Some literary characters, like some books and some very special people, never leave us. They found a way to win a space in our hearts and our imagination, because they represent something that complements or enriches our experience in this world.
And if at some point we must invariably say goodbye to these people, these characters who fascinate and enrich us, something in them always remains. The more our experience grows, and our self undergoes transformations and mutations that differentiate it increasingly from what it was when we met that special person, the more distant and opaque the memory becomes. But whenever we return to them, seeing a photo or rereading the book in which we met them, our memory is revived, and we realize that we need these special, unique beings, even if only as a mere reminder of the possibilities of human experience. Or as a reflection of a side of ourselves which we need to deal with and overcome, sooner or later.
Evgeny Bazarov is one of those characters.
He belongs to the long list of tragic heroes in Russian literature, but his tragedy unfolds differently than that of a Tarass Bulba, a Raskolnikoff, a Judas Golovlyov or a Levin. Bazarov had no grand philosophical or religious ideas to offer humanity; he neither claimed to be a savior nor wanted to be saved.
He was a nihilist.
He was part of a movement in Tsarist Russia that rejected all established notions of religious and societal norms as sterile old-fashioned traditionalism which wasn’t dead just because the backwardest strata of Russian society still insisted in adhering to it.
In 19th century Tsarist Russia, Nihilism was a multifaceted movement that encompassed philosophical skepticism, scientism, revolutionary tendencies, and a rejection of the traditional values of the conservative strata of the population. It was characterized by a belief in materialism, positivism, and rational egoism, while rejecting metaphysics, sentimentality, and aestheticism. This movement gained prominence between the 1860s and early 1900s. Turgeniev’s Fathers and Sons, published in 1862, was timely directed at criticizing and analyzing this critical moment in Russian history, but not in an overly judgemental way. Turgeniev is known for the sensitive, balanced and likable way he treats his characters. He’s not interested in shocking his readers, but rather in presenting them with a picture of a situation and let them judge of its worth by themselves. He is rather a painter than a judge of people’s characters and actions.
He clearly understood that Nihilism in Russia emerged as a response to the rigid social structures and authoritarian rule of Tsarist Russia. It represented a rebellion against the existing political and social order, a legitimate rebellion, albeit anchored in violent action sometimes, being then met with even stronger authoritarian resistance. Nihilists embraced materialism, believing that only the physical world and its phenomena were real. They also adopted positivism, emphasizing scientific knowledge and empirical observation as the basis for understanding the world. They rejected traditional morality, religion, and metaphysics, viewing them as outdated and oppressive. While not all nihilists were revolutionaries, like the ones described by Dostoevsky in Demons, the movement did overlap with revolutionary groups and contributed to the broader revolutionary movement in Russia. Some nihilists engaged in radical actions, including terrorism, as a means of challenging the existing regime. The aforementioned Dostoevsky book treats exactly of one of the most notorious terrorist acts of Russian nihilists, the assassination of a student by the nihilist Sergey Nechaev. Russian Nihilism was also seen as a conflict between generations, with younger nihilists rejecting the values and beliefs of their elders. It’s in this specific context that Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons must be regarded. It’s the quintessential generational conflict book. In response to the traditionalist and pacifying approach of Turgenev, the writer Nikolai Chernyshevsky wrote his popular novel What Is to Be Done?, which had a wide influence on the revolutionary movement in Russia, influencing even Marx himself. It’s clear then that far from being just a juvenile call for rebellion against authority, Nihilism was part of a turning point in Russian history, part of what would culminate in the great Revolution of 1917.
