In “Fathers and Sons,” set in rural Russia in 1859, Turgenev gives us a highly educated young Russian named Bazarov. Bazarov is tall and strong, good looking for a Russian, and has read a lot of “German” science (that is, chemistry and biology). Young Bazarov declares himself a nihilist. That’s the term Turgenev chose for him; we might choose another term, such as “materialist,” “cynic,” or “empiricist.” Bazarov denies the reality of thoughts, desires, traditions, beliefs and emotions. He accepts only sense data as real. He acknowledges no authority and no reality except what can be seen, tasted, felt, smelt, heard, or experimentally demonstrated — in other words, the concrete. He spends his spare time dissecting beetles and frogs. The only knowledge worth having, he proclaims, is how to make money. He plans to become a doctor, so that he can make money out of selling potions.
This is the character that Turgenev winds up and sets going. It is significant that Turgenev sets his young nihilist going in the rural Russia of 1859. That was a Russia in which the winds of social change were rapidly blowing. Czar Alexander II’s emancipation of the serfs was only two years away, and many landowners were already freeing their serfs and converting their estates into rental lands, where the peasants rented land and farmed it, owing a monthly rent to their former owners. Czar Alexander considered himself an enlightened liberal for adopting this measure, but as young Bazarov could have told him, he was far behind the aspirations of the Russian intelligentsia for social reform, or even revolution. (In fact, several attempts would be made to assassinate Czar Alexander, leading up to the successful assassination by the Narodnaya Volya in 1881.) Bazarov, the young “nihilist” of 1859 already speaks arrogantly to his moderate friend Arkady in terms of “we” (the revolutionists) and “you” (the moderates).
So what happens to Bazarov the nihilist? What happens to him is just about the worst thing that could happen to a nihilist: he meets a beautiful woman. Even worse: the beautiful woman is physically attracted to him, and he to her. In his biological studies, Bazarov has already accepted the fact that there is such a thing as sexual attraction. His position is, there is biological attraction caused by hormones, and that’s all there is. There is no such thing as love. Well, poor Bazarov! In the magnetic field of a beautiful, proud, rich and independent woman every bit his equal in intelligence, he struggles like a pinned beetle.
This is all carried off by Turgenev with great economy and restraint. As we noted above, Turgenev winds up his characters, sets them going, and then sits back and merely observes them. The reader is allowed to watch almost as in a laboratory experiment what happens to these two people as they become involved with each other. Mme. Odintsov is in control throughout, and Bazarov knows it. That only maddens him even more.
In the denouement, Bazarov proves able to summon up enough arrogance to tear himself away from Mme. Odintsov. After they have had a tete-a-tete in her bedroom, he abruptly presents himself before her at morning tea and bids her farewell, just like that. Bravo, revolutionist!
Mme. Odintsov will see Bazarov one more time, a year later, when Bazarov, now living in idleness at his parents’ farm, catches his death from cutting his finger while performing an autopsy on a peasant with typhus. He scientifically describes his symptoms while he dies. His last official act is to send word to Mme. Odintsov that he is dying. She rushes to his bedside. But as she enters the sickroom, here is what she feels:
“She felt simply dismayed, with a sort of cold, suffocating dismay; the thought that she would not have felt like that if she had really loved him flashed instantaneously through her brain.”
Emerson (Turgenev’s contemporary) once said, “only connect.” Emerson understood that, while there is no god, there is human connection, human decency, human love. Bazarov the scientist never understood that.
It would be easy to argue that Bazarov represents a failed human life. But Turgenev does not say that. He does not say anything. The closing pages of “Fathers and Sons” depict Bazarov’s aged parents, traditional rural Russians, visiting his grave and praying on his behalf before holy icons. Turgenev says nothing. The first Realist, he leaves us to observe the scene and figure out for ourselves what it may mean for Russia, for the coming revolution, and for us.