65 pages • 2 hours read
Ivan TurgenevFathers And Sons
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1862A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
A quick note on names: According to Russian cultural practice, each character has a first name, a middle patronymic name derived from the name of their father, and a last name. Polite address does not use the last name like in English (so, not Mr. Kirsanov), but instead the first name and patronymic (for instance, Nikolai Petrovich).
The novel opens in May 1859, before Russian peasants became legally free, as noble landowners are adjusting to the threat this looming new reality poses to their economic status.
Nikolai Petrovich Kirsanov, a middle-aged man wearing “a dust-covered coat, and no hat” (3) waits for someone at a coach inn, a stop for travelers. He repeatedly asks his servant if there is “any sign of them” (3).
Nikolai calls Marino, his large estate with two hundred peasants, a “farm” to signify his liberal politics and commitment to peasant freedom (3). His father had been a career officer, distinguishing himself in Russia’s 1812-1815 war with Napoleon. His mother lived a life of relative luxury and prestige, and “wore splendid caps and silk dresses that rustled” (4). Nikolai, unlike his father, was “something of a coward,” so he entered the civil service (4). His bureaucratic career took him to the imperial capital of St. Petersburg, where he shared an apartment with his brother, a military officer. Their father died shortly after his retirement, and their mother succumbed to “ennui” soon after (4). Nikolai fell in love with Masha, the progressive daughter of a civil servant and gave up a position in government to retire to the countryside. The Kirsanovs had one son, Arkady, and lived a life of domestic bliss until Masha died in 1847. Nikolai would have left Russia, but the European revolutions of 1848 thwarted his travel plans. Instead, he “occupied himself with the reorganization of his estate.”
Now, Nikolai is meeting Arkady, who has just graduated from university in St. Petersburg and coming back home. Nikolai daydreams about his son’s return, lamenting that his late wife is missing the momentous occasion. Soon, the doting father is rewarded with the “familiar profile of a beloved face,” and kisses his son’s cheek (6).
Chapter 2 Summary
Arkady greets his father, in a “voice hoarse from the road but still strong and youthful.” The father “seemed much more excited than his son” (6). Arkady introduces his friend, Evgeny Vasilich Bazarov, who will also be staying with the family. Bazarov’s face is “Long and thin, with a broad forehead, a nose that was flat at the top but sharp at the tip, large greenish eyes and drooping side whiskers of a sandy color, it was enlivened by a serene smile and reflected both confidence and intelligence” (6).
Bazarov does not answer when his host hopes that he won’t be bored on the family estate, and Arkady orders the horses harnessed so they can continue their journey. Nikolai is anxious that the family carriage will not fit Bazarov, who may have to ride separately in a hired coach. Arkady assures his father his friend “does not stand on ceremony,” so father and son set off in one carriage and Bazarov in the other (7).
Chapter 3 Summary
Alone with his son, Nikolai enthuses that his son is finally home while Arkady is slightly embarrassed at his dad’s effusiveness. Nikolai admits that he has been waiting for most of the day at the inn, and Arkady fondly kisses his father in acknowledgment of the gesture. Arkady explains that Bazarov is his dearest friend, a doctor and scientist. Father and son turn to estate matters. Nikolai is having trouble managing laborers and the peasants have stopped paying their quarterly rent. Nikolai explains that he no longer has unpaid house serfs—a kind of land-based indentured servitude—and instead pays wages to a steward, a coachman, and his valet.
Nikolai switches to French to convey a delicate matter, which would horrify a “‘stern moralist’” (9). Most educated Russian nobles of the period spoke French from birth, sometimes better than Russian. Nikolai Petrovich explains that he has been living with a former servant called Fenechka. Arkady assures his father that there is no need to change this on Bazarov’s account. Arkady feels a “secret superiority” that he and Bazarov are above caring about such things (10).