While Bazarov is painted as to represent the most prominent characteristics of Russian nihilists, his nonchalant demeanour indicates he’s not one who would go to the lenghts of a Nechaev, killing his opponents. In fact, he did not have a system to propose, instead he adhered to a simple and honest lifestyle where he pursued his favorite interests, science, medicine, without strictly adhering to any kind of established versions of truth. He does not believe in anything transcendental or metaphysical, his worldview is anchored in the coldest facts of life, which leads him to assume a rather cynical and cold relation to people, which are all too ready to lose themselves in abstraction and irrational thoughts and feelings. He sums up his position by saying he repudiates “everything”. Ie, he denies everything that has been accepted as fact up to that point in time. Including literature and poetry, all kinds of sentimentality. In a certain sense, he is an earlier version of Camus’ Mersault (The Stranger), for he lives naturally and without giving himself airs of importance or pretending to care about dead formalities. This attitude results in his becoming rather antisocial, since almost all people around him adhere to such formalities in spite of their obvious vacuity. He becomes friends, or rather, he is befriended, by one Arkady Nikolaevich Kirsanov, a son of a rich gentleman called Nikolai Petrovitch Kirsanov. The story itself begins when Arkady, having just graduated in St. Petersburg, comes home for a visit with his friend Bazarov, to whom he demonstrates an almost worshipping devotion.
We are soon introduced to Arkady’s father, who could be seen as the embodiment of the fossilized nobleman against whom nihilists were engaged in fighting. But Nikolai Petrovitch was not a nobleman, but a noble man, ie, he was noble in the truest sense of the term. He treated his servants well. He helped his declining brother. He tried his best to understand his son. And he welcomes Bazarov in his home even knowing the young man’s views goes against everything he believes in life, trying not to pass judgment before understanding the puzzle the Nihilist represents. Nikolai is obviously used by Turgeniev to make a point against those who deemed all kinds of aristocratic, wealthy landowners like himself as a backward élite which prevented and hindered the further advancement of people and social equality. Nikolai is almost idealistically portrayed, but through him the author is making a point: not all things and people in the “ancien régime” which Bazarov fights against are despicable or worth annihilation. We can’t obviously pretend that all landowners in Russia were like Nikolai. But the simple existence of one like him serves to bring into question this indomitable urge to deny a whole order of things based on what most, not all, of its representatives, supporters and enforcers are or do. Nikolai is essential to the plot by offering Bazarov not an opponent, but an antipode. If the latter’s worldview is based on the assumption that all of the establishment he fights against is worthy to be smashed to smithereens, Nikolai comes to show that there was some nobility in it, that nobility is possible. Not theoretically, but in practice, as it is through practicing what he believes that makes one realize Nikolai is not imbued with the typical conceit and prejudice of his peers. He is against all pomposity or primness. He treats others with kindness, but not as a sign of affectation or as a nod to the dead rituals of strict formalism, no, he does it because that’s what he feels like doing. He sees no reason why he should act otherwise.
And that’s why his conflict with Bazarov does not happen through fights or duels, verbal or physical. Instead, we are offered a confrontation between the results of their two antagonistic worldviews. Nikolai is loved and understood by all people around him, because his demeanor begets nothing else. Bazarov is inevitably misunderstood by all, including his best friend Arkady, who can’t actually cope with his level of bluntness. One scene is particularly memorable. The two friends are having a conversation and Bazarov, as the perfect provocateur that he is, tries to push Arkady to the limit, in order to assess how far the young man is going to take his rejection of old-fashioned notions of social rules, including his respect for his old-fashioned father. It’s in this moment that Arkady realizes that he and Bazarov are not the intimate friends he thought at first. He barely knew the guy he chose to worship. And he understood Bazarov’s line of reasoning leads to a dead end, like nihilism itself. The one thing Arkady can’t take is a frivolous attempt to diminish his father, whom he deeply loves and admires, before his eyes. He then ends up making a choice, and he obviously chooses his father’s worldview instead of Bazarov’s, which he then sees as a passing fad, and which Turgenev himself identifies as more than typical adolescent rebellion against the establishment, but also as something its proponents can’t properly define or understand. So, in the case of Arkady, he gives up, in the case of Bazarov, he ends up entrapped by his own logic.
