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On fathers and sons
RAVI VYAS
Young Man to Middle-Aged Man: You had content but no force.
Middle-Aged Man to Young Man: And you have force but no content.
IF English literature (that which we have been fed) has little taste for ideas disguised as literature — and not much for ideas at all — the Europeans, especially the Russians, have even less for creative work without theories to support it. There has been almost no public role for the literary intellectual in England unless he has also been a novelist, poet or playwright, whereas in Europe a man's imaginative writing often seems to be not much more than a handy way of drawing attention to his ideas. Or so it has been since the great resurgence of Russian literature in the 19th Century: no Russian writer was wholly free from the belief that the writer was, first and foremost, to bear witness to the truth; that the writer, of all men, had no right to avert his gaze from the central issues of his day and his society. To do no more than to record what Shakespeare had called "the body and pressure of time". And the issues they touched upon were the eternal existential questions: love, sex, authority, God, the paradoxical nature of truth, honesty, strength, goodness and evil. But, above all, the power of unreason at a time when science, industry, revolution and the perfectibility of man were touted as the new-found faiths of the times.
Ivan Turgenev's Fathers and Sons is the novel of ideas and quintessentially a political novel. It deals with the generation gap, the confrontation between the old and the new, of liberals and radicals, traditional civilisation and the new harsh, positivism which had no use for anything except what is needed by the rational man driven ostensibly by reason and reason alone. The story line is this. The central character is Bazarov, a young medical researcher. He is invited by his fellow student and disciple, Arkady Kiransov, to stay at his father's house. Nicolai Kiransov, the father, is a gentle, kindly country gentleman who loves poetry and nature, greets his son's brilliant friend with unfailing courtesy. Also in the house is Nikolai Kiransov's brother, Paul, a retired army officer, a carefully dressed old-fashioned dandy who once had been a figure-of-sorts in the salons but is now living out his life in elegant and irritated boredom.
Bazarov picks on the Kiransovs and takes a perverted pleasure in describing himself and his friends as "nihilists", that he and those like him reject everything that cannot be established by rational methods or natural science. Truth alone matters: what cannot be established by observation and experiment is useless or harmless ballast — "romantic rubbish" — which an intelligent man will ruthlessly eliminate. All that is impalpable, that cannot be reduced to quantitative measurement, like literature and philosophy, the beauty of art or the beauty of nature, tradition and authority, religion and intuition, "the uncriticised assumptions of conservatives and liberals, of populists and socialists, or landowners and serfs", is just so much nonsense. Bazarov believes in strength, will power, energy, utility, work and in the ruthless criticism of all that exists. He wishes to tear off the masks, blow up all revered principles and norms. Only irrefutable facts, only useful knowledge matters. As he puts it, "I agree with no man's opinion. I have some of my own...I have the temerity to believe in nothing."
Still, as G.K. Chesterton once put it, when people cease to believe in God, they do not believe in nothing — but rather believe in anything. In any case, it's not easy to regard agnosticism or atheism as naturally coextensive with progress when one sees the wasteland of capitalist materialism, the sinister credulity of "cult" members, or the hysterical adulation heaped on mortal leaders of the former communist world.
Bazarov targets the oversensitive, conventional Paul Kiransov. "At present," he tells him, "the most useful thing is to deny. So we deny." "Everything?" Paul Kiransov asks. "Everything." "What?" "Not only art, poetry...but even...too horrible to utter..." "So you destroy everything...but surely one must build too?" "That's not our business...First, we must clear the ground."
Michael Bakunin (1814-1876), the anarchist and a contemporary of Turgenev, who had escaped from Siberia to London, was saying much the same thing at the time: the entire rotten structure, the corrupt old world, must be razed to the ground, before something new could be built on it. But how you are going to go about it is not for us to say; we are revolutionaries. Our business is to destroy. The new man, purified from the infection of the world of idlers and exploiters and its bogus values — these men will know what to do. How? Bazarov has nothing specific to say; all he can do is to echo another anarchist, Georges Sorel who once quoted Marx as saying, "Any one who makes plans for after the revolution is a reactionary." (Whether Marx actually said this or Sorel cooked it up is difficult to ascertain.)
