Fathers and Sons - Ivan Turgenev [Online Meeting]

This event is supported by The Royal Institute of Philosophy’s Local Partners Programme.

N.B.: this meeting will be held online via Google Meet There is also an in-person session being held on Wednesday in the Prince of Wales pub near Covent Garden.

Continuing our thematic year of 'Crisis of Values', Fathers and Sons faces nihilism head-on, arguably for the first time in the modern era.

Sometimes translated as Fathers and Children, the novel sees generations and philosophies clash in mid-19th-century Russia. Radicals, liberals and traditionalists argue for influence in a rapidly changing world and families are split apart in the conflict of ideas - sound familiar?

The meeting starts at 7pm with drink breaks at 8 and 9. The discussion will end around 10pm but leave whenever you need to.

Here's the blurb from GoodReads:

Bazarov—a gifted, impatient, and caustic young man—has journeyed from school to the home of his friend Arkady Kirsanov. But soon Bazarov’s outspoken rejection of authority and social conventions touches off quarrels, misunderstandings, and romantic entanglements that will utterly transform the Kirsanov household and reflect the changes taking place across all of nineteenth-century Russia.

Fathers and Sons enraged the old and the young, reactionaries, romantics, and radicals alike when it was first published. At the same time, Turgenev won the acclaim of Flaubert, Maupassant, and Henry James for his craftsmanship as a writer and his psychological insight. Fathers and Sons is now considered one of the greatest novels of the nineteenth century.

A timeless depiction of generational conflict during social upheaval, it vividly portrays the clash between the older Russian aristocracy and the youthful radicalism that foreshadowed the revolution to come—and offers modern-day readers much to reflect upon as they look around at their own tumultuous, ever changing world.