Russian literature of the nineteenth century seemed always to have extraordinarily deep ties to the social, economic, and political milieu, and Turgenev's Fathers and Sons was no exception. The harshest critics of the novel interpreted its characters (Bazarov and Arkady on one hand, Pavel and Nikolai Petrovich on the other) as representatives of specific strata or classes in Russia of the 1850s and 1860s. Fully understanding the character of Bazarov requires placing the novel in its social and political context. Russia's intelligentsia was split between Slavophiles and Westernizers, both of whom believed in enacting sweeping reforms to eliminate the nation's serfdom-based economy and social structure. Since Turgenev allied himself firmly with the Westernizing camp, he and others like him believed that enacting Western democratic reforms would relieve the burden of serfdom. Slavophiles, on the other hand, felt Alexander II had already Westernized the country too much to little avail, calling him the "arch-villain of Russian history"-since the nation remained locked in the social and economic trappings and assumptions of a serfdom-based agrarian society-and that reform needed to take a more Russian track (Lowe 1989, 18). Turgenev had hinted at the theme of emancipating the serfs early in his career with A Hunter's Notes, collected and first published as a complete set of peasant sketches in 1852. Turgenev congratulated himself on contributing to the emancipation, a claim that Moser suggests can be substantiated: "The book made a solid political point without ceasing to be art" (1972, 9). The Emancipation Act became law in the spring of 1861, just before Turgenev published Fathers and Sons in February 1862. Set in 1859, just two years before the Emancipation Act was enacted, the novel opens to "a world on the brink of extreme change" and presents a view of the confusion and breakdown of social order that these years brought to the Russian countryside (Ripp 191).

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