Arkady is a young student who returns home to his country estate together with his much-admired friend Bazarov. Bazarov is a man of strong and outspoken views, a charismatic figure who can impress even those, like Arkady's father, who reject his opinions. Yet Bazarov finds difficulty in applying his intellectual convictions to the messy realities of life. His 'love' affair with Madame Odintsova is a catalogue of misunderstandings and missed opportunities, far removed from the philosophy of free love he espouses. A quarrel with Arkady's uncle Pavel ends in a ludicrous duel. When Bazarov returns to his own estate, his mind preoccupied, he finds himself in the midst of a typhus epidemic and, in tending the victims of it, he contracts the disease himself and dies. As its title suggests, the struggle between the generations is at the heart of Fathers and Sons. Its most memorable character, Bazarov, rejects what he sees as the failed romanticism of the older generation in favor of radical new ideas but these too are seen to be fatally flawed. His life appears to have been a failure and his early death bitterly ironic proof of his belief in the essential futility of the world but it is clear that his powerful personality has had its effect on most of the other characters in the novel. Fathers and Sons, Turgenev's most famous book, was widely admired in Western Europe during his lifetime and Turgenev, who spent long periods of his life in Germany and France, was the Russian novelist closest in spirit to contemporary Western writers such as Flaubert, whom he knew well. In Russia, his work has often been overshadowed by the novels of writers like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, seen as somehow more authentically 'Russian' than Turgenev, but his coolly ironic and humane vision of the world, exemplified by Fathers and Sons, is worth discovering.

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