As Arkady views the estate, including a recently sold forest to pay expenses, he is somewhat dismayed by signs of decay: “little villages with low peasant huts under dark roofs often missing half their thatch” and “small crooked threshing barns […] peasants […] in tatters and riding pathetic nags” (10). Arkady notes that the land around him “‘strikes one neither for its prosperity nor its industriousness’” and he decides that “reforms are essential” (11). On the other hand, Arkady is taken in by birdsong and the signs of emerging spring, eventually gazing at his father with a “young boy’s joyous face” (11). Nikolai, also moved to joy, recites a classic verse from Pushkin’s novel in verse classic, Eugene Onegin.
Bazarov asks Arkady to pass him tobacco and invites him to have a cigar, interrupting the familial reunion. Nikolai “turns away to as not to offend his son”—Nikolai does not use tobacco (12).
Chapter 4 Summary
As the group enters the house, “no crowd of servants appeared” though “they entered a drawing room furnished in the latest style” (12). A deferential older servant, Prokofich, enters and kisses Arkady’s hand, and the younger men decide to retire to their rooms before a meal. Before they can go, Pavel Petrovich Kirsanov, Arkady’s paternal uncle, enters. Pavel is a little older than Nikolai and “his face […] revealed traces of remarkable beauty. His bright, black, almond shaped eyes were particularly exquisite” (13). Pavel shakes hands with Arkady and kisses his cheek in the “Russian style” (13). After the young men depart, Pavel describes Bazarov as an animal, foreshadowing their mutual antipathy.
Dinner is tense. Insecure in his childhood home as an adult, Arkady drinks a great deal of wine, while Bazarov is silent and eats large quantities of food. Once they are alone, Bazarov disapprovingly mocks Pavel’s “dandyism” and long fingernails (14), while Arkady defends his uncle, referencing a failed romance in his past. Bazarov has kinder words for Nikolai, but calls both brothers “aging romantics” and mocks the “English washstands” in the guest rooms (14). Arkady, before sleep, feels real joy at being home, while his father remains so excited he struggles to sleep. Pavel stays up reading a liberal English newspaper, preoccupied with his past troubles and current circumstances. Fenechka is also awake, listening to the slumber of her young child with Nikolai.
Chapters 1-4 Analysis
As the work opens, Turgenev immediately introduces his work’s key subject: family drama amid a period of profound social change in the tsarist empire. The landowning Kirsanovs unmistakably belong to the aristocracy, owing to their family’s high military rank and their access to higher education. Nikolai is accustomed to luxury but also somewhat uneasy about it, as he takes pains to assure Arkady they no longer use serf labor for their family’s domestic staff.
Like his father, Arkady is emotional: He is happy about the family reunion, though he is also torn between longstanding family ties and his new sense of adulthood. He takes pains to assure his father that he has a modern attitude toward sex and women, denying that he has any concerns about the domestic arrangement between his father and Fenechka. Arkady also sets himself up as an astute observer and a more critical reformer than his father, as he sees only disarray and areas for improvement on the family estate.
From the first, Bazarov separates father and son: His offer of tobacco interrupts their conversation, highlighting the generational conflict between the younger men who smoke and the older ones who don’t. Once the travelers arrive at Marino, Bazarov is unimpressed by Pavel’s European manners and anglophile sensibility to the point where Arkady feels compelled to defend his uncle. Cultural preferences had profound political importance in imperial Russia: Liberal nobles often looked to France and England as models of civilization, and those known as Westernizers felt that this path was the key to Russia’s future development, including the emancipation of the serfs.
Bazarov immediately sets himself up as a member of a different generation, whose values are at odds with those of the men around him. In this, he is a classic instance of the “superfluous man”—a standard literary character in mid-19th century Russian literature, and one which Turgenev explored at length in almost all of his novels. The superfluous man is a talented, intelligent individual who cannot assimilate into social norms nor find a way to productively make use of his abilities. Typically, superfluous men in fiction become manipulative, ennui-filled, and selfish, unwilling to use their power or skills for the benefit of other people, and often justifying this attitude with either existential crises or an adherence to an amoral philosophy (in Bazarov’s case, nihilism).
As the chapter closes, only Arkady sleeps well: the Kirsanov home is beset by strong emotions, political turmoil, and class disarray, as a former servant is now essentially the lady of the house. As a quintessential realist, Turgenev sets up the family as representatives of Russia’s nobility on the eve of social transformation.
