What is Fathers and Sons About and Why Should I Care? More importantly, though, the novel exposes parents and children to the vantage point of the other, and by doing so, creates the possibility of empathy. Parents relate to Nikolai Petrovich attempting to understand his son, and children relate to Arkady and Bazarov trying to surpass their fathers. Of course, what has made his novel last is not just that it is a piece of Russian history, but that it has universal appeal. His personal struggle to understand what it meant to be a Russian circa 1860 was so well articulated that it became his country's. He took upon himself a role that not too many modern novelists are even ambitious enough to attempt: national elegist. What this means is that Turgenev's carefully crafted fiction has become part of the historical record. Any discussion of the growing liberalism of Russia, the move to emancipate the serfs in 1861, the anger and radicalism of the younger Russian generation, feels somehow abstract without Turgenev. It's almost impossible to speak of mid-nineteenth-century Russian history without a reference to Turgenev's novel. The book is a fantastic piece of literature, but one might argue that it has become even more than that.

Turgenev's goal is to depict the lives of his characters as carefully as he can, not to transmit a political message. Put another way, ideology takes a back seat to art. He refuses to come down on one side or another, to offer a dogmatic bottom line.

It is, in a sense, a testament to the success of Turgenev's novel. In short, both groups went to the book and wanted to see their own opinions and beliefs right there on the page, but neither found them.

Radical Russians read the book and were convinced that he was caricaturing the younger generation. Conservative Russians read Turgenev's book and thought that he was glorifying nihilism through the character of Bazarov. When Fathers and Sons was released, however, it created a scandal that broke like a thunderstorm right over Turgenev's head. Both Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky were admirers of Turgenev, and one could argue that his little book did a great deal to open up the landscape that those two later authors would plow. In its realism and its careful depiction of the rise of nihilism (a philosophy that takes no principle whatsoever for granted everything is open to question), it anticipates the great Russian novels of the second half of the nineteenth century.

Fathers and Sons, published in 1862, was more than a breakout novel for Ivan Turgenev it was a breakout novel for Russian literature as a whole.

Fathers and sons ivan