Ivan Turgenev (1818–1883)

Spring Torrents by Ivan Turgenev is a novella about love, lust and betrayal. It opens with the elderly Dmitry Sanin remembering his past and contemplating his
failure to secure love, marriage and children in his life.

As a young man in 1840, Sanin arrives in Frankfurt where he meets and falls in love with Gemma Roselli. Although Gemma is engaged to another, Sanin pursues her. They eventually admit to loving each other and go on to become engaged. He declares himself deliriously happy and decides to sell his Russian estate to fund his marriage to Gemma. He then meets a wealthy young married woman, the seductive Maria. He allows himself to fall for her charms and though feeling remorseful he decides to follow Maria and leave Gemma.

The story sharply defines the idea of love versus the concept of lust. Love is meant to be the ideal, but Sanin turned toward lust and ended up losing everything. Although Spring Torrents is meant to be autobiographical I still found it difficult to have much sympathy for Sanin. He didn’t have the strength of character to resist Maria, who was obviously toying with him. The author does give the story a sense of closure by having Sanin write to Gemma in later life and in turn receives her forgiveness.… (mais)

Every intellectually curious young man tends toward either Arkady or Bazarov. Whichever you are, following upon the key idea of Turgenev’s book, it would be best to seek out your counterpart. Turgenev knows that what makes Bazarov a charismatic and compelling character is that he actually is a lot more coherent than the people and the ideologies he sets himself against. There is a simple satisfaction easily acquired by the just-intelligent-enough, in negating any of the imperfect and absurd reasons that “normal “ people give themselves for existing. Nietzsche said that these negators were like lions set apart from the sheep, and like lions they can inspire awe, fear, and admiration. Nietzsche, like Turgenev before him, saw the dead end that one inevitably reached if one lived as a lion for too long. The true genius is one who can become like a child again, playfully engaging with the complexity of life, without animus or judgement.
Ironically, it is easier to become like a child as one grows older, when the passions of youth cool and experience reveals each and every dogma as the shadow that it is. Bazarov, in his extreme lion-ness, could never have grown old, and indeed he didn’t.… (mais)

I'm always excited when I begin to read a title from Russian literature to read, because despite initially looking daunting and portentous, all of them (but particularly Tolstoy and Dostoevsky) prove to be deep and layered, cultured and weighty and yet surprisingly easy to read. Ivan Turgenev's Fathers and Sons was much the same way, particularly in being easy to read, and yet having finished it I find myself with less to say about it than I expected I would.

Whereas Tolstoy and Dostoevsky would root powerful themes deep within their stories, and their characters and structure would successfully embody these themes, Turgenev's attempts to do so here are more mixed. My English translation by Rosemary Edmonds, first published (perhaps not coincidentally) in the mid-1960s, emphasises the generational gap between Bazarov and Arkady and their fathers, the obvious 'fathers and sons' of the book's title. The youthful dissidence of Bazarov and Arkady latches on to the trendy ideology of nihilism, which stands at odds with the less exciting conservatism of their fathers' generation.

This is the obvious interpretation, but the society Turgenev paints – he does some fine character work – swirls so that one could also see it as the difficulty for anyone to understand another person: their emotions, feelings, ambitions and fears, particularly when they come into conflict with other people. "Possibly every human being is an enigma," Bazarov says on page 174, while in discussion with Madame Odintsov, and the frustrating romantic relationship the two share could be seen as another complement to the 'fathers and sons' generational narrative; that is, two people failing to understand another. "I did not understand you – you did not understand me," Madame Odintsov says a few pages later, before continuing: "I did not understand myself either" (pg. 183). This seems to recognise what drives Turgenev's novel: a cast of well-drawn characters who both clash and complement one another, all under the lens of the writer's microscope.

It leads to a lot of perfectly able writing, much of which is also narratively satisfying, but it denies the book a sharpness found in, for example, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky. Tolstoy would bring out the characters as a reflection of their time and his themes with more vivacity, whereas in Turgenev's novel the fact that events play out against the backdrop of the emancipation of the serfs (the peasant 'sons' becoming free of their patriarchal 'fathers') often seems incidental. And whereas Dostoevsky would strengthen the conflicting viewpoints of the characters so that their resulting clash was more profound, Turgenev, in contrast, doesn't seem to hold much respect for the nihilist viewpoint held by some of his younger characters, and waters it down. Some of his writing decisions seem almost satirical, such as Bazarov falling in love (an irony for a nihilist) or Arkady saying he accepts no authority in the same breath he names Bazarov as his mentor (pg. 138), though the book shies away from anything as pointed as satire.

The frustration Turgenev's characters feel in one another, then, is a frustration I also found myself in reading about them. Bazarov in particular is a wretched being, though Turgenev does bring a liveliness to both him and the other characters which justifies the book's continued status as a classic. This novel was the first major piece of Russian literature which found success in the West, and paved the way not only for his storied countrymen but also proved an influence in how later authors, such as Hemingway, explored their characters' emotions and reserve as an end in itself, rather than as subservient to a plot or adventure. But for all that I enjoyed its readability and its drawing of character, I couldn't help feeling that the novel hit limiters that greater literature would have burst through. Whereas Tolstoy and Dostoevsky still seem fresh and dynamic, even timeless, Fathers and Sons feels very much like 19th-century literature.… (mais)