When Fathers and Sons was first published in Russia, in 1862, it
was met with a blaze of controversy about where Turgenev stood in
relation to his account of generational misunderstanding. Was he
criticizing the worldview of the conservative aesthete, Pavel Kirsanov,
and the older generation, or that of the radical, cerebral medical
student, Evgenii Bazarov, representing the younger one? The critic
Dmitrii Pisarev wrote at the time that the novel "stirs the mind . . .
because everything is permeated with the most complete and most touching
sincerity." N. N. Strakhov, a close friend of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky,
praised its "profound vitality." It is this profound vitality in
Turgenev's characters that carry his novel of ideas to its rightful
place as a work of art and as one of the classics of Russian Literature.