Dostoevsky (75 page)

Turgenev had carefully studied the writings in which the new generation expressed its contemptuous rejection of the old, and he drew on the ideas he found there with remarkable precision. All the social-cultural issues of the day are reflected so accurately in the book that one Soviet Russian critic has rightly called it “a lapidary artistic chronicle of contemporary life.”
⁷
Nonetheless, the shading that Turgenev gave to these issues was determined by his own artistic aims and ambiguous attitudes; like Dostoevsky, he could simultaneously sympathize with the ardent moral fervor of the young, deplore their intemperance, detest their ideas, and lament over their fate. Many of the positions that Bazarov advocates are not so much echoes of
The Contemporary
as subtle deformations and exaggerations calculated to reveal their ultimate implications and thus their dangerous potentialities. It is hardly surprising that partisans of these ideas should have found Turgenev’s rendition unacceptable; much more unexpected is that even one radical spokesman should have proclaimed Bazarov to be the beacon lighting up the path to the future.

Fathers and Children
inaugurates what will become the dominant theme of the Russian novel of the 1860s: the conflict between the narrow rationalism and materialism upheld by this new generation and all those “irrational” feelings and values whose reality they refuse to acknowledge. But if Turgenev exposes the shortcomings of the worldview of the
raznochintsy
in this way, he nonetheless delineates Bazarov as someone far superior in energy, force of character, and promise for the future to any of the gentry characters by whom he is surrounded. Both of the older Kirsanovs (the father and uncle of Arkady, Bazarov’s gentry liberal friend) are clearly relics of the past. Unable to cope with the new Russian society on the point of bursting its old bounds, Arkady and his father flourish in contented mediocrity on their estate, but the towering image of the rebellious Bazarov definitely places their “family happiness” (to use a Tolstoyan tag) in the shade. “Your sort, you gentry,” Bazarov tells Arkady, when the two friends come to the parting of the ways, “can never get beyond refined submission or refined indignation, and that’s a mere trifle. You won’t fight . . . but we mean to fight . . . we want to smash other people!” (8: 380)

18. I. S. Turgenev, ca. 1865. From Turgenev,
Polnoe sobranie sochinenii
, vol. 9 (Moscow–Leningrad, 1965)

All through the novel, Turgenev’s portrait of the relations between the two generations deftly captures the full range of the opposition that had been building up both in personal contacts and in journalistic exchanges, and his delineation of this conflict sets the ideological terms in which the polemics of the immediate future would be carried on. The obsolescence of the older generation is revealed by Nikolay Kirsanov’s fondness for Pushkin and his amateur efforts on the violoncello. “It’s time to throw up that rubbish,” Bazarov says, referring to Pushkin, and he counsels Arkady to give his father “something sensible to read.” The two friends condescendingly decide that Büchner’s
Force and Matter
would be suitable as an introduction to more serious intellectual fare because it “is written in popular language” (8: 239).

Bazarov’s attack against art is carried on vigorously and, for an informed reader of that time, with obvious reference to Chernyshevsky’s thesis. But while Chernyshevsky had merely argued that art should be subordinate to life, and had not denied it a certain secondary usefulness, Turgenev pushes the opposition between the “aesthetic” and the “useful” into a total negation. When Arkady’s uncle Pavel Petrovich complains that young Russian artists regard “Raphael as a fool,” Bazarov retorts, “To my mind, Raphael’s not worth a brass farthing; and they are no better than he” (8: 247). No distinction is made between different kinds of art as more or less useful, and another remark of Bazarov illustrates the point with epigrammatic terseness: “A good chemist is twenty times as useful as any poet” (8: 219).

Bazarov evidently exemplifies Chernyshevsky’s conviction that the physical sciences, with their theory of a universal material determinism, furnish the basis for a solution to all problems, including those of a moral-social nature. But this faith in science, which still implies a belief in general principles of some sort, is then splintered by Bazarov into particular sciences. “There are sciences,” he declares, “as there are trades and vocations; but abstract science doesn’t exist at all” (8: 219). Ultimately, even science itself becomes reduced to “sensations,” and it is these, in all their infinite variety, that have the last word. “There are no general principles—you’ve not made even that out as yet!” Bazarov exclaims to Arkady with some astonishment. “There are feelings. . . . Why do I like chemistry? Why do you like apples?—also by virtue of our sensations.” The “feelings” referred to by Bazarov are purely physical sensations, not psychic or emotive ones, and Bazarov insists that “men will never penetrate deeper than that” (8: 325). Chernyshevsky’s scientism thus ends up as a solipsistic empiricism or sensationalism in which all general principles or values are dissolved (much as in Max Stirner) into a matter of individual taste or preference.

