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Shop nowFathers and Sons
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Learn moreOne of the most controversial Russian novels ever written, Fathers and Sons dramatizes the volcanic social conflicts that divided Russia just before the revolution, pitting peasants against masters, traditionalists against intellectuals, and fathers against sons. It is also a timeless depiction of the ongoing clash between generations.
When a young graduate returns home, he is accompanied—much to his father and uncle's discomfort—by a strange friend who does not acknowledge any authority and does not accept any principle on faith. Bazarov is a nihilist, representing the new class of youthful radical intelligentsia that would come to overthrow the Russian aristocracy and its values. Uncouth and forthright in his opinions, Turgenev's hero is nonetheless susceptible to love and, by that fact, doomed to unhappiness.
Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev (1818–1883) was the first Russian writer to gain a wide reputation in Europe. He witnessed the February Revolution in Paris (1848), and his subsequent connection with reform groups in Russia, along with his sympathetic 1852 eulogy of Nikolai Gogol (who satirized the corrupt bureaucracy of the Russian empire), led to his arrest and one-month imprisonment in St. Petersburg. In 1879 the honorary degree of doctor of civil law was conferred upon him by the University of Oxford.
Anthony Heald, an Audie Award–winning narrator, has earned Tony nominations and an Obie Award for his theater work; appeared in television’s Law & Order, The X-Files, Miami Vice, and Boston Public; and starred as Dr. Frederick Chilton in the 1991 Oscar-winning film The Silence of the Lambs. Heald has also won numerous AudioFile Earphones Awards. He lives in Ashland, Oregon, with his family.
Constance Garnett (1862–1946) translated the works of numerous Russian authors, including Tolstoy, Gogol, Pushkin, and Turgenev.
Reviews
“Stirs the mind…because everything is permeated with the most complete and most touching sincerity.”
“No fiction writer can be read through with a steadier admiration.”
“[A novel of] profound vitality.”
“Vividly portrays the unsettled state of Russian peasantry before the revolution.”
“The subtlety and rightness of Turgenev’s technique is most clearly seen in the central character Bazarov…a prefiguration of twentieth-century man.”
“The physician Bazarov, the novel’s protagonist, is the most powerful of Turgenev’s creations.”
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