The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Ivan Turgenev · Отцы и дети · a novel in twenty-eight chapters · 1862 · scored on Turgenev’s Russian as he issued it in book form in 1862, read from knowledge, with Constance Garnett’s translation (1895) beside it for sense and Richard Freeborn’s and Rosemary Edmonds’s for comparison; no text in hand, Russian quoted only where its words are certain, each with a plain English rendering, and no translation quoted
Mode
Novel of ideas and of the generations; country-house comedy, love story and the tragedy of a death in one short book
Mythos
The return home and the departure; the prodigal inverted, the father before a son he cannot understand; the new man who denies everything; the scalpel cut where the creed meets the body and the people; nature outlasting every theory
Phase
One summer, from a father’s wait at a posting inn on 20 May 1859 to a son’s death in his father’s house, then a winter wedding and a grave
Presentation
Fiction; twenty-eight chapters, dedicated to the memory of Vissarion Belinsky; objective third-person narration that withholds comment; a circuit of visits, much of it carried in dialogue
Register
From drawing-room argument, a son’s terse contempt against an uncle’s French-inflected Russian, through provincial satire and a duel half farce, to a deathbed and a grave
Scale
Two households of fathers and sons, a woman’s estate and a provincial town, a handful of persons in one summer on the eve of the Emancipation
Governing Proposition
A landowner waits at a posting inn for his son, and the son comes home bringing a friend: Bazarov, the new man who denies everything. Over one summer of visits the friend quarrels with his host’s brother, falls in love with a woman who will not have him, fights a duel, goes home to parents who adore him, and dies of a cut taken at a peasant’s autopsy. The wager of the novel is that the rift between generations is a fact of a society in rapid change and not a quarrel of temperaments, that a creed of total negation, sincerely held, cannot account for the life of the man who holds it, and that only a narrator who refuses to judge can show both sides partly right.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
“Что, Петр? не видать еще?”
(Well, Pyotr? Not in sight yet?) The novel begins with a date, 20 May 1859, and a question asked at a posting inn (ch. 1). Nikolai Petrovich Kirsanov, a landowner, is waiting for his son, and the son, Arkady, comes home bringing someone else: a friend, Bazarov, with red hands and a long naked face, who will spend the summer among them. The whole book is in that wait. A father has been looking down the road for his child, and what arrives is his child and the generation behind him, which he will spend the summer trying to understand.
Turgenev issued the book in twenty-eight chapters in 1862, after it had run in Mikhail Katkov’s The Russian Messenger in the February issue of that year, and he revised the text between the journal and the book. He dedicated it to the memory of Vissarion Belinsky. The action runs through one summer, two years before the Emancipation of 1861, and its plan is a circuit of visits: the Kirsanovs’ estate, Maryino; the provincial town and its governor’s ball; Anna Sergeyevna Odintsova’s estate, Nikolskoe; the small house of Bazarov’s parents; then back through Nikolskoe and Maryino, to a duel, the parting of the two friends, and Bazarov’s death in his father’s house. The last chapter moves forward to a winter wedding, gives the later fates of the survivors, and ends at a grave.
The persons are few, and they come in pairs. Nikolai, who yields, plays the cello and reads Pushkin; his brother Pavel, who resists, keeps his English clothes and his nails in the country. Fenichka and her infant, Mitya, are Nikolai’s second family. Odintsova has a younger sister, Katya. Bazarov’s parents, Vasily Ivanovich and Arina Vlasyevna, live for the son who visits them. Sitnikov and Kukshina, in the town, wear the new creed as a fashion. Over all of them the narration keeps its distance: it shows, it lets each speak, and it does not say who is right.
Movement II
At the Kirsanovs’ table the word is spoken, “нигилист” (nihilist), and defined for the fathers: the new man denies everything. Pavel recoils from the word. He lives by his “принсипы”, his principles, said in the Frenchified Russian of a liberal of the 1840s. The quarrel between the uncle and the guest begins at once and does not end until they stand facing each other with pistols. Each finds the other absurd, and each is right about something.
