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We need no longer doubt that, as Turgenev frequently insisted, it was characters, not ideas, that came first for him
Indeed, the overthrow of the tsarist autocracy had been on the agenda of Russian internal affairs ever since the Decembrist revolt of 1825.
If the inner life, the ideas, the moral predicament of men matter at all in explaining the course of human history, then Turgenev’s novels, especially Fathers and Sons, quite apart from their literary qualities, are as basic a document for the understanding of the Russian past and of our present
Arguably the greatest achievement of Turgenev, one which earned him the lasting opprobrium of the younger generation of the Russian intelligentsia and can still stimulate heated debate, is that he, a writer of the generation of ‘the fathers’, was so successful in portraying—intuitively but sympathetically—a representative ‘son’.
The novel’s tragic dimension, the ultimate condition of things in which all generations are equal, is demonstrated by the hero’s final need to ‘die decently’, as he puts it.
Such Quixotic independence of mind in defiance of cliché is Bazarov’s principal weapon.
Bazarov’s criteria, though, are utilitarian. He dismisses aristocratism, liberalism, progress and principles as so many foreign and useless words. They are wholly inappropriate to a situation in which human needs, meaning the needs of the Russian peasantry, are at a basic subsistence level. To Pavel Petrovich this betokens a rubbishing of all the most sacred shibboleths about the Russian people—their traditionalism, patriarchalism and religious faith.
as a heroic type he offers a vision of human self-reliability and potential that has a modern appeal to it and suggests both the power of man when armed with scientific understanding and the Frankenstein-like fate awaiting him if the power is abused.
