65 pages • 2 hours read
Ivan TurgenevFathers And Sons
Ivan TurgenevFiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1862A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Nature and the Landscape
Nikolai and Arkady are both lovers of nature. When he is outside, Nikolai wistfully contemplates both his lost wife and his strained relationship with his son. His love of the pastoral is set up as a key contrast with Bazarov’s scientific outlook. As Nikolai paces his garden with “mournful agitation,” he imagines, “oh, how Bazarov would have made fun of him, if only he’d known what he was feeling at the moment!” (47).
Arkady also highly values the aesthetic experience of being in nature. Bazarov and Arkady seriously quarrel for the first time when Arkady describes a leaf “like a butterfly in flight” (104). Bazarov is offended, declaring, “‘I consider such fine talk indecent” (104) and trying to instigate a physical fight. Soon after, Arkady departs for Nikolskoe, where he and Katya spend a great deal of time outdoors, in an atmosphere of “trusting intimacy” (133). Their shared love of nature creates domestic harmony. In contrast, Anna and Bazarov are both “indifferent” to nature, (73), a lack of sentiment that presages their fleeting bond.
Estates
The novel links the state of each house and surrounding land with the psychological qualities of its owner.
Descriptions of Marino paint it as an estate in disarray: The estate is on “flat and barren land” and “the young trees hadn’t taken, too little water collected in the land, and that in the wells had a brackish taste” (15). This demonstrates Nikolai’s ineptitude at land management and his unconventional domestic situation. When Nikolai finally marries Fenechka, and Arkady has settled into domestic happiness with Katya, Arkady takes over management of Marino and becomes the “zealous proprietor” of the newly thriving estate (160).
Anna’s estate Nikolskoe, reflects her extreme control over her life and emotions: “an avenue of pruned firs lead to its entrance […] it was clear that order prevailed in this house: everything was clean and sweet-smelling, like a minister’s reception room” (65). She marries a man equally committed to an absence of passion, retaining her ability to organize everything around her.
While Bazarov’s family home has none of this grandeur, it echoes the warmth and love of his parents: Arkady finds dinner “sumptuous” and he “slept very well in the room attached to the bathhouse. It smelled of mint” (95). Even the two crickets he hears behind the stove seem to be a reference to Vassily and Arina. After Bazarov’s death, his parents make a home in a new place: a poorly tended cemetery where only his grave is “untrampled by animals” and has a new fence around it. As, “the flowers growing on it look out at us serenely with their innocent eyes” (163), the novel implies that Bazarov’s scorched-earth approach to life has left no mark on the environment. In death, his parents have covered over their son’s temperament.
The Superfluous Man and the Byronic Hero
The character of Bazarov evokes two important and interrelated literary motifs, the superfluous man and the Byronic hero. Both rely on a vision of frustrated masculinity that disrupts traditional moral values. The Byronic hero is usually brooding, morally tortured because of some transgression, and somewhat ostracized from society. The superfluous man’s alienation comes from his great intelligence, but also his incapacity to effect real change. Turgenev himself popularized the latter term with his 1850 work, The Diary of a Superfluous Man, but characters who embody parts of the archetype can be found as early as the 1830s. Bazarov’s sense of his insignificance in the universe and his “boredom and anger” as he contemplates this (102), put him firmly in the tradition. Byronic heroes often die tragically, which also lines up with Bazarov’s fate.
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