Bazarov’s creed is short. “Порядочный химик в двадцать раз полезнее всякого поэта”
(A decent chemist is twenty times more useful than any poet.) He says it in the sixth chapter, and he lives by it: he dissects frogs, he works at his microscope, he calls love romanticism. He puts the whole of it in one sentence: “Природа не храм, а мастерская, и человек в ней работник”
(Nature is not a temple but a workshop, and man is the workman in it.) The book will answer that sentence in its last paragraph, without argument, at a grave.
Nikolai does not quarrel. He gives way. Arkady takes Pushkin out of his father’s hands and gives him Büchner’s Kraft und Stoff instead. He plays his cello in the evening; alone in the garden, he remembers his dead wife, and the book lets the reverie run without irony. Around the house the estate is on the eve of the Emancipation, and the peasants distrust his reforms. They take Bazarov, who jokes with them, for a clown. The guest who means to serve them and the master who means to free them are both strangers in the fields.
Movement III
In the town the creed has its followers. Sitnikov follows it; Kukshina smokes, and talks of George Sand and of chemistry. They are the fashionable hangers-on of the new thinking, and the book draws them in a broader hand than it allows itself elsewhere: their point is made in their first scene and made again. The governor’s ball is thin. The town matters for where it leads: to Odintsova, and to her estate at Nikolskoe, where Bazarov, who has a word for love and a contempt to go with it, is tested.
At Nikolskoe the creed meets what it cannot account for. Bazarov falls in love with Odintsova, and despises himself for it. He declares himself, and she draws back. The man who called love romanticism finds he has it in him, and cannot argue it away, and cannot have it. Beside him, more quietly, Arkady comes to love the younger sister, and moves from his friend’s opinions to his own: his love for Katya takes, as Bazarov’s does not, and the doubling is the book’s judgment on both.
Then the parents’ house. Vasily Ivanovich talks too much, anxiously; Arina Vlasyevna adores. The father is pious, and the son, who denies everything, is the centre of his life. Here the return of the prodigal is turned round: it is the father who comes humbly before a son he cannot understand. Lying by a haystack, Bazarov tells Arkady that when he is dead a burdock, “лопух”, will grow out of him. The visit is short. The son cannot stay in the house where he is loved.
Movement IV
The friends go back by way of Nikolskoe to Maryino, and the book stops to tell Pavel’s past: a passion for a Princess R. that did not answer, and a ring with a sphinx. The telling comes as a block of exposition, but it is paid back. Fenichka, Nikolai’s young woman, has something of the princess in her face, and Pavel has seen it. The proud man who lives by principles and the proud man who denies them have been undone in the same way, by a love that does not answer, and the book leaves the echo for the reader to find.
So the old world’s last answer to the new is a duel. Pavel and Bazarov fight it, and the book stages it as near comedy, two men going through the motions of a code one of them despises, and then lets it turn to dread when the pistols are raised. Its motive lies in Fenichka’s face and the princess behind it as much as in any argument at the table. After it nothing at Maryino can go on as before, and Bazarov leaves.
The friends part. Arkady has become himself by becoming less like Bazarov: his defection has been slow, and the book does not say whether his happiness is a victory or a falling away. He will marry Katya. Bazarov goes home to his parents, with nothing settled and his love unreturned.
Movement V
At the autopsy of a peasant Bazarov cuts himself, and there is no caustic to burn the cut. The infection takes. The man of science who meant to serve the people and could not talk to them is killed by the body of one of them. The book does not say whether the cut was carelessness or something nearer a wish; it gives the fact and the fever and lets the question stand.
Odintsova comes to his deathbed, bringing a German doctor. Bazarov allows the last rites. He speaks to her once more, and his last words to her are a request: “Дуньте на умирающую лампаду, и пусть она погаснет”
(Blow on the dying lamp and let it go out, ch. 27.) The man who would not be a poet ends in an image. His father, who has lived for him, is left in the house with his mother and the grave.
The last chapter moves forward to winter and a double wedding, and Arkady marries Katya. The fates of the survivors are told quickly. Then the book comes to the grave, where an old couple come to their son, and to its last sentence: the flowers on the grave speak not only of the calm of “«равнодушной» природы” (“indifferent” nature, in Pushkin’s phrase) but “о вечном примирении и о жизни бесконечной”
(of eternal reconciliation and of life without end, ch. 28.) The workshop has its answer. Whose faith the answer is, the narrator’s, the parents’ or nobody’s, the book does not say.
