Not So Russian

19 Ramadhan, 1441

Surprised, beguiled and puzzled by Turgenev's Fathers and Sons. I knew that Turgenev was regarded as more of a 'western' writer than Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, but I expected something a bit more solid, a bit more Russian than what turned out to be a seemingly slight, almost delicate work - at times curiously inconsequential, a word you'd never apply to the other Masters I'm considering here. Even when you can't figure out what's going on in Dostoevsky you know it has consequence, and Tolstoy oozes significance. But episodes in Turgenev sometimes seem to just fade away, like short stories lacking the energy to point a moral. The themes are obvious - generational conflict, social upheaval, ways of living fully - yet there's nothing obvious at all in the way they are worked through. In fact, they don't feel worked through at all: they are just there to brood over, but conveyed in a far from brooding manner.

I suppose what I found puzzling about Fathers and Sons was the kind of lack of overt seriousness involved. The death of Bazarov at the end (which I did not for one moment expect) struck me as almost flippant in terms of plot development - yet the melancholy following at the end of the novel was conveyed with powerful sincerity. And the character himself was genuinely fascinating in terms of idiosyncratic originality. You never quite knew what to expect from him. The duel with Pavel is a case in point. Why accept the duel at all? And why so little investment in it?

This is the kind of novel which sends a reader to critical commentary, not to be told what to think, but to help in trying to recognise the art underlying the artifice.