Fathers and Sons

Arkady Kirsanov returns to his father's country estate with his friend Bazarov, a young physician who calls himself a nihilist and dismisses art, romance, and inherited authority as worthless. Bazarov's arrival unsettles the older Kirsanov brothers, one of whom challenges him, and his cold certainties are gradually tested by an attraction he cannot rationalize away and by the ordinary fact of illness and death. Turgenev sets the generational quarrel of 1860s Russia inside a single household, tracing how a philosophy built to reject feeling meets the parts of life that will not bend to it.