Why We Should Return to Ivan Turgenev’s "Fathers and Sons"
In this essay, Sadhika Pant helps us to see why Turgenev’s fourth novel remains the most enduring portrait of Russia’s 19th-century ideological storm. More than a mere history, the novel continues to resonate as an antidote to the revolutionary spirits of today.
Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons is a novel that may find itself lost amid louder voices. It is not revolutionary enough for the radical left, nor nostalgic enough for the old guard. It is not polemic. It is not triumphant. It has a brooding quality. Yet, in an age like ours, torn between generational impatience and inherited anxiety, it reads with startling clarity. Turgenev, one of the foremost Russian novelists of the 19th century, occupied a complex position within his cultural milieu. Disillusioned by years of censorship and the persecution of writers under Nicholas I—a system whose effects lingered even after the tsar’s death in 1855—he left for Western Europe in 1856, spending most of his later life in France and Germany. He returned to Russia for only brief visits thereafter.
Educated in both Russia and Germany, he found himself caught between liberal Western ideals and the entrenched conservatism of his homeland. His life in partial exile and his role as a mediator between Russian and European literary sensibilities endowed his work with a certain psychological nuance and restraint of prose rare among his contemporaries—writers such as Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, whose novels surged with moral intensity and philosophical argument. He famously clashed with both men, their temperaments and artistic visions too different to coexist easily, though time and illness would soften these rivalries into mutual respect and eventual reconciliation. And perhaps because of that moderation, Fathers and Sons—Turgenev’s fourth novel—has aged better than many of the novels of its generation.
Timeless reading in a fleeting world.
