GajimaruClassics.
Fathers and SonsOn the coverRye, Ivan Ivanovich Shishkin, 1878
Fathers and Sons
A young nihilist, Bazarov, comes to stay and sets off a clash between two generations, the old romantic gentry and the cold, science-minded young. The novel that handed the word “nihilism” to the world.
Character notes and context for the chapter you’ve read.
The great novel of the generation gap, elegant, short, and startlingly even-handed, letting both the idealistic young and the wounded old be right and wrong at once.
SettingRural Russia, c. 1859
Russia on the eve of freeing its serfs, when a confident new generation embraced science and rejected everything their romantic, landowning fathers held sacred, and called it nihilism.