Chapter Areas for further study of Fathers and Sons - Study Guide by Ivan Sergevevich Turgenev

Areas for further study

1) How important an element of Fathers and Sons is the problem of what to do with the serfs?

2) Examine the role of nature in Fathers and Sons.

3) How accurate and fair is Fathers and Sons as a portrayal of Russia and its people in 1859, two years before the signing of the Emancipation Act?

4) "Turgenev is really absorber with the human predicament of Bazarov – his views are only incidental…if one thing emerges clearly from the novel it is that politics and political views are transient - only life and its true values persist for all time." (L. Schapiro) How true an appraisal of Turgenev’s depiction of Bazarov does this seem to you?

5) Turgenev has been called the "novelist’s novelist", why might this be?

6) Examine the symbolic importance of Bazarov’s duel with Pavel Petrovich Kirsanov.

7) How valid are the socio-political systems and views put forward by Bazarov?

8) Can Bazarov rightly be seen as "the usurper of a divine right, whose arrogant self-will proclaims for itself a self-sufficiency in life which contravenes the limits of human experience and gives rise to a dilemma that is only to be resolved in death"?