Turgenev’s novella left me feeling surprisingly—perhaps intentionally—empty. There is a hollowness to the narrative that leaves the reader feeling hollow as well. Perhaps the hole is created by the writer so that the reader may go and fill it with something themself. That’s a big ask, though, since Turgenev manages to find little meaning in, even destroy the meaning of, such putative idols as revolution, medicine, love and marriage, and death. 

The novel opens with the visit of Arkady and Bazarov to Arkady’s father’s estate, Maryino, named thus for Bazarov’s departed mother.

Nikolai, Arkady’s father, lives there with his brother, Pavel, and his mistress, Fenichka. Nikolai, the landlord, is playing at revolution, emancipating his serfs, like Tolstoy’s Levin, and trying to set up a working farm, to little avail (his son Arkady will have greater success in the postscript as eventual estate manager). 

Arkady and Bazarov—the carelessly idealistic university students—immediately fall to arguing with the elders, Nikolai and Pavel. Pavel and Bazarov, representatives of their respective generations and ideologies, especially argue with acrimony.

Bazarov is a self-professed nihilist. He is a medical student and a staunch materialist. He hates, with bitterness, the aristocratic affectations of his elders and social betters (he is from a superior class, but his family is very poor). Pavel is something of a dandy, always wearing immensely fashionable outfits—patterned suits and fezzes—to do nothing more than sit around the house with his brother. By contrast he defends nationalism, aestheticism, and other pieties, and grows to hate the young nihilist, whom he considers impudent. 

However, Pavel has had a somewhat disappointing life: once a promising officer, he threw away his career for a love that ended nowhere. He chased his lover all over Europe, at great expense, and ended up alone. Pavel fears that his esteem for the sacred social things of this world has led to his unhappiness, and Bazarov is revealing this to him. Bazarov eagerly nettles this dreg of the upper classes, knowing that his challenges to society are direct salvos at Pavel’s character. 

Meanwhile, Arkady and Nikolai game out the relationship of father and son. It goes poorly at first, and Arkady and Bazarov depart for Bazarov’s parents house.

There, they only stay three days (“three days in three years is not much!” Bazarov’s dejected father laments). They visit instead, and at length, Odinstova’s house.

Odinstova is a beautiful woman, who both young men initially love. Bazarov is eventually rejected by her, whereas Arkady finally marries her younger sister, Katya.

First however, Bazarov, Odinstova, and Arkady seem to play a game of falling in love. Odinstova is interested in Bazarov—only until he confesses his affection, at which point she loses interest; in the man who professed total indifference to love to begin with (which fact redoubles his embarrassment from the jilting). Odinstova then falls in love with Arkady, sort of, but anyways it’s too late, as he has asked Katya to marry him; Katya who has real feeling, not merely the ability to play and affect love. 

Bazarov returns to “work on science” at Nikolai’s farm (he was prevented from doing so at his own house by his father’s doting), where he continues to barb Pavel. Eventually he deals him a real wound: Pavel has fallen in love with his brother’s mistress, Fenichka, and Bazarov smooches her one day in a glade, when Pavel is secretly watching. A duel ensues; Pavel is wounded, survives, and Bazarov flees back to his family. There, he contracts typhus while treating a patient, and dies. 

I suppose the book could be classed as a tragicomedy, since it ends with both a marriage and a death. While Bazarov is wasting away, Arkady is marrying Katya—and Pavel, in an about-face, has convinced his brother to marry Fenichka, his mistress and babymama. Bazarov’s ignominious tomb, overgrown, in “some forgotten corner of Russia,” is just deserts for his nihilism. Nothing mattered, and neither did he—except to his parents, whom he scorned, and who now weep daily and bitterly at his grave.

Pavel laughs last, as he leaves the farm for Petersburg, then Dresden, where he is very welcome, and celebrated in society. 

If there is a moral of the book, it is perhaps that the old pieties don’t exist for nothing. However, there is ample evidence given against them. That is why the book feels empty: you feel fucked if you do, fucked if you don’t at the end. Neither revolution nor participation will leave you satisfied.