bow to any authority, who doesn’t take a single principle on trust, no matter how much that principle is revered—”

“So, and is that a good thing?” interrupted Pavel Petrovich.

“It depends, uncle dear. It’s good for some people, and very bad for others.”

“Indeed. Well, I can see that this is not in our line. We old-timers, we believe that without principes” (Pavel Petrovich gave the word a soft French pronunciation, while Arkady spoke of “principles” with the accent on the first syllable) “which are accepted on trust, as you put it, one can’t move a step or draw a breath. Vous avez changé tout cela; God send you good health and a general’s rank, while we look on and admire you, messieurs . . . what was it again?”

“Nihilists,” said Arkady distinctly.

“Yes. Once upon a time there were Hegelists, and now there are nihilists. Let’s see how you manage to exist in a vacuum, in space. But now, brother Nikolai Petrovich, would you please ring the bell, it’s time for my chocolate.”

Eventually, Bazarov joins them after having spent the morning foraging for creatures to use in his medical experiments.

“What have you there—leeches?” asked Pavel Petrovich.

“No, frogs.”

“To eat or to breed?”

“Experiment,” said Bazarov indifferently, and went indoors.

“So he’ll be cutting them up,” remarked Pavel Petrovich. “He doesn’t believe in principes, but he believes in frogs.”

When Bazarov returns to the table, the grilling resumes:

“Your modesty is most admirable,” pronounced Pavel Petrovich, straightening up and leaning his head back. “But how is it, as Arkady Nikolayich was just telling us, that you don’t recognize any authorities? You don’t believe in them?”

“Why on earth should I recognize them? What am I supposed to believe in? If someone tells me a truth, I agree with it; that’s all.”

They go back and forth about the virtues of nihilism—if it can be said to have virtues. I am not certain about the ontology there. Fathers and Children is a tremendously talky novel. The characters are always trading quips and barbs, referencing literature, history, science, and philosophy. They argue about economics, art, music, the best way to organize one’s schedule, agricultural practices, and on. Everything element of life is a space for debate and conversation. The characters engage one another physically, it is true, but the true plane of engagement between the characters is that of conversation and argument.

They observe each other, share glances, little touching gestures, but in Turgenev’s great novel, it is language that dominates. It matters if a character say something in French. It matters if a character cannot understand French. It matters if they speak German or read German, even in translation. All of this matters because language, in the world of these characters, has a real valence and impact on their material realities. When, later in the novel, Bazarov and Arkady end up at a rich woman’s estate, what causes Bazarov to fall in love with her is that she can argue with him. The big dramatic moment in the novel is that a character does not return the confession of love of another until it is too late.

This might sound very boring to you. The idea of a novel that is mostly about people arguing and talking to one another, failing to talk to one another, but I found myself reading breathlessly because Turgenev’s dialogue is simply sublime and also because there is nothing more urgent than waiting to hear what someone will say to you. You don’t know what’s coming! How they will react to what you have said or done. How they will take up the challenge of your words.  In the case of Bazarov and Pavel Petrovich, the challenge is sometimes quite literally a challenge of a duel to the death.

There is too, a great deal of failing to say in Fathers and Children. For example, Nikolai Petrovich is able to say that he has taken a lover in the form of a young woman from the village. And that they have a child now. Arkady understands immediately what is the case and tries to get his father to express himself. But he cannot. He is too honor-bound, too ashamed, too afraid that Arkady will reject him. And so we get his shy, anxious picking around the edges until Arkady grows impatient.

“A strict moralist would find my frankness inappropriate, but firstly, the thing can’t be hidden, and secondly, you know that I’ve always had particular principles regarding openness between father and son. Of course you’re within your rights to criticize. At my age . . . Anyway, that . . . that girl that you’ve probably already heard about . . .”

“Fenichka?” asked Arkady casually.

Nikolai Petrovich blushed. “Don’t say her name so loud, please . . . Well, yes . . . she’s living with me now. I’ve moved her into the house . . . there was a pair of little rooms free. Anyway, we can change all that.”

[…]

“Really, Papa,” protested Arkady, “you seem to be apologizing—you should be ashamed of yourself!”

“It’s true, I really should be ashamed of myself,” answered Nikolai Petrovich, growing redder and redder.

“Stop it, Papa, please, do me a favor, stop it!” Arkady gave him a loving smile. “What’s he apologizing for?” he thought to himself, giving way to a feeling of indulgent tenderness toward his kind, gentle father, mingled with a sense of hidden superiority. “Do stop,” he repeated once more, reveling despite himself in the knowledge that he himself was so free and emancipated.

Also, there is the matter of Pavel Petrovich being madly in love with the young woman with whom his brother has fathered a child. And he is unable to say anything about it. It is too painful, would be too complicated. And yet we know that Nikolai Petrovich suspects something. Why else does he ask, “Has my brother been here?” when he enters to find Fenichka in her rooms? He suspects that there is something unsaid about the relationship between the two, but it would be inappropriate to say anything.

There’s also this really beautiful moment after Bazarov has been rejected and he’s trying to rework the situation into one that he can survive. When he speaks to Arkady, using decidedly un-Nihilistic language:

“Yes,” began Bazarov, “human beings are strange creatures. If you take a look from one side, from a distance, at the dumb existence they lead, these ‘fathers’ of ours, you might think—what could be better? Eat, drink, and know that you’re behaving in the most correct and sensible manner there is. But no—you’ll be eaten up with boredom. You want to have doings with other people; even if it’s only to swear at them, you want to be in among them.”

My heart!

Or, in the last beautiful pages of the novel, when Bazarov says his last words:

“Goodbye,” he said with sudden burst of energy, and a last sparkle in his eyes. “Goodbye...Listen...I never kissed you that time... Blow on the dying lamp, and let it go out . . .”

Anna Sergeyevna laid her lips on his brow.

“That’s enough!” he said, sinking back on his pillow. “Now... darkness . . .”

It’s remarkable to me that in the end, Bazarov is kind of a romantic, though an unsentimental one. There’s this really great death-bed speech where he talks about how he’s just a dude and his death means nothing. Yet, at the very end, a kiss from the woman he loves and who spurned him, is enough to make him say Enough! Almost as if he’s afraid that the sweetness of it will make him want to live in the face of not being able to. I ended up feeling quite heartsick for Bazarov. I recognized myself in his fate.

I think there are a lot of reasons to read Fathers and Children. The writing is simply very good. In the new translation I read, it was lively, funny, wry, and very lucid. Turgenev writes sublime scenes of conversation and life. There’s also a great deal of philosophy here. The arguments how we ought to live, what a meaningful life can be, how we come to love in the way we love. But I think the greatest accomplishment of the novel is that it manages to be simultaneously a novel of ideas, a novel of consciousness, and a mimetic novel of life. It moves the way a bourgeois mimetic novel might move—scenes, actions described, physical details, etc—but always carrying alongside it a rich, interior pulse of ideas that is not merely mimetic on its surface, but it captures some of the inner transits of conscious life. Also, it is so funny. Please read it!

B