Act III · The Twelve
The test is subtractive, and the plan is the argument. Maryino sets the fathers against the son and his friend; Nikolskoe tests Bazarov’s creed against love; the parents’ house tests it against filial love and the land; the return to Maryino brings the duel, which is the old world’s last answer; the death tests it against the body. Each station is required, and each is short. The fathers are paired, and the pairing bears weight: Nikolai, who yields, plays the cello and reads Pushkin; Pavel, who resists, lives by his “принсипы” (his Frenchified principles). What the test can take is small. Kukshina and Sitnikov make their point in their first scene and repeat it; the governor’s ball is thin; Pavel’s past with Princess R. arrives as a block of exposition, though the ring with the sphinx and Fenichka’s likeness to the princess repay it. Perhaps a twentieth of a short book is permitted rather than compelled.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds. The rift between generations is a structural fact of a society in rapid change, not a quarrel of temperaments: the fathers are not fools, the son is not a monster, and each is right about the other. A creed of total negation, sincerely held, cannot account for the life of the man who holds it. Bazarov, who calls love romanticism and holds that “Порядочный химик в двадцать раз полезнее всякого поэта” (a decent chemist is twenty times more useful than any poet, ch. 6), is undone by a passion for Odintsova that he despises in himself, and dies of a cut taken at the autopsy of a peasant, one of the people he meant to serve and could not talk to. And the parents’ love outlives the son and the creed. The book named a social type in the act of its making and saw its inner cost. Held below the top because the disclosure is of a type and a moment as much as of a condition, and the old and the new are opened less deeply than the century’s greatest novels open passion and honesty.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The heights are real, and placed late. Bazarov’s dying in his father’s house, with Odintsova come to him with a German doctor, is the book’s height, and his last words to her hold it: “Дуньте на умирающую лампаду, и пусть она погаснет” (blow on the dying lamp and let it go out, ch. 27). The last paragraph rises with it: the old couple at the grave, and the flowers that speak of the calm of indifferent nature and of more than that. Below these come the lyric heights: Nikolai alone in the garden at evening, remembering his dead wife; Bazarov lying by the haystack and telling Arkady that a burdock, “лопух”, will grow out of him; the duel, staged as near comedy and turning to dread. Much of the book is comedy and argument, in a register that does not seek elevation. The height is high; the frequency, moderate, is what holds the axis here.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The title names the archetype, and the structure builds it: two houses of fathers, a son of each, the return home and the departure, the son who does not belong in his father’s world and the father who cannot reach him. It inverts the prodigal. Bazarov comes home and it is the father who, in effect, kneels before a son he cannot understand, and at the end it is the parents who keep the vigil at the grave. Bazarov himself became a type, the new man who denies everything, as Hamlet and Don Quixote, the figures of Turgenev’s own lecture of 1860, are types: the name became a common noun in Russian argument. The death from a scalpel cut on a peasant’s corpse is a load-bearing image, the creed meeting the body and the people. What holds the axis here is that much of the myth lives in the social type of 1859 rather than below it: the archetype is built, but kept at the realist surface, implicit and particular, and it is not built as deep as the myths of the century’s greatest novels.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The form is inherited, and conservative: the short novel of Turgenev’s own Rudin (1856), A Nest of Gentlefolk (1859) and On the Eve (1860), each built round a superfluous man or a hero of the moment, in scenes and portraits. The turn is in the hero and the stance. Bazarov is the first figure of the radical young generation in Russian fiction drawn from inside, neither satirised nor exalted, stronger than everyone around him and wrong about his own heart; and the narrator refuses to judge him. That stance was the stake, and it was paid in full. The young read the book as libel and the old as surrender: Dmitry Pisarev’s essay “Bazarov” (1862) embraced the hero, Maxim Antonovich’s “Asmodeus of Our Time” in Sovremennik (1862) called him a slander on the young, Turgenev was attacked from right and left alike, and his standing in Russia never fully recovered. The swerve is in the treatment, not the form, and that holds the figure where it is.