Questions on who takes on the job of reconstruction after the revolution don't go away; in fact, they come thick and fast. "Peasants?" he asks himself. But "they are prepared to rob themselves in order to drink themselves blind at the inn." Caught in a bind, Bazarov turns to the individual whose first duty, he says, is to develop his own powers, to be strong and rational, to create a society in which other rational men can breathe and live and learn. When Arkady suggests that the peasants could live in a commune, "like a huge whitewashed hut", Bazarov retorts that "I have conceived a loathing for this...peasant. I have to work the skin off my hands for him, and he won't as much as thank me for it; anyway what do I need his thanks for? He'll go on living in his whitewashed hut, while weeds grow out of me." So, these were the true colours of the revolutionary: a hard-boiled, unashamed materialist who could only think of his own skin when the chips were down!
It is the father who is most affected by this talk. He walks about the garden like a zombie, head drooped in thought. "But to reject poetry," he thought again, "not to have a feeling for art, for nature... and he cast about him, as if trying to understand how it was possible not to have a feeling for nature." Bazarov remains unshaken. "All principles," he declares, "are reducible to mere sensations." In that case, Arkady asks whether honesty is only a sensation. "You find this hard to swallow?" says Bazarov. "No, friend, if you have decided to knock everything down, you must knock yourself down, too!..." In other words, "clear the ground", as Bakunin said. The new culture had to be founded on real, that is, materialistic, scientific values: socialism is just as unreal and abstract as any other "isms". As the old, aesthetic, literary culture crumbles, the tough-minded realists, who can look at "truth" in the face, will take over.
Paul Kiransov rejects this and in the end so does the young Arkady. But Bazarov sticks his ground. He tells Arkady, "You aren't made for our harsh, bitter, solitary kind of life. You aren't insolent, you aren't nasty, all you have is the audacity, the impulsiveness of youth, and that is no use in our business. Your type, the gentry cannot get beyond noble humility, noble indignation, and that is nonsense. You won't, for instance, fight, and yet you think yourselves terrific. We want to fight....Our dust will eat out your eyes, our dirt will spoil your clothes, you haven't risen to our level yet, you can't help admiring yourselves, you like castigating yourselves, and that bores us. Hand us others — it is them we want to break. You are a good fellow, but, all the same, you are nothing but a soft, beautifully bred, liberal boy..."
In the end, against all his principles, Bazarov falls in love with a cold, calculating, well-bred society girl, is jilted, suffers deeply and not long after dies of an infection while dissecting a corpse in a village autopsy. What do we call all this? Chance encounters or the music of chance that have nothing to do with reason? Bazarov dies stoically, wondering whether his country had any need for him or men like him. "Russia needs me? ..No, clearly she doesn't. And who is needed? The cobbler's needed, the tailor's needed, the butcher...sells meat..." Bazarov falls because he is broken by fate, not through failure of will or intellect. He is incurably wounded by a lover, by human passion that he suppresses and denies within himself. He thought, as many revolutionaries do, that his brains would save him from his feelings.
But what do we make of Bazarov and his nihilist friends in the cold light of reason and experience? That they were mere preachers who use phrases, inflated language and rhetoric to push their own political agenda? Are the slogans, diatribes, radical cant a substitute for hard, scientific facts and the work ethic? Finally, are they any better than the simple people but far more dangerous because they know how to exploit the cunning of reason? Bazarov and his friends are just so much hot air; they are not researchers, they will discover nothing because they are so dogmatic, doctrinaire and jargon-ridden. We have many of them around still and their tribe doesn't diminish.
Fathers and Sons, Ivan Turgenev, Penguin Classics, first published in this translation by Rosemary Edmonds, 1965, £2.50 (1985 reprint).
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