Fathers and Sons

The young graduate Arkady brings his friend Bazarov, a self-declared nihilist who believes in nothing but science and reason, home to his father's estate, and the clash between the generations plays out across the estates and towns of provincial Russia. Turgenev maps a real rural world: the Kirsanov estate of Maryino, the provincial town and its society, the estate where Bazarov meets the woman who defeats his creed, and the humble farm of his devoted parents.

Arkady

Maryino

The homecoming

At the Kirsanov estate of Maryino, Arkady's kindly, ineffectual father and his elegant, conservative uncle Pavel receive the graduates, and the abrasive Bazarov at once sets the household on edge. Turgenev opens the generational quarrel here, the mild liberal fathers of the 1840s baffled and affronted by the sons' cold, iconoclastic nihilism.

The opening chapters

inspired by Maryino, the Kirsanov family estate to which Arkady brings Bazarov, is a fictional estate drawn from the landed provinces of central Russia; sited there.

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