Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev

Published 1862 · 79,634 words · about 5 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction

How hard is Fathers and Sons to read?

Fathers and Sons scores 51 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 52 out of 100
Elegant nineteenth-century Russian prose; political and philosophical vocabulary.
Sentence structure: 50 out of 100
Clear narrative prose with dialogue; Turgenev is more accessible than Dostoevsky.
Abstraction: 60 out of 100
Philosophical positions debated through character; abstraction grounded in psychology.
Information density: 55 out of 100
Character-focused narrative with room for landscape and reflection.
Narrative indirection: 45 out of 100
Third-person narration with access to multiple perspectives; relatively direct.
Symbolic density: 50 out of 100
Less symbolic density than Dostoevsky; realism predominates.
Ironic distance: 55 out of 100
Turgenev's balanced irony toward all positions; neither fathers nor sons are endorsed.
Resolution withholding: 45 out of 100
Bazarov's death provides closure but leaves ideological questions open.
Structural complexity: 45 out of 100
Linear narrative focused on Bazarov's visit and its aftermath.

How Fathers and Sons is regarded

Fathers and Sons holds a literary regard score of 84 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

Where Fathers and Sons sits in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Placed by a full reading of the text (156 passages), not from reputation. Each verdict quotes the passage that earned it. On the axis from myth to irony, Fathers and Sons scores 63 out of 100. A second mythos, comedy, pulls at it with a weight of 0.2. About the map of stories.

Mode: Low Mimetic
Because I am a prosaic and eminently uninteresting individual.
Symbol: Formal
The Bazarovian establishment consisted of six small rooms, of which one—the room to which Vasili Ivanitch was now conducting our friends—was looked upon as the study.
Mythos: Irony iv (Tragic Pathos) (irony iv)
Russia needs me, indeed! Evidently she does not need me.
Genre: Novel + Anatomy
since some of my readers may care to know how each of the characters in the book is faring at the present day, I will satisfy that curiosity.

Where the story of Fathers and Sons takes place

  • Provincial Russia on the eve of emancipation, May 1859 to January 1860 (1859 to 1860), the main setting
  • St Petersburg and Baden: Paul Petrovitch's backstory with Princess R. (1830 to 1848)

5 things that are true of Fathers and Sons, with the passage for each

  1. The novel opens on a specific date, the 20th of May 1859, at a posting-house.

    stepped on to the verandah of a posting-house on the 20th day of May, 1859.

  2. Paul Petrovitch proposes pistols at ten paces for the duel with Bazarov.

    the rendezvous to be behind the copse, the weapons to be pistols, and the distance ten paces.

  3. Bazarov's valet-witness for the duel is Peter, the Kirsanovs' servant.

    Peter the valet, a man who stands at the apex of contemporary culture

  4. In delirium Paul Petrovitch says Thenichka resembles Princess R., whom he calls 'Nelly'.

    Nikolai, do not you think that Thenichka slightly resembles Nelly?

  5. Bazarov's fatal wound comes from an autopsy of a typhus victim.

    To-day I went to the village whence they brought the typhus patient the other day; and though they tried to conceal the body, I succeeded in discovering it.

Scenes in Fathers and Sons that Frye would name

27 sightings of Frye's terms in the text. The strongest:

Pathos, untitled
he sank back upon the pillow. "Now let there come—darkness." Bazarov's deathbed scene, the sacrificial end of the hero.
Agon, untitled
Past Bazarov's ear something suddenly whistled, while almost at the same moment there came the sound of a report. The duel is the physical agon between the generations.
Agon, untitled
At present the course most useful is denial. Therefore we deny. The central ideological contest between Bazarov and the Kirsanovs reaches its formal statement of nihilism.
Alazon, untitled
Matvei was a mere glittering fraud Koliazin is the pompous, stereotyped bureaucratic impostor.
Alazon, untitled
so lost his head as to sit down upon his own hat! Sitnikov, the 'progressive' braggart, is exposed as a fraud.
Cognitio, untitled
there were solemnised in the tiny church of the parish—solemnised quietly, almost without a witness—two sets of nuptials The double wedding restores and regularises the family and its society.

Books that share these scenes with Fathers and Sons

About the author

Ivan Turgenev