Fathers and Sons

Arkady Kirsanov and Yevgeny Basarov (who embodies the first popular appearance of nihilism in literature) have a memorable relationship in this novel. Turgenev has a compelling style that you can really slip into quickly. I listened to this on audiobook on morning walks throughout the summer, usually spending some time with a few chapters before starting work. One thought that comes to mind at the moment is that I wish I'd read this in my early twenties, just to know how re-reading it now might have felt. Perhaps I'll return to it again in 10 years. I found Bazarov to be fairly insufferable, but empathized with each of the characters - Arkady for his initial idolization of his friend, whose ideas seemed so compelling to him at university, his own personal growth in balancing this discovery with a practical appreciation for tradition, music, and the arts; Bazarov for his cold materialism that is undermined by his own falling in love with Anna Sergeyevna; Nikolay and Pavel Kirsanov for their earnest confusion at the picture of a new generation that leaves them feeling isolated from modern ideas; Anna Sergeyevna for her independence and isolation. Every character seems naive but caught in a search for understanding and being understood, often finding themselves out of time in one way or another.

"Whereas I think: I’m lying here in a haystack... The tiny space I occupy is so infinitesimal in comparison with the rest of space, which I don’t occupy and which has no relation to me. And the period of time in which I’m fated to live is so insignificant beside the eternity in which I haven’t existed and won’t exist... And yet in this atom, this mathematical point, blood is circulating, a brain is working, desiring something... What chaos! What a farce!"

"A man's capable of understanding anything - how the ether vibrates, and what's going on in the sun - but how any other man can blow his nose differently from him, that he's incapable of understanding."