Dmitry Ivanov. Predatory man

Predatory man
I.S. Turgenev. Fathers and Sons

Dmitry Ivanov

Publication date: July 21, 2000

I remember the image of Bazarov from my school days, or more precisely, from the time when, having graduated from the eighth grade of a very unloved high school, I ran away from it to the local mining technical school, where all my further literature lessons took place. These lessons were not God knows what, but I developed a special relationship with Bazarov: in Turgenev’s six-volume light brown collected works there were color illustrations of a certain artist Pinkesevich, whose portrait of this particular literary hero was somewhat better than all the others. Once during class, out of boredom, I began to redraw it in a notebook: I drew a grid and copied it with a simple ballpoint pen, enlarging it by about two and a half times. I tried and it turned out, honestly, better than Pinkesevich’s - more romantic, more mysterious, more severe. Our whole group watched and admired, and then I read the novel and thought that, in general, it was written well.

This story came to mind in connection with this: due to circumstances, I never became a builder of industrial and civil enterprises, which I studied at that distant technical school, but I am busy with other things and, in particular, I participate in checking entrance essays for various faculties of Moscow State University . At one of them this summer, the topic was proposed: “Bazarov and Pavel Petrovich Kirsanov as antipodes and doubles.” The topic seemed easy and winning to me, immediately the mutual hostility of two extraordinary representatives of various public camps, Bazarov’s “outfit” and the English “suites” of the elder Kirsanov, biting ideological disputes over evening tea, and finally, an early morning duel in a birch grove arose in my memory. Nevertheless, I still decided to re-read the novel (which, to tell the truth, examiners usually do not do, believing themselves to be smarter than the applicants).

The line of relations between Bazarov and Pavel Petrovich is indeed one of the most prominent in the novel, but, as often happens, at the same time one of the least interesting. Indeed, what could be interesting today in the clash between a positivist and a pseudo-romanticist of the mid-19th century? Conversations about the contradictions between the progressive commoner-democrat Bazarov and the reactionary liberal-aristocrat Kirsanov have been stuck in my teeth since school (technical school). Except that the national issue still attracts attention. One of the heroes is an avid Anglomaniac, the other extols German science and scolds everything domestic, but the conversations among themselves are well known: “So, you are going against your people? - And even if it was so?.. and besides, he is Russian , but am I not Russian myself? - No, you are not Russian after everything you just said! I cannot recognize you as Russian. - My grandfather plowed the land " ... etc. Here you inevitably admit that the applicants are right, unanimously noting that “this work of the great writer I.S. Turgenev is dedicated to eternal themes that remain relevant today.”

But that's not what's good about the novel. Turgenev the ideologist is clearly inferior to Turgenev the human scientist, and Bazarov is interesting in his own right, without any comparison with Pavel Petrovich. I remember in college I liked his defiant directness and sharpness, his ability to slap something like this right on the forehead: “Every person must educate himself...”, “Nature is not a temple, but a workshop, and man is a worker in it,” “ In my opinion, Raphael is not worth a penny...", "A decent chemist is twenty times more useful than any poet...", "Huh? What? Not to your taste? No, brother! If you decide to mow down everything, kick yourself in the foot too !" . Nihilist, in a word.

However, the nihilist is kind of strange. Compare him, say, with another nihilist, a certain Souvarine (also Russian, by the way) from the novel “Germinal” (and Turgenev loved Zola). He was also a master at talking, and in almost the same words as Bazarov. Here’s one: “Understand, we need to destroy everything ,” but here’s another: “First we need to clear the place ,” - you can hardly tell the difference. Yes, only Souvarine talked and talked, and then he took a drill, a hacksaw and a chisel and brought down the shaft of the mine, around which the action of “Germinal” revolves, on the heads of several hundred of his fellow miners. And he left - apparently to continue clearing. And Bazarov... Well, except that he cut frogs, and only for experiments. And he also treated people - through which he suffered.

Or here’s another plot device, known since the time of Molière’s “The Misanthrope” - take a kind of skeptic and rationalist and make him fall in love, no matter what he says about women in general. Here, by the way, Bazarov turns into a very interesting side of himself, which I did not notice at all in college. Then his cynical statements about women passed along with others as purely nihilistic - a kind of shocking, the same ideologically verified chatter as his judgments about Raphael: “What kind of figure is this? He doesn’t look like other women,” “only freaks think freely between women.” , “Such a rich body! Let’s go to the anatomical theater now,” “in my opinion, it’s better to break stones on the pavement than to let a woman take possession of even the tip of a finger,” etc.

