Fathers and Sons

Turgenev's novel is remembered mainly for coining a word, but Bazarov is more interesting than the label 'nihilist' suggests: he despises romanticism in his arguments and then falls helplessly in love, and Turgenev tracks that contradiction without ever resolving it into a simple verdict on the younger generation. The book was read on publication as a political statement, and it enraged nearly everyone, radicals felt caricatured, conservatives felt vindicated, and Turgenev spent years defending what he'd actually meant by the character. What later critics, Isaiah Berlin among them, kept returning to is that the novel refuses to let either generation win the argument cleanly; the fathers' complacency and the sons' destructiveness are both treated with the same melancholy rather than polemic, which is why it still reads as an account of generational rupture rather than a period piece about 1860s Russia specifically.