Fathers and Sons (33 page)
5
kissed him on the shoulder
: A traditional salutation of respect from an inferior.
6
amice
: My friend (Latin).
7
Robert le Diable
: An opera of 1831 by the German composer Jakob Meyerbeer (1791–1864).
8
Suvorov
: Prince Alexander Suvorov (1729–1800), great Russian commander against the Turks and against Napoleon – famous for his crossing
of the Alps in 1799.
9
Castor and Pollux
: Classical Greek twin demigods and heroes.
10
Dioscuri
: ‘Sons of Zeus’, another name for Castor and Pollux as sons of the king of the gods.
11
Vladimir
: The military order of St Vladimir, founded by Catherine II in 1792, which conferred hereditary nobility on the recipient.
12
handshake
: The traditionally devout would kiss a priest’s hand while he would bless them.
13
s
ilver
: Silver money was worth more than paper banknotes.
1
poor Nikolay Petrovich was having a hard time
: Nikolay Petrovich’s problems with running his estate echo Turgenev’s own difficulties with his peasants at Spasskoye.
2
desyatina
: An old unit of land measurement equivalent to 2.7 acres.
3
Council of Trustees
: Founded by Catherine II to safeguard the interests of orphans. In the course of time it became responsible among other things
for the provision of credit and mortgage facilities.
4
Du calme, du calme
: Calm, calm (French).
5
Sunday schools
: Schools for adult literacy were developed from 1859 onwards.
1
Baltic barons
: The noble landowners of the Baltic provinces, mostly of German origin.
1
comme il faut
: Gentlemanly style (French).
2
À bon entendeur salut
: He that hath ears, let him hear (French).
3
utile dulci
: The useful with the pleasant (Latin).
4
v
ertige
: Giddiness (French).
5
Mrs Radcliffe
: Ann Radcliffe (1764–1823), successful English writer of ‘Gothic’ novels, the most famous being
The Mysteries of Udolpho
(1794).
6
Sir Robert Peel
: (1788–1850), British Conservative politician and prime minister.
7
Couchez-vous
: Go to bed (French).
8
Pasha
: Affectionate diminutive of Pavel.
9
C’est de la même famille
: It’s the same type (French).
10
belle-sœur
: Sister-in-law (French).
11
au dix-neuvième siècle
: In the nineteenth century (French).
12
Quelle idée
: What an idea (French).
1
Heine
: Heinrich Heine (1797–1856), German Romantic lyric poet, many of whose poems were set to music.
2
kvass
: A lightly fermented home-made drink made with rye flour.
3
Kaluga governor’s wife
: The reference here is to the writer Nikolay Gogol’s letter to A. O. Rosset-Smirnova of 6 June 1846 originally excised by
the censor from his selected correspondence. First published in 1860 under the title ‘What is a governor’s wife?’, it was
criticized by liberals as reactionary and sententious.
1
e volatu
: A mangled version of the French
et voilà tout
, ‘and that’s all’.
1
The time… love
: I.e. a trashy romance.
2
mir which rests on three fishes
: There is a play on words here between
mir
, commune, and
mir
, world or earth. Also in early Russian mythology the earth rested on three fishes.
3
Goulard water
: A lead-acetate-based lotion named after the French physician Thomas Goulard (1720–90)
4
Napoleon
: He means Napoleon III, then on the French throne (1852–70).
5
lunar caustic
:
Lapis infernalis
, ‘the stone of hell’ – silver nitrate, used by doctors to cauterize wounds.
6
Elysian Fields
: In Greek mythology the paradise of the blessed.
7
Stoic
: A follower of the Stoa, a Greek philosophical school characterized by the austerity of its ethics
8
duty as a Christian
: I.e. receive the last rites of the Church.
9
Wo ist der Kranke
: Where is the sick man (German)?
10
wertester Herr College
: Respected colleague – in the Russian a bit garbled from the German.
11
iam moritur
: Now he’s dying (Latin). Latin had been the international language of medicine.
12
Der Herr scheint des Deutschen mächtig zu sein
: The gentleman clearly understands German (German).
13
Aesculapius
: The Greek god of medicine.
14
Ikh… gabe
:
Ich habe
, I have (German), garbled.
1
kokoshnik
: The traditional Russian headdress, which now survived chiefly at court and as part of a nursemaid’s costume.
2
grand seigneur
: Great nobleman (French).
3
Farewell
: In English in the original.
4
at this moment
: I.e. after Emancipation in February 1861.
5
arbitrator
: A newly created official who after Emancipation regulated relations between landowners and former serfs.
6
e’s as u’s
: The examples of Pyotr’s ‘refinement’ given by Turgenev are
tyupyur’
and
obyuspyuchyun
, for
teper’
(now) and
obespechen
(guaranteed).
7
Brühl Terrace
: The terrace on the River Elbe, named after Count Brühl, minister of Augustus the Strong of Saxony.
8
a perfect gentleman
: In English in the original.
9
Slavophile
: See chapter XII, note 10.
10
très distingué
: Very distinguished (French).
11
bast shoe
: Traditional peasant shoe made of bast, strips of the inner bark of lime trees; leather would either have been unavailable
or too expensive.
12
temporarily in opposition
: To the Tsar’s reforms.
13
the waters in Bohemia
: Carlsbad and the other Bohemian spas were the height of fashion with the Russian upper classes.
14
Yelisevich
: A fictitious name.
15
eternal reconciliation… life without end
: These words echo the language of the Russian Orthodox service for the dead.
Fathers and Sons
, Turgenev’s most famous and certainly finest novel, has not aged even to this day. It is studied in Russian schools and,
however strange this might appear, is loved by teenagers (although the majority of teenagers hate literature, even the classics).