But now something else strikes the eye. Firstly, Bazarov is not at all original. To Sitnikov’s playful accusation: “You are a follower of Domostroy.” You should have a whip in your hands ,” Bazarov, not knowing that he is speaking in the words of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, replies: ” “The whip is a good deed . It is in this sphere - the sphere of relations between the sexes - that Nietzsche's breathing behind Bazarov's back is heard most clearly. And secondly, now it became clear to me that Bazarov, this “great hunter of women,” understood absolutely nothing about them, and in this sense he is pitiful and ridiculous, and not at all romantic, not mysterious and not harsh, like I thought once upon a time. Bazarov did not miss a single woman in the novel, but nothing worked out with any of them. Oh, what would Nietzsche and Zola say...

And yet Bazarov is a damn attractive character, and nothing can be done about it. Perhaps Katya Lokteva explains this best in the novel: “He is predatory, and you and I are tame . ” Bazarov is truly by nature a predator, an aggressor, albeit a fatally unlucky one. And this has nothing to do with any nihilism; nihilism is superficial, but this is innate, from nature. Turgenev feels this very well and draws just such an image, completely alien to himself, draws with genuine interest, with some kind of passion. “When I meet a person who would not give up in front of me, then I will change my opinion about myself ,” Bazarov says to him. But he won’t meet him, of course, where there... Pavel Petrovich started to stutter, so Bazarov immediately put a bullet in his thigh so that he would know his place. Wild, animal, unbridled power is the essence of Bazarov, which fascinates, no matter how you look at it. And fathers and children... these are all relative concepts; it is not for nothing that I read from particularly advanced applicants two equally convincing and at the same time completely opposite interpretations of who should be considered children here and who should be considered fathers.

Finally, what else is this novel notable for - the abundance of memorable, almost catchphrases (in this, Turgenev, in my opinion, is almost as good as Griboedov, and not only in this: Turgenev in general has a very inherent sense of the dramatic, even though he is a novelist - just re-read his dialogues ; and Griboyedov wrote his “Woe from Wit”, also from “The Misanthrope”): “I love the comfort of life... This does not prevent me from being a liberal,” “he with his sideburns is a real pig in the bush,” “we have no right indulge in the satisfaction of personal egoism ,” and the famous “Oh, my friend, Arkady Nikolaich! I ask you one thing: do not speak beautifully . ”

I guess I got a little carried away with the quotes, but Turgenev’s language is such that it’s impossible to tear yourself away. So even the parallel reading of three dozen introductory essays could not spoil the pleasure of the novel.

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Web presence ( V.Sonkin )

Turgenev, represented by "Spring Waters", was the hero of the second issue of "Indiscriminate Reading" . Let's try to see what has changed over these sixteen months.

To the State Literary Museum I.S. Turgenev in Orel even before, if my memory serves me correctly, it was difficult to reach him, but now it is completely impossible.

" is in place The American student's project " The Byronic Roots of Bazarov - and this time its mention is much more appropriate.

The OZon store has a good, detailed annotation for the school-academic publication “Fathers and Sons.” Books, alas, are "out of stock".

Dmitry Ivanov did not introduce us to any gems from the works that he had to check - which is a pity, because the quotes available online from the works about “Fathers and Sons” (in which for some reason one about Rakhmetov was included) are not funny (from magazine "Crocodile" in 1992: "Bazarov respected Odintsova not only for her intelligence, but also for her rich body").

There are also materials for a research lesson on the novel. The text is called “ Their affairs are beginning to get better .” I was especially intrigued by the line, “Whenever this work is studied, the question of why the main character dies is raised.” If I remember correctly, the main character was poisoned by cadaveric poison. What's the mystery?

The rest of the materials in Russian are also related to education (manuals, “golden”, damn, “essays”, abstracts, etc.). This is the inevitable ballast that forms in the web presence of a textbook (in the literal sense of the word: included in the school curriculum) work.

There are a lot of materials of various kinds on “Fathers and Sons” in English-language resources - here textbook knowledge (of a higher, university level) also plays a role. You can listen to the novel on cassette (read by Walter Zimmerman); you can buy a book published by Oxford University Press translated by Emeritus Professor of the University of London Richard Freeborn (I found links to two other English translations - this is how we should translate foreign classics); you can get acquainted with the verdict of the “ Group of Readers ,” who gather in a circle and discuss books (they met at Max’s place; the novel, an unknown reviewer sarcastically notes, turned out to be so good that then Max forgot that we had already read it, and offered it for discussion six months later); you can meet questions on a novel from the curriculum of some American university. And then Altavista began to issue links to the “Association of Fathers of America” and other things of the same kind, mainly dedicated to the struggle of divorced fathers for the right to see their children. Without any mention of Turgenev.

If so, here is a link to the amateur, but very popular site “ Children and Ancestors ”.