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Change the form and the book stops knowing what it knows. The objective narration, which shows and withholds comment, is the instrument of its justice: Bazarov and Pavel must be weighed without an author to tip the scale, and the refusal to tip it is the disclosure that both are partly right. The circuit of visits, which returns to Maryino, makes the hero a guest everywhere and at home nowhere, and each return shows what has changed in him. The doubling is formal and meaningful: two fathers, two sisters, two friends, and two loves, Arkady’s for Katya, which takes, and Bazarov’s for Odintsova, which does not; and at the end a double wedding set against a single grave. Held off the top because the short novel of portraits is Turgenev’s established container, and parts of this book, Pavel’s past and the satirical pair, sit in it rather than work through it.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Evidence rather than promise. The question of who Bazarov is was opened in 1862 by Pisarev’s and Antonovich’s opposite readings, answered by Turgenev in his essay “Apropos of Fathers and Sons” (1869), answered in fiction by Chernyshevsky and by Dostoevsky, and has not closed. The text keeps its uncertainties: whether Bazarov’s nihilism is defeated or only killed by accident; whether the cut that kills him is carelessness or something near a wish; whether the last paragraph’s eternal reconciliation is the narrator’s faith, the parents’, or a consolation the book has already undercut with indifferent nature; whether Arkady’s happiness is a victory or a falling away. Formal depth yields on return too: the echoes of Pavel in Bazarov, two proud men undone by a love that does not answer, are left to be found. Held a step down because the surface is clear, and the open questions are fewer, and nearer the surface, than in the deepest novels.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The field is Russian literature of the nineteenth century and, through Turgenev, the first of its novelists read widely in the West, the European novel. The intrinsic force: the book made the new man a subject for the novel, fixed the type in a single figure, and showed that a novel could take a political generation as its matter without becoming a tract. Its formal force is smaller, and that holds it below the top: the reach runs through its subject and its type more than through any reorganisation of what the novel could do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the book gave “нигилист” (nihilist) its currency in Russian and then in European speech; Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done? (1863) wrote its new people against Bazarov; the book set going the anti-nihilist novel of Pisemsky and Leskov that culminates in Dostoevsky’s Demons (1871 to 1872); and the problem of the generations became a frame for later fiction and thought.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the novel survives whole, in Turgenev’s book text of 1862, with nothing lost. Presence: a hundred and sixty-four years of continuous reading; a set book in Russian schools for generations; translated into English from the nineteenth century onward, by Constance Garnett in 1895 and many times since, and into most written languages; taught in courses on the novel and on Russian thought. Fabric: no charge. The surface is partly fixed to its moment, the debates of 1859 and Büchner’s Kraft und Stoff, which Arkady gives his father in place of Pushkin, but it has outlived those conditions, since the quarrel of the generations is read for itself. Held a step below the widest presence such a span can show, because outside Russia it is read more in the classroom than the most widely read novels of its century are read at large, and a classroom presence is presence, not proof.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Judged on Turgenev’s Russian as far as it can be judged here; the sentence itself, unheard in this reading, is neither credited nor charged. The construction is exact: a short book in which every station has its function, the visits paced so that each changes the hero, the two love plots timed against each other, the duel placed after the declaration and the death after the parting. The portrait is Turgenev’s instrument, used with economy: Pavel’s nails and English clothes in the country; Bazarov’s red hands and long naked face; Nikolai’s cello; Vasily Ivanovich’s anxious garrulity. The dialogue lets the argument be heard in two idioms at once, the son’s terse contempt and the uncle’s French-inflected Russian. Charged: the expository block of Pavel’s past; the caricature of Kukshina and Sitnikov, cruder than the rest; and the last chapter’s quick disposal of the survivors’ fates, before the grave restores the scale.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Kukshina’s cigarette and her chatter of George Sand and chemistry in a provincial town, and Bazarov’s death in his father’s house. One law holds them: theories of life, old or new, borrowed or sincere, are measured against what life does to the body and the heart, and nature, the garden, the fields, the burdock and the flowers on the grave, outlasts them all. Pavel’s principles fail by that law as Bazarov’s denials do, and Kukshina’s are its comic shadow. The range is wide for so short a book, from drawing-room comedy and a duel half farce to a deathbed and a grave, and it is held in one tone of grave irony. Charged: the satirical pair are drawn in a broader hand than the law elsewhere allows; and the closing paragraph’s eternal reconciliation strains against indifferent nature, a strain the book may intend.