Nihilism in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons

Ivan Turgenev’s novel Fathers and Sons is about many things--parents and children, a fading social order and an emerging new one, romantic love--but the heart of the novel around which all else is arranged is the nihilism of the young medical student Yevgeny Bazarov. Indeed, in his book Modernism and Nihilism, Shane Weller writes that it was Fathers and Sons more than any other work that gave the term nihilism currency.

Nihilism is generally defined as the belief that nothing has any meaning. The Oxford Guide to Philosophy says, “By definition, the nihilist believes in nothing and disdains all values.” As Weller points out, however, nihilism can take many forms. There are nihilisms--philosophical, political, social, Nietzschean, Heideggerian and so forth--and various “deployments” throughout history.

Bazarov’s nihilism in Fathers and Sons is of the destructive sort. Seeing all norms and institutions as empty, he disregards them and wishes to see them cleared away without himself desiring to replace them with anything. He doesn’t believe in social hierarchy, superstition or art. Soon after Bazarov comes to stay at Arkady Petrovitch’s house, he gets into a philosophical discussion with his friend’s family. Here is a brief exchange with Arkady’s father:

“Allow me, though,” began Nikolai Petrovitch. “You deny everything; or, speaking more precisely, you destroy everything… But one must construct, too, you know.”

“That’s not our business now… The ground wants clearing first.”

     --(Fathers and Children, translated by Constance Garnett)

Bazarov’s philosophy is different from what Weller calls programmatic nihilism, which seeks to remake the world. In fact, for all his contempt of the status quo, he has no belief in progress either.

For Friedrich Nietzsche, nihilism as the sense that nothing has any meaning is the result of that which we considered the highest value turning out to be of no value at all. The central crisis of modernity, one which society as a whole became unable to deny in the 19th Century, is the death of God, and it poses a question we are all familiar with today: If there is no God, what gives life meaning?

Western civilization’s highest good, the monotheistic God, turned out to be nothing more than the product of the smoke and mirrors of our own consciousness. In the modern world, we are all faced with this nihilism, the absence of what was for so long taken to be the objective ground of all values, but nonetheless some, unable or unwilling to face it, turn away to veneration of the smoke and mirrors in their head.

Nietzsche, unlike Bazarov, saw nihilism as a force to aid as well as overcome. If nihilism is destruction, then the solution is creation. If what we have valued has passed away, then we need new values. The artist, through his work, brings forth new values, his or her values, and imposes them on the world through force of will, places them against the nothingness, like a painter portraying his subject against negative space, or a musician invoking music out of silence.

My own beliefs have traced the path of nihilism outlined by Nietzsche. In the years after my infatuation with religion, I realized that I could no longer maintain my intellectual integrity and still believe in God, whether that of the mild Methodism of my upbringing, that of the fundamentalist Baptists who courted me, or that of the sophisticated Christianity of my professors in college and the theologians we studied. As a seeker for truth, I could hardly accept the notion of a being for which there is not only no proof, but for which not even a single compelling argument that can withstand scrutiny or even a single piece of solid evidence exists.

At that point, my highest value had been devalued. This was never a cause of utter despair for me, for I was convinced that anything that wasn’t true shouldn’t be believed, but nonetheless, as the years passed, my thoughts sometimes strayed into nihilistic territory. If there is no God, no moral order imposed on the universe, then on the grand scale of the universe, what do the worst atrocities matter?

It has taken some time to find new values and bases for them, but I have and continue to do so. There may not be a divinity to impose order on the world, but I do, through the force of my will, even determined as it may be by natural causes. My values are those of secular humanism and they can do much good in the world--some would say more good than those of fantastical superstitious systems.

I was never in any danger of falling into the blackest, most destructive of nihilisms anyway, because such nihilism is, for basically decent and mentally sound folks, impossible to uphold. Along our mental journeys, we may rationally reach a point where we declare that nothing has any meaning, but we cannot stop life from having meaning for us--it just does whether or not we like it, understand it, or think it should.

Nihilism is the impossible philosophy, and this is something the characters in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons demonstrate.

Like many great novels, Fathers and Sons is populated with a wide variety characters and we see that for each of them, life has meaning in different ways. For the fathers and mothers, the meaning lies principally in the well-being of their children, although they do have other values as well, like Nikolai Petrovitch with his music, reading and desire to modernize his farm, and Pavel Petrovich with his aristocratic dignity and foppish Anglophilia.

Life has meaning for the novel’s nihilists as well. It is plain from the earliest pages that Arkady’s heart isn’t into it--that he harbors sympathy for the backwards ways of his family, their stuffy customs and foolish superstitions--and he eventually falls madly in love with Katya, marries, and presumably settles down to a conventional existence with kids and all the rest.

Bazarov mocks Arkady for becoming a “jackdaw” (“a most respectable family bird”), but even he, the novel’s most strident nihilist, falls prey to love, becoming infatuated with Anna Odintsova. It comes to nothing, and even on his deathbed, he remains defiant, declaring:

“I said I should rebel,” he shrieked hoarsely, with his face inflamed and distorted, shaking his fist in the air, as though threatening someone; “and I rebel, I rebel!”

While his spirit is admirable, we have seen its limits in more than love. He participated in his father’s medical practice, with care, almost as if...it meant something to him. And this should come as no surprise, for throughout the book his passion for learning about the natural world was evident, and in the end, it was this passion that led to his contracting typhus.

The experiences of the characters in Fathers and Sons are much like our own. We construct personae for ourselves, worry over things, dedicate ourselves to causes, and fall in various kinds of love. We might ask as Bazarov does on occasion, “What good is it?”, and in the long run, on a cosmological scale, perhaps none of it is any good at all. The universe will someday undergo heat death or some other demise, long before then the sun will turn into a red giant and scorch the earth, and in not so long at all, each one of us will die, but until then, we cannot help life having meaning. It simply does.