Clearly Bazarov was created from Byronic and Romantic roots. Turgenev idolized the Russian Romantic Pushkin and befriended the later, darker Russian Byronist Lermontov. Turgenev certainly read, translated, and even interpreted Byron's literature, while Byron's life and literature exerted a strong influence on the early Russian Romantics. Nihilism itself is a Russian phenomenon, but Turgenev's literary expression of that movement transcends its Russian roots with Bazarov's conflicting internal struggle between romantic idealism and romantic realism, between pure instinctual negation and romantic love. This struggle within Bazarov provides us the clearest picture of the character's Romantic roots and of his psychological development. While it is convenient to draw direct correlation between Bazarov and Byronism, no direct connection exist-the influence must travel through the revolutionary tumult of nineteenth century Russia, through the interpretation of Byronic heroism into a peculiarly Russian phenomenon focused upon negation, through the censorial power of the czars and the resulting exiles and persecutions, and through the emancipation of the serfs and the corresponding radical shift in social paradigm which emancipation forced. Bazarov is a purely Russian character, and Turgenev is often assigned the title "Russian realist." Only in the past twenty-five years has the focus shifted dramatically to identifying Turgenev's deep roots in Romanticism, attempting to separate the realistic from the Romantic elements in his works (Lowe 2-3). Once overshadowed by such authors as Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Turgenev's fame is returning to the forefront of modern criticism because of his intensely realistic psychological portraits; Bazarov the Byronically romantic idealistic nihilist is one of the best, revealing the complex contradictions that make modern "heroes" great.

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