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Held, in a small compass. Consciousness: Bazarov’s self-contempt in love, Nikolai’s reverie, Arkady’s slow defection. The family: two households, three generations with the infant Mitya, a father’s second family with Fenichka and the child, the parents’ adoration. Class and labour: the estate on the eve of the Emancipation, the peasants who distrust Nikolai’s reforms and take Bazarov, as he jokes with them, for a clown; Fenichka’s serf origin. Science and thought: the frog, the microscope, Büchner, the creed of negation, Pavel’s liberalism of the 1840s. The natural order: the garden and the fields, the ground of the book’s last word. The sacred: the father’s piety, the last rites Bazarov allows, the closing lines. Every order is joined through one question. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the compass: the state and history are present as ground, the reforms of the coming decade, not as agents; the city is glimpsed; and a short novel of one summer holds its orders more briefly than the long novels hold theirs.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.6 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.1, then The Made at 8.9, then The Unconcealment and Pressure on Tradition at 8.8. A hundred and sixty-four years of continuous reading, in Russia and in translation, of a text that survives whole; a short book exactly built, every station with its function and the two love plots timed against each other; a disclosure that holds, that the rift between generations is a fact of a society in change and that a creed of negation cannot account for the life of the man who holds it; and a reach that gave the word nihilist to Russian and European speech and drew answers from Chernyshevsky and Dostoevsky.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 8.2, held by its compass: many orders joined through one question, with the state and history as ground rather than agents and the city only glimpsed, in a short novel of one summer. Next above it, The Sublime and The Archetypal Deep at 8.4: heights that are real but placed late, in a book much of which is comedy and argument; and a myth built in the two houses of fathers and the inverted prodigal, but lodged in the social type of 1859 and kept at the realist surface. The music of Turgenev’s Russian sentence is beyond this reading, and is neither credited nor charged.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.6 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 8.9, The Inner Law at 8.7, The Living Form at 8.6, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on one axis: The Imperishable at 9.1, The Unconcealment at 8.8 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.8 clear the bar of 8.5, and The Swerve meets it exactly at 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 8.4 falls a tenth short. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.4, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.2. Four of the five summit conditions are met; the summit is withheld on the Epochal Gate, and the aggregate, at 8.6, stands below it as well.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Ivan Turgenev’s Отцы и дети (Ottsy i deti, literally Fathers and Children, known in English as Fathers and Sons), scored as the novel as Turgenev issued it in book form in 1862, in twenty-eight chapters, with its dedication to the memory of Vissarion Belinsky. It first ran in Mikhail Katkov’s Russkii vestnik (The Russian Messenger) in the February issue of 1862, and Turgenev revised the text between the journal and the book; the serial text is context, not the work scored, and so is his essay “По поводу «Отцов и детей»” (“Apropos of Fathers and Sons”, 1869). Every axis is judged on the novel in Turgenev’s Russian. No text, Russian or English, was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Russian is quoted only where its words are certain: the opening question, Pavel’s principles, the words nihilist and burdock, Bazarov’s two sentences on the chemist and on nature, his last words, and two phrases of the last paragraph. Beneath or beside each stands a plain English rendering made for this page, not taken from any published translation. Events are paraphrased. Translation · Constance Garnett’s Fathers and Children (1895), the version best known to this reading, read beside for sense; Richard Freeborn’s (Oxford World’s Classics) and Rosemary Edmonds’s (Penguin) for comparison. None is quoted, and nothing in any is charged to the novel. The music of Turgenev’s Russian sentence, which Russian readers hold among the purest in the language, is beyond this reading, and is neither credited nor charged. Names follow the usual English forms. Citations are by chapter, and are given only where the chapter is certain. Facts that could not be verified, among them the particulars of the revision between journal and book, the length of the novel in words, the share of it given to dialogue, the chapters in which several episodes fall, the interval between the death and the wedding, and any part the book’s reception played in Turgenev’s long residence abroad, are not given.