Not to unnecessarily beat a dead horse, but we seem to be hung up on what constitutes a nihilist. It appears as if it is thought that someone had to affirm a given set of principles in order to be a true nihilist. Indeed, this is how nihilism is defined today. But it was not necessarily viewed that way during Turgenev's time.
Consider this:
``“Nihilism was not so much a corpus of formal beliefs and programs (like populism, liberalism, Marxism) as it was a cluster of attitudes and social values and a set of behavioral affects—manners, dress, friendship patterns. In short, it was an ethos.”
"Nihilism" — and also in large part "realism," particularly "critical realism" — meant above all else a fundamental rebellion against accepted values and standards: against abstract thought and family control, against lyric poetry and school discipline, against religion and rhetoric. The earnest young men and women of the 1860's wanted to cut through every polite veneer, to get rid of all conventional sham, to get to the bottom of things. What they usually considered real and worthwhile included the natural and physical sciences ...
''“While nihilism emancipated the young Russian radicals from any allegiance to the established order, it was, to repeat a point, individual rather than social by its very nature and lacked a positive program ...
''Since they had no cohesive, constructive social program the nihilists lacked strategic sustainability of their revolutionary movement.
''Such were the true nihilists, the destroyers, who did not trouble themselves about what was to be built after them. They did not exactly deny everything, for they believed firmly, fanatically, in science and in the power of the individual mind. But they thought nothing else worth the slightest respect, and they attacked and sneered at family, religion, art, and social institutions, with all the more vehemence the higher they were held in the opinion of their countrymen ... ``
more at: http://www.counterorder.com/history.html
And this is the key that I have tried to emphasize in my previous posts on this subject: Bazarov fully met the definition of nihilist as the term was understood at that time by Turgenev and other Russians.
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Originally Posted by Virgil
"It's so mysterious, the land of tears." 
) It was a nice place for Turgenev to show us the contrast of the different generations though.
I am blind. 
I can hardly make out a thing.
