In the spring of 1859 two young men come home from the university to the quiet Russian countryside: Arkady Kirsanov, and his admired friend Yevgeny Bazarov — a medical student, the son of a poor army doctor, and a self-declared nihilist who believes in nothing he cannot test or prove. Into Arkady's father's gentle, old-fashioned household Bazarov brings contempt for everything its inhabitants hold dear: art, sentiment, tradition, love itself. Almost at once the generations strike sparks, and the polished, proud uncle Pavel is roused to fury by the rude young man who would clear away the whole old world.

But Bazarov's hard creed has no room for what is coming. When he meets the cool and beautiful young widow Madame Odintsov, the man who reduced love to physiology falls helplessly, humiliatingly under its power — and the comedy of generational manners darkens, by degrees, into tragedy. Turgenev brings his nihilist hero to an end as unsparing as anything in Russian fiction, and gives the last word not to any idea but to two grieving parents at a country grave.

Published in 1862 and attacked at once by radicals and conservatives alike, Fathers and Children fixed the word nihilism in the world's vocabulary and gave literature one of its first fully modern characters. Set at the hinge of Russian history — the serfs newly freed, the old order cracking — it is Turgenev's most famous book and a model of the restraint and lyric beauty for which his prose is prized.

This edition pairs the complete public-domain English translation by Constance Garnett with an editor's foreword on the novel's reception and meaning, a biographical note, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection.