Fathers and Children

“Well, Piotr, not in sight yet?” was the question asked on May the 20th, 1859, by a gentleman of a little over forty, in a dusty coat and checked trousers, who came out without his hat on to the low steps of the posting station at S⁠⸺. He was addressing his servant, a chubby young fellow, with whitish down on his chin, and little, lacklustre eyes.

The servant, in whom everything⁠—the turquoise ring in his ear, the streaky hair plastered with grease, and the civility of his movements⁠—indicated a man of the new, improved generation, glanced with an air of indulgence along the road, and made answer:

“No, sir; not in sight.”

“Not in sight?” repeated his master.

“No, sir,” responded the man a second time.

His master sighed, and sat down on a little bench. We will introduce him to the reader while he sits, his feet tucked under him, gazing thoughtfully round.

“What is Bazarov?” Arkady smiled. “Would you like me, uncle, to tell you what he really is?”

“If you will be so good, nephew.”

“He’s a nihilist.”

“Eh?” inquired Nikolai Petrovitch, while Pavel Petrovitch lilted a knife in the air with a small piece of butter on its tip, and remained motionless.

“He’s a nihilist,” repeated Arkady.

“A nihilist,” said Nikolai Petrovitch. “That’s from the Latin, nihil, nothing, as far as I can judge; the word must mean a man who⁠ ⁠… who accepts nothing?”

“Say, ‘who respects nothing,’ ” put in Pavel Petrovitch, and he set to work on the butter again.

“Who regards everything from the critical point of view,” observed Arkady.

“Isn’t that just the same thing?” inquired Pavel Petrovitch.

“No, it’s not the same thing. A nihilist is a man who does not bow down before any authority, who does not take any principle on faith, whatever reverence that principle may be enshrined in.”

“Well, and is that good?” interrupted Pavel Petrovitch.

“That depends, uncle. Some people it will do good to, but some people will suffer for it.”

“Indeed. Well, I see it’s not in our line. We are old-fashioned people; we imagine that without principles, taken as you say on faith, there’s no taking a step, no breathing. Vous avez changé tout cela. God give you good health and the rank of a general, while we will be content to look on and admire, worthy⁠ ⁠… what was it?”

“I begin to agree with my uncle,” remarked Arkady; “you certainly have a poor opinion of Russians.”

“As though that mattered! The only good point in a Russian is his having the lowest possible opinion of himself. What does matter is that two and two make four, and the rest is all foolery.”

“And is nature foolery?” said Arkady, looking pensively at the bright-coloured fields in the distance, in the beautiful soft light of the sun, which was not yet high up in the sky.

“Nature, too, is foolery in the sense you understand it. Nature’s not a temple, but a workshop, and man’s the workman in it.”

At that instant, the long drawn notes of a violoncello floated out to them from the house. Someone was playing Schubert’s “Expectation” with much feeling, though with an untrained hand, and the melody flowed with honey sweetness through the air.

“What’s that?” cried Bazarov in amazement.

“It’s my father.”

“Your father plays the violoncello?”

“Yes.”

“And how old is your father?”

“Forty-four.”

Bazarov suddenly burst into a roar of laughter.

“What are you laughing at?”

“Upon my word, a man of forty-four, a paterfamilias in this out-of-the-way district, playing on the violoncello!”

Bazarov went on laughing; but much as he revered his master, this time Arkady did not even smile.

“Where are you going?” she said slowly.

He answered nothing, and sank into a chair.

“And so you consider me a placid, pampered, spoiled creature,” she went on in the same voice, never taking her eyes off the window. “While I know so much about myself, that I am unhappy.”

“You unhappy? What for? Surely you can’t attach any importance to idle gossip?”

Madame Odintsov frowned. It annoyed her that he had given such a meaning to her words.

“Such gossip does not affect me, Yevgeny Vassilyitch, and I am too proud to allow it to disturb me. I am unhappy because⁠ ⁠… I have no desires, no passion for life. You look at me incredulously; you think that’s said by an ‘aristocrat,’ who is all in lace, and sitting in a velvet armchair. I don’t conceal the fact: I love what you call comfort, and at the same time I have little desire to live. Explain that contradiction as best you can. But all that’s romanticism in your eyes.”

Bazarov shook his head. “You are in good health, independent, rich; what more would you have? What do you want?”

“What do I want,” echoed Madame Odintsov, and she sighed, “I am very tired, I am old, I feel as if I have had a very long life.

Two hours later he knocked at Bazarov’s door.

“I must apologise for hindering you in your scientific pursuits,” he began, seating himself on a chair in the window, and leaning with both hands on a handsome walking-stick with an ivory knob (he usually walked without a stick), “but I am constrained to beg you to spare me five minutes of your time⁠ ⁠… no more.”

“All my time is at your disposal,” answered Bazarov, over whose face there passed a quick change of expression directly Pavel Petrovitch crossed the threshold.

“Five minutes will be enough for me. I have come to put a single question to you.”

“A question? What is it about?”

“I will tell you, if you will kindly hear me out. At the commencement of your stay in my brother’s house, before I had renounced the pleasure of conversing with you, it was my fortune to hear your opinions on many subjects; but so far as my memory serves, neither between us, nor in my presence, was the subject of single combats and duelling in general broached. Allow me to hear what are your views on that subject?”

Bazarov, who had risen to meet Pavel Petrovitch, sat down on the edge of the table and folded his arms.

“My view is,” he said, “that from the theoretical standpoint, duelling is absurd; from the practical standpoint, now⁠—it’s quite a different matter.”

“That is, you mean to say, if I understand you right, that whatever your theoretical views on duelling, you would not in practice allow yourself to be insulted without demanding satisfaction?”

“You have guessed my meaning absolutely.”

“Very good. I am very glad to hear you say so. Your words relieve me from a state of incertitude.”

“Of uncertainty, you mean to say.”