A medical student who dissects frogs, sneers at Pushkin and declares that “a decent chemist is twenty times more useful than any poet.” His friend Arkady explains to his family that a nihilist is “a man who does not bow down before any authority, who does not accept any principle on faith.”
His undoing is everything he denied: he falls hopelessly in love with Anna Odintsova, fights a pointless duel, and dies after infecting himself in a typhus autopsy. The last pages, with his old parents at his grave, are among the most moving in Russian literature.
Lines to Remember
2 quotationsA decent chemist is twenty times more useful than any poet.
Context & when to use it
Bazarov’s utilitarian contempt for art.
For science versus the humanities; utility versus beauty.
Nature is not a temple, but a workshop, and man’s the workman in it.
Context & when to use it
Against Romantic reverence for nature.
For instrumental reason, the technological attitude (Heidegger’s “standing-reserve”).
Explore Next
related by shared connections
Ivan Turgenev
The most Western of the great Russian novelists, whose Fathers and Sons created Bazarov and gave the word “nihilist” to an entire generation.
Demons
Dostoevsky’s prophetic political novel — a provincial town possessed by revolutionary nihilists, the murder of one of their own, and the hollow charisma of Stavrogin.
Nikolai Chernyshevsky
Radical critic and author of What Is to Be Done? — the utopian novel of “rational egoism” that inspired Lenin and provoked Dostoevsky’s Underground Man.
The Rebel
Camus’s history of revolt — metaphysical and political — arguing that rebellion that kills for history betrays its own origin. It ended his friendship with Sartre.
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
Macbeth, told that his wife is dead, delivers the bleakest speech in Shakespeare — life is a walking shadow, a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing.
A Confession
Tolstoy’s account of his mid-life crisis — at the height of fame he could not answer “why live?” and nearly killed himself, until he found meaning in the faith of simple people.