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Ivan Turgenev Was Distrusted by the Left and the Right (neh.gov)
19 points by seventyhorses on Nov 10, 2018 | hide | past | favorite | 2 comments



“Our successors!” repeated Nikolai Petrovich, with a dejected smile. He had been sitting on thorns, all through the argument, and had done nothing but glance stealthily, with a sore heart, at Arkady. “Do you know what I was reminded of, brother? I once had a dispute with our poor mother; she stormed, and wouldn’t listen to me. At last I said to her, ‘Of course, you can’t understand me; we belong,’ I said, ‘to two different generations.’ She was dreadfully offended, while I thought, ‘There’s no help for it. It’s a bitter pill, but she has to swallow it.’ You see, now, our turn has come, and our successors can say to us, ‘You are not of our generation; swallow your pill.’”

This is great and really resonates. I've often thought the current strife manifests from an inevitable transition of power from the extremely powerful, rich and reluctant baby boom generation to the next millennial generation.


"These restless youths found another mirror of their attitudes in Bazarov, the young hero of Turgenev's novel Fathers and Sons (1862). Turgenev (a 'man of the forties') had intended him as a monstrous caricature of the nihilists, whom he regarded as narrowly materialist, morally slippery and artistically philistine, although later he would pretend otherwise. There was a striking resemblance between Bazarov and the student idol Pisarev. Yet such was the gulf of misunderstanding between the fathers and sons of real life that the young radicals took his faults as virtues and acclaimed Bazarov as their ideal man." - A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution: 1891-1924

This is probably the reason why it was distrusted by the Left and the Right. The right disliked the message his characters such as Bazarov presented, the left disliked the message his characters like Pavel Petrovich presented.




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