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
While Bazarov's immediate Russian inspirations are known, Bazarov also owes a debt of gratitude to Byron, Byronism, and Russian Romanticism. As early as 1819, at the age of eleven, Turgenev had read Byron's Childe Harold, The Bride of Abydos, and Mazeppa in English. Most Russian writers viewed Byron's work in one of two ways: late sentimentalists admired his "vivid" and "tender" sensitivity; later Romantics (many of whom wrote in Karamzin's Vestnik Europy) emphasized their hero's "bleak colouring" and "rebellious passions" (Diakonova and Vacuro 144-5). In Turgenev's adolescence and early adulthood Byron's struggles and support for national and regional independence movements influenced Decembrists and other revolutionaries in the 1820s. One such revolutionary was Alexander Pushkin, most famous of the Russian Romantic poets, who was exiled to his mother's estate as a result of his involvement in and support of the 1825 uprising (Moser 1989, 170). Pushkin was Turgenev's early idol while Turgenev studied at the University of St. Petersburg; he was even able to meet Pushkin twice while a student (Lowe 16). Pushkin's impact on Russian Romanticism cannot be minimized, particularly as it relates to Mikhail Lermontov, the last famous Russian Romantic writer. Both Pushkin and Lermontov exerted considerable influence on Turgenev. Turgenev's character Rudin from Rudin is considered a Eugene Onegin-like figure; Bazarov is a later incarnation of Pechorin. Turgenev certainly read Pushkin's powerful poetry (considered by many Russian critics, even today, to exhibit the ultimate mastery of Russian poetic language), mostly imitations and interpretations of Byron's oriental tales, and, since Pushkin was his idol for a time, Turgenev would also have been intimately familiar with Pushkin's four year period of living and writing as Byron lived and wrote, from 1820 to 1824 (Diakonova and Vacuro 148). Lermontov wrote his most famous work, a novel entitled A Hero for Our Time, in 1841. This same time period in Turgenev's life marked his emerging but struggling writing career; during the decade of the 1840s he wrote many of the sketches for A Hunter's Notes. During this time Turgenev developed a talent for depicting peasants as typically human, not property, and for painting psychologically realistic pictures of these characters with his pen. The famous Russian critic and Turgenev's close friend Belinsky recognized Turgenev's talents and encouraged him to continue writing these realistic sketches (Moser 1972, 9). It would be difficult to imagine Turgenev's developing sense of realistic psychological detail not having been inspired in part by Lermontov's peculiarly Russian portrayal of Pechorin in A Hero of Our Time in which the author carefully depicts Pechorin's somewhat Byronically evil motives (Brown vol. 4 240). Furthermore, Bazarov owes a significant debt of gratitude to Pechorin, who may well be the prototype of the early nihilist. It is important to note that Turgenev's Byronic influence emerges from Russian Romantic interpretations of Byron and Byronism than from the author himself. Bazarov the nihilist finds his roots in the particularly Russian brand of Byronic Romanticism known for its dark powers of negation and contradiction and the corresponding politics of the revolutionary nineteenth century.