Fathers and Sons

The book is a fantastic piece of literature, but one might argue that it has become even more than that. It's almost impossible to speak of mid-nineteenth-century Russian history without a reference to Turgenev's novel. Any discussion of the growing liberalism of Russia, the move to emancipate the serfs in 1861, the anger and radicalism of the younger Russian generation, feels somehow abstract without Turgenev. What this means is that Turgenev's carefully crafted fiction has become part of the historical record. He took upon himself a role that not too many modern novelists are even ambitious enough to attempt: national elegist. His personal struggle to understand what it meant to be a Russian circa 1860 was so well articulated that it became his country's.