It is hard to say how deeply I was drawn into this text. It is also odd that I read Peter Pan during this month as the beginnings of both books want to establish that there is something else going on in these pages than meets the eye. Turgenev is doing something very different in his book, and he sets each element up like Bazarov’s laboratory in the Petrovich’s house. Turgenev asks the question, what do your own thoughts mean to others? Are we indebted to one another in a way that simply changing your mind can fracture a relationship? But ultimately, this book asks the question, what if you loved someone and they didn’t love you back? This is a deep concern of this book and one that I don’t think finds the positive resolution you might imagine an embarked upon theme like this would attempt.
I have tried to read this little book many times throughout my life, probably over the last 20 years I have picked it up and put it down. I set out to read this book as a young man simply because Hemingway in one of his books claims it was one of his favorite books. I was really into Hemingway at the time, and thought if it was good enough for him it should be good enough for me. For whatever reason I never got past the first couple of chapters multiple times in the last two decades.
The first 3 chapters of this book do not do the rest of the book justice. Turgenev is trying to set up some fairly high stakes for this type of novel and the beginning gets off to a rocky start for the reading. You are on a horse drawn cart with 3 men you don’t know yet and one them is an atheist and the other, perhaps who you might consider the main character of the book Arcady just thinks that’s the most delightful thing in the world and his old fashioned father who has come to pick them up from the station, I guess, is not amused with the atheist or the fact that his son is so enamored of Bazarov. This is unfortunate because this conflict though important to the book really disappears from my eyes but the interpersonal relationships really step out behind this façade very quickly.
Bazarov is a difficult character, and I couldn’t find a way through the rest of the book to come to like this person. I am not sure if we are supposed to, but I also did not like Arcady, Nickolai, or Pavel. The characters I liked in this book were the women, Fenechka and Odintsova. These are the only two characters that seem to live as they mean to throughout the novel. Not much happens in this book, so where we read it "plot light," the characters, and even more so the dialogue are as deep as the ocean. I have never read dialogue like this. If you want to give a young writer the task of figuring out how to write dialogue, give them this book and let them weep at its majesty and walk into the sea. It could have been from the performance of the audio book that I was listening to but the dialogue is so wrapped with complexity, competing motivations, miscommunications, and things being left unsaid in a way that I found it mystifying.
There is a scene where Arcady and Bazarov, presumably young college students, have had to sleep in a barn for some reason I can’t recall at the moment, and they are laying there trying to fall asleep in the hay and they begin to have an argument that feels almost like a romance. There is one point in the argument that Arcady rebuffs Bazarov’s bullshit, and asks the question, “when where you ever given to self-destruction?” and in a book written more recently, Bazarov would have answered, ‘right now’ and kissed him I am sure of it.
The theme of novel circles around this question: what if you loved someone that does not love you back? This is where the connection to Hemingway gets interesting I think. Hemingway is a complicated character in the history of American literature and one that I still have a fondness for deep in my heart. There is something about that human being that I think I understand from his writing. I have read 5 of his books mostly from the beginning and ending of his writing life. I was driving down Lake Shore Drive in the rain looking for something for my daughter on a sort of a side quest trip to Chicago listening to the ending of this book. I was driving south at night, looking up at the neon pink Drake hotel sign with the lake on my left, and I was listening to the dying Bazarov sort of plead with himself as he was dying to get the resolution of his question whether Odintsova actually loved him. She comes at the end to convalesce him, and he reads this as a sign that she actually did love him and that this could be the only justification for this action. She doesn’t, and this is the way the book ends. Odintsova loves him as a human not wanting to see him die alone like a dog. Bazarov didn’t want love, he wanted to be worshipped. Odintsova didn’t want to worship that man. Bazarov dies knowing that he loved her but she did not love him back, or at least not in the way he wanted.
And the thought occurred to me, this is why Hemingway loved this book and why so many of his character’s lives revolve around this gravitational pull, this question which isn’t unique to these authors by any stretch, but situated here, I felt like I knew something secret, something intimate about this writer that shaped my young reading life. It may have been a concern of Hemingway’s life this issue of whether people actually loved him or this tension between fear and love and adoration that I think pounds through his writing. Anyways, that’s enough about Fathers and Sons. It was fantastic. Please read this book.
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