Its main hero, Yevgeny Bazarov, a provincial doctor’s son , is a popular character, and people know many of his sayings by
heart. No one in Russia would be ignorant of the fact that Bazarov ‘dissects frogs’. The name of Bazarov has become a common
noun (the noun
bazarovshchina
denotes crude materialism, rejection of art, etc.). It seems that the main reason for this is that Bazarov is a complete
lout, a ‘nihilist’, rejecting all principles and all social norms and taboos – and this is what young people love. In the
middle of the nineteenth century these characters were called ‘new people’, and indeed people like them had never been seen
before in Russia – not in such large numbers.
I have called Bazarov the main hero, although perhaps this isn’t entirely true. His young comrade, Arkady Kirsanov, who reveres
his morose friend, has equal claim to the epithet. But in personality Arkady is pale and ordinary in contrast with his coarse
and colourful friend. The ‘fathers’ – the Kirsanov brothers, Arkady’s father and uncle – can also be called main heroes. Painstakingly,
in loving detail, Turgenev describes these ageing men (they are over forty), who are of a vanishing generation, refined, noble
and kind people who love art, but who are almost helpless in the face of the onrush of history and impending enormous social
changes. The action of the novel takes place in 1859, two years before the Emancipation of the Serfs after 300 years of slavery
and the great judicial reforms that made all
citizens equal in the eyes of the law for the first time in Russia.
The Kirsanov family, Bazarov’s parents and the women in the novel – all the characters in fact – are accurately portrayed,
with humour and in charming detail: one could imagine them miraculously acting out their dramas in real life. The subtle psychological
prose of
Fathers and Sons
couldn’t be more appropriate for a sentimental novel of love. But into this world, so familiar, so well thought out and so
deeply felt by him, the author brings a dark, insolent fellow with ideas – Bazarov – just like a horse into a drawing room.
And even the author has no idea what’s going on in that horse’s head.
In the 1850s there appeared on the scene a generation of young people who categorically rejected anything connected with tradition,
with the old way of life. These were the
raznochintsy
, children of impoverished or simply minor noblemen, priests or rich tradesmen from the lower classes (members of free city
corporations). They saw themselves as ‘new people’, striving to conquer and refashion the old, stagnant world, overturn all
hierarchies, rewrite laws and review all social relationships. Equal rights for women, the right to education, the serf question
– all these issues demanded an urgent solution. Where should one begin? One should begin with everything – all at once!
To these young people the natural sciences – chemistry, botany, medicine – were of great importance. Chemistry explained the
structure of nature, botany could help in increasing harvests, medicine cured people. Having mastered the laws of existence,
man would learn how to put them to good use, and universal happiness would follow. Belief in progress had never been so strong;
the road ahead had never seemed so broad and bright. And at the same time, parallel with this, nihilistic ideas – the rejection
not merely of the old world but of everything in the world in general – became ever more popular among young people. All were
agreed on the need for change, but there were different ways of achieving this. By reform or revolution? The eternal question
that divided conventional fathers from their sons, reactionaries from radicals, the patient ones from rebels.
This was a generation remarkable in its own way, freedom-loving,
untiring, generous, capable of rejecting leisure and prosperity for the sake of science and of helping one’s neighbour. It
gave birth to many remarkable enthusiasts: jurists, scholarly scientists, doctors. But it also gave birth to terrorists: reformers
and revolutionaries are born of the same mother.
It’s no surprise that these people not only rejected art but considered it a harmful obstacle, a social amusement, the leisure
pursuit of idlers and old men who had outlived their time. The following attitude was typical: you shouldn’t paint pictures,
as this is stupid and harmful; a painting could be useful only if, let us say, it offered an allegorical portrayal of a young
girl in fetters racked with pain. This would arouse a desire in the spectator to free the girl, while she would symbolize
the peasant question or scientific thought or the rights of women – each spectator would decide for himself. The main word
would be ‘use’. What is useful is good. According to this attitude, such occupations as reading poetry or admiring a beautiful
sunset or the sound of a cello would obviously be nothing short of idiocy.
And of course this view of the world struck the ‘fathers’ as prosaic, pragmatic, subversive, mocking and infinitely cynical.
And the fathers, delicate creatures that they were, would be horror-stricken, while the children, being coarse creatures,
wanted to spit at their finer sentiments. That is, everything happened as it usually does, only the change in generations
on the eve of the 1860s in Russia was in fact a change in geological eras.
Turgenev was the first to introduce such an unusual hero as Bazarov into a novel. For one whose education and whole way of
life were based in the world of the ‘fathers’, this new hero was, so it seems, not completely comprehensible in contradistinction
from all – I repeat all – the other characters in the novel. A master of the art of psychological writing, Turgenev undertook
something that did not easily yield to his powers of psychological analysis. Therefore it’s all the more interesting to observe
how he attempts it. Turgenev is also a master of caricature and he brilliantly portrays that petty riff-raff clinging to modish
ideologies, to the liberal Fronde – Sitnikov and especially Kukshina, the ‘liberated woman’, supposedly interested
in everything scientific – embryology, for example – just as others are interested in hats and frills (at this period not
to be interested in embryology was tantamount to appearing backward and provincial). These hypocritical people are in raptures
over Bazarov and assume they are his equals. But for Turgenev, Bazarov is a real person, although infinitely alien and obscure.
And far from providing his hero simply with his own particular outlook on the world, he provides him with a separate circulatory
system, a separate nature. And he describes him not only externally, but from within, so that he ‘knows’ how he must feel.