fathers and sons · turgenev

Ivan Turgenev's 1862 novel brings the young nihilist Bazarov to the provincial estates of his friend's family, where his contempt for tradition meets the older generation's liberalism, and then meets love and death. It is the classic portrait of a generational break, and of what an ideology of pure negation cannot account for.

Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons, translated and edited by Richard Freeborn (Oxford University Press, 2008). Read in full, Junior Spring at Torrey Honors.