Отцы и дети [Fathers and Children]

Following a mention made of this book on the French National Public radio, I read Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons for the first time last month. This is a fabulous novel, reflecting about the failed modernisation of Russia after the abolishing of serfdom and the rise of nihilism in the younger generation. Having re-read Dostoievski’s Demons a few years ago, I appreciate the earlier Fathers and Sons and its role in shaping Dostoievski’s book, maybe in a less magistral way but also with a much more humane feeling in Fathers and Sons, while pretty much everyone sounds like an idiot in Demons. The plot of the nihilist attitudes of the sons being gradually swept away when falling in love may sound like a cheap trick, aggravated by the tragic and rather absurd ending of the most extreme character, but this is a more balanced image of the rural Russian society at the time, still exposing the shortcomings of a agrarian system that could not survive the (limited) emancipation of the serfs but also reflecting on the atemporal love of the parents for their prodigal sons!