It is this attack on
all
general principles that forms the basis of what Turgenev labels Bazarov’s “Nihilism”—a term that had just come into usage in connection with the radicals and was destined, as a result of Turgenev’s novel, to a great
career. A Nihilist, Arkady eagerly explains, “is a man who does not bow before any authority, who does not take any principle on faith, whatever reverence for that principle may be enshrined in” (8: 216). In the most famous passage in the book, Bazarov explains the universal scope of this rejection to the incredulous elder Kirsanovs:

To be sure, Arkady immediately leaps in to say that “the present condition of the people requires it”—thus linking such negation with the aim of a revolutionary social transformation. But this distant aim, so far as Bazarov is concerned, remains clearly subordinate to the work of negation and destruction, to a personal emancipation from all inherited principles and prejudices and the encouragement of such emancipation among others. Turgenev here thus reverses the actual order of priorities among the followers of
The Contemporary
, whose goals were much more social-political than personal. Very probably, though, he had already become aware of another radical current in the essays of Pisarev and other contributors to the
Russian Word
, who, as Strakhov had noted, put a much stronger accent on self-assertion and self-liberation and whose philosophical preferences were in fact quite close to Bazarov’s “sensationalistic” empiricism.

Bazarov’s attitude toward “the people” is also a mixture of conflicting ideas that, without representing any single prevalent point of view, finally again puts the emphasis on a solitary individualism. On the one hand, he is proud of his plebian origins, and when Pavel Petrovich, shocked at his utterances, accuses him of not being “Russian,” he replies, “My grandfather ploughed the land” (8: 244), and points out that the peasants feel more at home with him than with the gentry. But he is also an inflexible Westernizer who refuses to idealize the peasants and ridicules their backwardness and superstition. Even that holy of holies, the village
obshchina
, does not escape the lash of Bazarov’s iconoclasm, and in this he reflects not only the opinion of his creator, the Western liberal Turgenev, but also a viewpoint just beginning to make its appearance in
The Russian Word
.
⁸

No scene in
Fathers and Children
is more prophetic than the one in which Turgenev brilliantly dramatizes all the ambiguities of Bazarov’s love-hate relation
to the people—the internal clash between his self-assertive ideas, which express an aching need for personal self-fulfillment, and the obligation imposed by history on his generation to devote their lives to bettering the lot of the backward peasantry. Bazarov recalls that once, while walking past the
izba
of a prosperous peasant, Arkady had piously remarked that Russia would “attain perfection when the poorest peasant had a [clean and comfortable] hut” and that “every one of us ought to work to bring [that] about.” Such an obligation impels Bazarov to confess to a feeling of intense “hatred for this poorest peasant, this Philip or Sidor, for whom I’m ready to jump out of my skin, and who won’t even thank me for it . . . and what do I need his thanks for? Why, suppose he does live in a clean hut, while nettles are growing out of me—well, what then?” (8: 325).

Turgenev penetrates here, with consummate insight, to the anguishing dilemma of the young Russian radical of the 1860s, heart and soul dedicated to serving a people from whom he is totally alienated by his culture—a people on whose behalf he must surrender all claims to happiness, and yet who cannot even understand the nature or meaning of his self-sacrifice. Such an awareness of the tragic isolation of the intelligentsia—an isolation that had been one of Dostoevsky’s most shocking discoveries during his years in the Siberian prison camp—had hardly been fully grasped yet as an objective datum of the Russian social-cultural situation. It was to become much more widespread in the next few years, partly because the people did not behave in the manner that the intelligentsia had anticipated, partly because Turgenev had raised the issue to the level of consciousness. As a result, Bazarov’s sense of indomitable will and strength as an
individual
, as well as his realization that he stands alone above and beyond the people, will come to the foreground and shape the guiding attitudes of the
raznochintsy
intelligentsia throughout the remainder of the 1860s.

Even before the publication of
Fathers and Children
, rumors had been making the rounds in Petersburg that Turgenev’s new novel was a revengeful lampoon of Dobrolyubov. Chernyshevsky continued to believe this to his dying day and repeated the accusation as late as 1884.
⁹
Depending on how the text was read, it could be taken either as an “apotheosis” of Bazarov (to cite the scandalized reaction of Katkov)
¹⁰
or as a condemnation and exposure of the type he incarnated. The second view was that of a majority of readers, and is echoed in a report of the secret police surveying the cultural scene in 1862 with a good deal of
perspicacity: “With this work . . . Turgenev branded our adolescent revolutionaries with the caustic name of ‘Nihilists,’ and shook the doctrine of materialism and its representatives.”
¹¹
To make certain that Turgenev would receive the proper chastisement for his audacity, Chernyshevsky entrusted the review of the novel to the twenty-two-year-old M. A. Antonovich, a protégé of Dobrolyubov known for his belligerence.

Antonovich’s essay, “The Asmodeus of Our Time,” is not so much an article about Turgenev’s novel as a headlong onslaught intended to destroy whatever credit it might be given as a picture of the aims and ideal of the young generation. Most of the article is devoted to defaming Turgenev by every possible means. Whatever the justice of some of his remarks concerning Bazarov, they are drowned in the flood of abuse that made Antonovich’s article a synonym for critical malpractice.