Fathers and Sons (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

By Ivan Turgenev and David Goldfarb

Fathers and Sons, by Ivan Turgenev, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:

• New introductions commissioned from today's top writers and scholars
• Biographies of the authors
• Chronologies of contemporary historical, biographical, and cultural events
• Footnotes and endnotes
• Selective discussions of imitations, parodies, poems, books, plays, paintings, operas, statuary, and films inspired by the work
• Comments by other famous authors
• Study questions to challenge the reader's viewpoints and expectations
• Bibliographies for further reading
• Indices & Glossaries, when appropriate

All editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences—biographical, historical, and literary—to enrich each reader's understanding of these enduring works.   Youth rebels. It’s true today and it was true in Russia, in 1862, when Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons first appeared.  At the novel’s center stands Evgeny Bazarov, medical student, doctor’s son, and self-proclaimed nihilist. Bazarov rejects all authority, all so-called truths that are based on faith rather than science and experience. His ideas bring him into conflict with his best friend, recent graduate Arkady Kirsanov, with Arkady’s family, with his own parents, and eventually with his emotions, when he falls helplessly in love with the beautiful Madame Odintsova.
 
Turgenev’s earlier A Sportsman’s Sketches had helped hasten the liberation of the serfs in 1861. But the complex portrait of Bazarov, whose goals he admired but whose rejection of art and embrace of violence he could not accept, enraged both right and left. The right saw Fathers and Sons as a glorification of radical extremists; the left saw it as a denunciation of progress. Even today, readers argue over Turgenev’s attitude towards Bazarov. But they can’t resist the novel’s power to grip the heart while engaging the mind.   David Goldfarb is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages at Barnard College. He has published numerous

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble Classics
• Release date: Jun 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9781411432185

Ivan Turgenev

Ivan Turgenev was born on 9th November 1818 to noble and wealthy parents in Oryol, Russia. His father a Colonel in the Russian Cavalry and his mother came from the nobel Lutovinov house of the Oryol Governorate. Turgenev spent the majority of his younger life in Moscow with his two younger brothers, where he was brought up having a proper education. Turgenev started out university life at the university of Moscow in 1833, before moving to the University of St Petersburg to study Classic Russian Literature and philology between 1834 to 1837, it was during this time Turgenev started to write poetry. Whilst he was studying there he would lose his father to kidney stoney disease and his youngest brother to epilepsy.From 1838 to 1841, Turgenev studied philosophy and history at the university of Berlin before finishing his master in St Petersburg. Unable to get a professorship at St Petersburg University, Turgenev ventured into the world of politics and government where he spent two years between 1843 and 1845 at the Russian Ministry of Interior. Here he would continue to write poetry before venturing into play writing with 'The Rash Thing To Do', in 1843. Though he never married, Turgenev did have a love with the well renowned Spanish singer Pauline Viardot. Though this relationship would only be a platonic one, the two would become close friends exchanging letters with Viardot helping Turgenev later on in life. Turgenev was known to have many love affairs with his family servants, with one of these love affairs in 1842 leading to the birth of his illegitimate daughter Paulinette. Turgenev would later entrust his dear friend Viardot to bring-up his daughter Paulinette. Turgenev's writing career began in the 1840's, writing long poems before transitioning into plays, novels and short stories. Unlike a lot of writers of the time Turgenev's works shied away from the religious influences of the time and preferred to revolve his work around the political and social issues of Russia during the 1800's. This would come and haunt him when he wrote his greatest novel 'Father and Sons' in 1862, where it was given a hostile reaction by the Russian audience leading him to go into self-exile. This self-exile first sent Turgenev to Germany but at the outbreak of the Franco-German war in 1870, he moved to London and then Paris, where he would settle. Turgenev's final piece of word was a short story called 'The Mysterious tales' in 1883, later that year he would die at the age of 64 on the 3rd September 1883 in Bougival, France. His body was then transported back to St Petersburg where he was buried in Volkovo Cemetery.