Gotham Diary:
Of Fathers and Sons
6 March 2015

What I wanted to do on Wednesday, I allowed myself to do yesterday: nothing. Nothing but reading, watching a DVD, and preparing a couple of minimal meals. Kathleen, who thought that she might have contracted my little cold, and who had been up very late the night before, working on a project, decided to sleep in as well, and to work from home (the dining ell) in the afternoon. Suspended in the aspic of convalescent domesticity, I had the sense not to try to write.

I had spoken of reading Fathers and Sons in the comfort of bed amply propped with pillows and quilts, but the comfort quickly lulled me to sleep, and I got little reading done until I tired, as I always do eventually, of being in bed at all. After lunch, I coursed through the middle of the novel, pausing on the morning of the duel to watch François Truffaut’s Vivement Dimanche. (More about that some other time.) Then I went back to Fathers and Sons and finished it. After dinner, I read the first chapter of Paul Sperber’s Karl Marx: A Nineteenth Century Life, and, after that, the first quarter or more of Penelope Lively’s Spiderweb. (My Lively hiatus did not last very long, did it.)

***

When I was in college, I read Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, but not Turgenev, because Turgenev, unlike the other two, was “ambivalent,” or, in other words, lightweight and wishy-washy. Timid — the one thing you could say that Dostoevsky and Tolstoy weren’t. Dostoevsky was a Slavophile pessimist, and Tolstoy a patrician idealist, but they both somehow knew that Western liberalism (an economic outlook only dimly related to the political liberalism that emerged after the American struggle for equal civil rights) was going to lead Russia to catastrophe, if only because it was too indigestible an import. Turgenev had more faith in good intentions. He was also, at the time when he was writing Fathers and Sons (1860-1), very optimistic about the reforms that the new Tsar, Alexander II, was expected to introduce. He could not know that Alexander would be assassinated, twenty years later, by revolutionary terrorists who were impatient with liberal compromises. Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, in short, knew, or divined, what was coming; Turgenev did not.

In those days, during the high noon of the Cold War, one read Russian novels in order to learn something about the enemy. What could Turgenev, who spent much of his adult life not only outside Russia but inside anothers’ marriage, tell us about that? A wealthy aristocrat who lived in France and elsewhere in order to be close to the married opera diva he loved (and, necessarily, to her husband), Turgenev was obviously too much the playboy to know much about the volcanic suffering that made Russians crazy, drunk, and miserable. Turgenev had a life! That his novels were said to be lovely, charming, and so forth was hardly recommendation. One wasn’t reading Russian novels for pleasure!

When I finished the novel yesterday, I read Rosamund Bartlett’s introduction to the Penguin edition (translated by Peter Carson), and I was very surprised to learn that Fathers and Sons caused a sensation when it was published. How could such a sweet — yes, charming and lovely — novel upset anyone’s equanimity? Bartlett quotes the novel’s first translator into English, Eugene Schuyler.

Each generation found the picture of the other very life-like, but their own very badly drawn.

That’s where ambivalence will get you. The fathers, the “men of the Forties,” very much resented being told that they had had their day, while their sons, who were going to do great things under the new Tsar, felt ridiculed and caricatured in the portrait of the novel’s apparent hero, Bazarov. I had missed all of this while reading the book, and I wondered what knowing of the resentments that Turgenev incurred (all were united in detesting him) would have done to the pleasure I had taken in it. More than that, though, I wondered what reading Fathers and Sons, with this background in mind, would have been like had I read it alongside Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, back in college, in the Sixties.

I can’t quite answer that, of course, but the question immediately highlighted a huge difference between the world of Fathers and Sons and the one I grew up in. The fathers and sons of the aristocratic and professional elite in mid-nineteenth-century Russia disagreed about means, but they were of one mind about the end, which was that Russia must reformed. The question was whether this reform would entail “modernization” — making the peasants more like Western Europeans. But the question’s terms showed that fathers and sons alike were blinkered about the role of commerce in this reform. Neither generation appears to have found it very important. Industry, such as it was, could have little to do with the fight for the Russian soul. The Russian soul was rooted in the land. Relations between those who owned the land and those who worked it would have to be sorted out before Russia could advance. Or so it was thought. In fact, the swelling urban proletariat that was excluded from this calculus of reform would overpower the landed interests. Fathers and sons alike would be shown to have trained their eyes on the same wrong ball.

In contrast, the struggles of the American Sixties, a century after Turgenev, were social, not economic. Remarkable prosperity encouraged demands that would never have been made in leaner times. These demands were not so much twofold as made on two distinct planes, and tensions generated by the way in which these demands rubbed in contrary directions would result not in explosive revolution but in the perplexed but fruitful fatigue of the Seventies, during which changes began to take hold. One of the planes was that of the fight for equal civil rights. No amount of legislation could settle this fight, but the laws that were enacted at least cleared the ground on which African Americans could claim equal opportunities. On the other plane, young people sought to put an end to respectability, that bogus and hypocritical portmanteau that had zombified the three cardinal civic virtues of decency, self-respect, and generosity. The tension between the two conflicts arose when black men and women, seeking to be treated as fully American, presented themselves in garb that seemed, to critical whites, to be merely respectable.

The demolition of respectability in the late 1960s was, of course, a generational fight, similar to the one seen whenever hazing rituals are contested. The elders say, “We endured it; so can you.” Just as hazing rituals are corruptions of rites of passage, so respectability was a corruption of civic virtue. Everyone knew this, but the fathers did not believe that change was feasible. The issue of civil rights was not generational at all, but it did involve fathers — the political leaders who believed that the status quo must be maintained in order to see the nation through the Cold War — and the victims of racial condescension who were infantilized by them. In Russia in the 1860s, it was agreed that Russia must be reformed. In the United States in the 196os, it was agreed that the fathers must be got rid of.

But Russia was not reformed, and the American fathers are still finding replacements (Jeb Bush, for example). Turgenev was right: Plus ça change…