#bazarov

turgnev is like "bazarov is my favorite child," he's my terrible darling boy whom i will defend until my dying breath. if any reader doesnt love him like i do i'm killing everyone in the world and then myself. he sucks and i love him more than life itself. nobody understands him but me and my two writer friends :(

Turgueneff had so much accustomed us to a certain poetical halo which surrounded his heroes, and to his own tender love which followed them, even when he condemned them, that finding nothing of the sort in his attitude towards Bazaroff, we saw in the absence of these features a hostility of the author towards the hero.

And yet, as Pisareff understand at once, Bazaroff was a real representative of the young generation. Turgueneff, as he himself wrote later on, merely did not 'add syrup' to make his hero appear somewhat sweeter.

[...] it was only on rereading Fathers and Sons much later on that we noticed, in the very words that so offended us, the germs of a realistic philosophy of solidarity and duty which only now begins to take a more or less definite shape.

'Truth alone matters: what cannot be established by observation and experiment is useless or harmful ballast - "romantic rubbish" - which an intelligent man will ruthlessly eliminate [...including] all that is impalpable, that cannot be reduced to quantitative measurement - literature and philosophy, the beauty of art and the beauty of nature, tradition and authority, religion and intuition, the uncriticised assumptions of conservatives and liberals, of populists and socialists, of land-owners and serfs. He [Bazarov] believes in strength, will-power, energy, utility, work, in ruthless criticism of all that exists. He wishes to tear off masks, blow up revered principles and norms. Only irrefutable facts, only useful knowledge, matter.'

Yevgeny Vasilevich Bazarov