View Poll Results: Fathers and Sons : Final Verdict

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  • * Waste of time. Wouldn't recommend.

    0 0%
  • ** Didn't like it much.

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  • *** Average

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  • **** It is a good book.

    3 100.00%
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Thread: May '14 / Realism Reading: Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev

  1. #1
    Pièce de Résistance Scheherazade's Avatar
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    May '14 / Realism Reading: Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev

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    Please share your thoughts and comments on Fathers and Sons in this thread.

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    Better late than never!
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    "It is not that I am mad; it is only that my head is different from yours.”
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  2. #2
    Pièce de Résistance Scheherazade's Avatar
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    I did read this one in June... While I enjoyed the writing and storyline, all together it felt too simplistic, too idealistic... Maybe I have been reading too many "modern" novels recently but felt it lacked something even though I quite liked the characters and the interactions between them.
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    "It is not that I am mad; it is only that my head is different from yours.”
    ~


  3. #3
    Registered User Aylinn's Avatar
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    I remember that I read it, because Bazarov was apparently supposed to be a mix of Hamlet and Don Kichot. Unfortunately he lacked the charm of Don Kichote and Hamlet’s ability to entertain. It was a good book, but not one that blew me away.

  4. #4
    Registered User neilgee's Avatar
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    Bazarov is described as a nihilist, Turgenev's novel popularized the term I'm told; he's a continuation of Pushkin's "superfluous man" (Eugene Onegin), a man not really fitted to do anything in the world he moved in; monied sons of Russian landowners who see the injustices of the system and no longer believe in what supplies their parent's cash. I thought Bazarov was arrogant but there are those who defend him pointing out that he thought he was cleverer than anyone else in his society because he was. I could argue that it's one thing to know it and another thing to show it, but maybe that's splitting hairs when the point of the novel is not Bazarov's likeability but his displacement, but it's about displacement in a society that was to be swept into oblivion by the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 so it's difficult to get a grounding in the dynamics that drive Turgenev's plot anymore. There's so many specifics that are hard to relate to for a 21st Century reader, but don't doubt Tergenev's sincerity because he was sent into exile for his beliefs during his lifetime.
    What are regrets? Just lessons we haven't learned yet - Beth Orton

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