return to title page Introduction The Momentum of Byronism Terms of engagement Turgenev: biography Early upbringing Early influences Developing lifestyle Exile, repatriation, death Turgenev and political turbulence Slavophiles and Westernizers Forces of negation Byronic influence through others Pushkin and Lermontov Anarchists and early nihilists Fathers and Sons: from the source Bazarov as nihilist? Bazarov as Romantic hero? Conclusion Bazarov as Byronic negator and idealist Bibliography Text-Only Version

Tracing Byron's Influence on the Creation and Development of the Nihilist Bazarov in Ivan Turgenev's Fathers and Sons INTRODUCTION The Momentum of Byronism The socially unsettled and peasant-filled Russian countryside of 1862 was far from the politics of Victorian England at the height of its Empire and the literary and philosophical realism of European writers of the same period. As English romantic idealism faded with Napoleon's defeat and English Romanticism "died" with Sir Walter Scott, late-blooming Byronic Romanticism marched through war-ravished France and on to an isolated Russia wracked by revolutionary elements of its own. Byron's influence as individual and author seemed always to have greater impact outside of England than within his prudish homeland. While imitators and admirers of Byron the individual and author could be found throughout Greece, Spain, France, Italy, Turkey, and Russia, little more than harsh criticism for his works and exile for his lifestyle emanated from his sometimes beloved, sometimes criticized native Britain, even after his death. Other nations were left to bear Byron's legacy through the future, a responsibility eagerly attempted by an emerging array of Russian Romanticists in the 1830s through the middle 1840s. Voraciously reading Byron's poetry and prose in the original, in translation, and in loose interpretation, these Russian writers dedicated themselves for over a decade to write as Byron wrote and to live as Byron lived. Although short-lived, this worship of a completely new type of hero made an indelible impression upon a young Russian intellectual just beginning to write: Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev. Turgenev's first critically acclaimed work was written a short seven or eight years after the death of the last of the Russian Romantics, Mikhail Lermontov. Turgenev grew up reading Byron's work in English and in translation, translating Byron's work himself, and imitating Byron in his writing style and content (Magarshack 33). As Romanticism's appeal waned in a Russian intellectual and cultural environment grown tired of idealism, Turgenev's first critical work, Notes of a Hunter, was praised for its realistic attention to the life of the peasant because it did not treat the Russian social and political situation idealistically; it was perceived and lauded as a veiled critique of Russian serfdom (Lowe 1989, 23). By 1862, when Turgenev published what is now known as his greatest work, Fathers and Sons, Byron and Romanticism had long been left behind as idealistic nonsense; yet Fathers and Sons' main character Bazarov, the first literary "nihilist," reveals traces of Turgenev's Byronic appreciation and imitation in his Byronically negating revolutionary spirit. Although no direct line of influence connects Bazarov to Byron and no critical study of Bazarov's character could possibly be completed by focusing solely on his Byronic traits, Bazarov's nihilistic world view certainly has its roots in the influence of European and Russian Byronism. return to top of page