If Bazarov is the quintessential rebel, Arkady is the typical follower. He follows someone blindly until the moment he realizes the one he worships is leading him to a dead end. His passion for nihilism was really a fad, like his passion for anything else would be. His final breakup with Bazarov happens when he falls in love with a girl and gets married, signaling he wants to lead an old-fashioned life, like his father. Bazarov understands and gets sick at realizing Arkady is just another conformist, like most others. He also understands how utterly alone he is in the world.
A rather interesting part of the novel is the conflict between Bazarov and Nikolai’s brother, Pavel Petrovitch. Contrary to his brother, Pavel is aristocratic, elitist, in the most intransigent meaning of such words. He obviously enters into a collision course with the nihilist. He sees Bazarov as the embodiment of everything that’s wrong with the younger generation. Bazarov, of course, hates him and sees Pavel as little more than a hypocritical sycophant living at the expense of his brother. In the novel, Pavel is obviously meant to represent a counterpoint to Nikolai. The would be gentleman and the genuine noble man who acts nobly because that’s how his character is made, that’s how he feels he must act. While Pavel is formalistic, ritualistic, fossilized if not in deed at least in his worldview, fearing social change as the one thing that would imperil his prejudiced vision of himself the most, Nikolai is natural, informal, and his every act of nobility is not something forced, but comes naturally to him, as second nature. He lets his brother live with him as long as he wishes, for the latter is decadent and would starve if not for his brother’s aid. As a result, Pavel worships Nikolai, but cannot emulate his brother’s unaffected demeanor, clinging to his obtuse notions of aristocracy to his last breath.
The main feminine character in the book is Anna Sergeyevna Odintsova. She is a rather independent feminist woman with an intelligence and wit far broader than could be expected of her female contemporaries. She becomes friends with the two nihilists and Arkady becomes predictably enamored of her. Bazarov at first fights the fascination she exercises upon him, sworn enemy of romanticism and sentimentality that he is. But despite Arkady’s obvious infatuation with her, she really becomes interested in Bazarov, whose boldly independent behavior amazes her. She sees him as a kind of male reflection of herself, accustomed as she is to be surrounded either by worshippers or by people who thoroughly misunderstand her freedom of mind. Then the inevitable happens and Bazarov finds himself blindly and helplessly in love with the powerfully attractive woman. But here is where the true drama in the story resides: for all the admiration for his brave independence she can nurture, she cannot love him as a man. Bazarov himself first reacts to his passion cynically, then ends up succumbing to it, admitting the cold reality of what he is experiencing, to the utmost surprise of every fiber of his being. He is madly in love, something which appeared as completely unimaginable to him before knowing Anna, certain as he was that love itself was something unreal and fantastical, clearly explainable in scientific terms. But helas, no, he wasn’t simply willing to make love to Anna and then leave her behind. Like a man would naturally do. No, it was definitely something deeper than carnal desire that affected him.
Through his love for Anna, he was enraptured by the ineffable.
Now, much can be said about the ineffable, it’s the safe territory of Christians, mystics, religious people of all kinds. It’s that space in human experience not explained or explainable by cold-blooded rationalist science. It’s the realm of the unexpected, the arbitrary, the contingent. No matter how many countless pages on the subject of love you may read, the phenomenon itself remains unexplained. It belongs to the realm of the ineffable, yes, just like faith, but with a significant difference in relation to the latter. For love appears when an individual human being gets to know another individual human being, both as physical, as real as they could be, and the mere presence of such a being is further, definitive proof, for the heart if not for the mind, that a higher kind of feeling exists than mere animalistic attraction bent on reproduction. Whereas faith is a blind belief in something nobody will or would, ever, see, touch, feel, love is materialized in the shape of the be-loved object, all too carnal, all too real, all too human. Whereas faith is intuited, love is felt, felt with each fiber of one’s being. That’s one reason why love is way, I mean way, more powerful than faith. It’s really the deepest feeling a human being seems capable of feeling. And when one’s engrossed with such a feeling, when one’s enthralled by its energy and time consuming charm, everything else loses significance except for the possible conquest of the object of love. It starts with an infatuation, soon becomes an obsession and ends up either leading to a man’s greatest sense of fulfilment in life or to his greatest act of despondency. For when the subject realizes the grander, nobler, more fulfilling kind of love is possible, ordinary, fleeting sexual atraction loses its meaning or appeal. The more fascinating the love interest, the more vapid, uninteresting, unattractive the other people appear to the lover’s eyes, most specially those who are easy or free to “get”. This is why the man madly in love can come to the point of despising all other women, even to the point of becoming a celibate for life. The be-loved one is a unique being, whose charm is unique, and the circumstances surrounding the love story are also unique. In fact, falling in love is fall prey to the enchantment of a unique, unrepeatable human being. If such a person was ordinary, just like any other, we would not have anything more than the average “mating” encounter bent on making a family and having children. No, the love story goes much further than that. And that’s why Bazarov at first can’t understand it, and fights hardly against what appears to him as a complete rebuttal of his solid materialistic worldview. But one day he stops pretending and in what is the most poignant moment of the story, confesses his love for Anna only to find out it is doomed to be unrequited. At that moment, his life is finished. He can’t cling to his nihilism any longer for, despite all its revolutionary fervor, it fails to account for the possibility of love. And since he can’t cling to what was up to that point his lifeline, and knows he will never have Anna’s love anyway, no matter what he does, he ends up as a man in front of an abyss. Only, an abyss of his own creation.
Bazarov’s death remains as one of those unforgettable passages in Russian literature, in which there are so many of them. He dies because of a simple cut during an autopsy of a typhus victim. At those times, any kind of disease could prove fatal. But he was already dead before dying. His worldview had collapsed. His relationship to his father and mother by the end of his life adds a further touch of melancholy to the story. His parents can’t understand him anymore than any other person around him, but he loved them in his own way. Anna visits him in his deathbed and it’s then he makes his final revelation to her, his fear of dying. He feels that, by dying so young, and because of such an insignificant reason, his whole life has been futile and he, who regarded himself as an independent, extremely rational kind of superman, dies madly in love with a woman who can’t love him and despite all his love for science, his knowledge is entirely useless in preventing his early death. Which could be related to a death desire sprung out of his depressed spirits, anyway, something that would make him utterly careless about anything.
Bazarov had to die, then, as a victim of his own worldview. Obviously, like all great Russian literature, Fathers and Sons is open to many interpretations. This is mine. Bazarov had to die as a martyr for an extremist worldview which fails to give an individual a real sense of fulfillment and any other purpose than destruction itself. When Bazarov tells everyone he is against “everything”, he means “everything held as sacred by others”, not literally everything, as he’s still a practioner who cares enough about his job. His nihilist position could be better understood by reading the (in)famous Cathechism of a Revolutionary from Nechaev, in which the author posits that the nihilist revolutionary must have only one end in sight: revolution, revolution at all costs. Including one’s own life and the lives of others. Life itself becomes a liability when one is possessed by such an urge to destroy. A liability one’s ready to get rid of at any moment. In this sense, the two crucial factors that lead to Bazarov’s defeat are his encounter with Nikolai Petrovitch, who is, as I said, the genuine noble man, and his falling in love with Anna, who represents everything he never imagined to find in a woman. These two characters personify the denial of his worldview. If he’s bent on destroying the old social order because all of its members are corrupt, Nikolai shows him this can’t be an irrefutable truth. There can be something not rotten, something not worth destroying, in a world which generates a man like Nikolai. And if he is a sworn enemy of sentimentality, Anna reveals to him a side of himself that is not dead, just buried under a facade of sceptic indifference. This confrontation with what seems to him at first the most logical and reasonable course of action for a man is too much for his ego and his manly pride. If Nikolai was like his brother Pavel and Anna was just another woman, he would have just confirmed his beliefs. Instead, Turgenev forces him to a confrontation which he cannot stand, which he doesn’t have the moral fiber to stand.
Bazarov then becomes an early symbol of this philosophical position which has been puzzling people for at least 160 years now.