Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev

Meeting at the usual place, upstairs at The Shakespeare Hotel, 200 Devonshire Street, Surry Hills, at 7.00pm, on Thursday 2 April 2026, we will be discussing Fathers and Sons (1862) by Ivan Turgenev,

The novel is about the homecoming of Arkady and his friend Bazarov. Bazarov is a young nihilist who rebels against the old, rejects all authority and hates sentimentalism. He represents the growing intellectual rift between the romanticist "fathers" of the 1840s and the revolutionary "sons" of the 1860s.

As the young men visit various estates, Bazarov finds his contempt for the status quo and his cold logic challenged by his sudden love for a woman - and a wealthy one at that. The novel explores the inevitable clash of generations, the limitations of scientific rationalism, and the shifting social landscape of a Russia on the brink of profound reform. As a writer, Turgenev has been praised by Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Joseph Conrad and Hemingway.

The format of the meeting is that we talk about the book in a fairly focused way for about an hour. Then the meeting ends. Almost everyone stays back to talk more about the book or other things bookish.