Fathers And Sons

Arising out of Russian intellectual circles in the 1830s, the Slavophile movement had a romantic vision of the Russian past. The movement posited a division between Russia and the West, and saw Russian Orthodoxy, the peasant commune, and the family, as key institutions for national renewal and reform.

Westernizers were Russian thinkers who supported transforming Russia along a European model. Turgenev was a noted Westernizer in many ways, as he was sympathetic to liberal democracy and European thinkers. Fathers and Sons is dedicated to the Westernizer literary critic Vissarion Belinsky.

This pan-European intellectual movement grew out of the new European order after the defeat of Napoleon in 1815. Romantics, broadly speaking, were interested in questions of individual self-understanding, the union of nature and artistic creation, and the psychology of emotions. In the introduction to his short history of European Romanticism, Warren Breckman writes that “in its highest form, the Romantic quest for integration and wholeness directed itself toward nature and divinity, though, in truth, nature and God were frequently viewed as virtually identical” (“Introduction” p. 19, see Further Reading for further information).

In the late 19th century, the rise of science, especially new information about biology and chemistry, fascinated Russian and European intellectuals. One branch of intellectuals, inspired by French thinker August Comte, became positivists who believed that all of society could be ordered on a scientific and empirical basis. Nihilists rejected this model, eager for an overthrow of existing institutions.

Serfdom was the forced labor system in Russia from roughly the 1500s to 1861, a version of the feudal system that was common earlier throughout Europe. A landowner’s serfs farmed the land and did not have freedom of movement. They paid their lord in labor or in money (quitrent). Peasant culture reflected its medieval roots: Most were deeply religious and illiterate, relying on a combination of folk belief and Christianity. Their lives were strikingly different from that of the nobility, who were often more literate in French than in Russian, and many of whom were not especially religious. This social division had profound consequences for Russian politics, leading indirectly to the Communist Revolution on 1917.