When Fathers and Sons was first published in Russia in 1862 it was met witha blaze of controversy about where Turgenev stood in relation to his account ofgenera... » 

When Fathers and Sons was first published in Russia in 1862 it was met witha blaze of controversy about where Turgenev stood in relation to his account ofgenerational misunderstanding. Was he criticizing the worldview of theconservative aesthete Pavel Kirsanov and the older generation or that of theradical cerebral medical student Evgenii Bazarov representing the youngerone? The critic Dmitrii Pisarev wrote at the time that the novel stirs themind . . . because everything is permeated with the most complete and mosttouching sincerity. N. N. Strakhov a close friend of Tolstoy and Dostoevskypraised its profound vitality. It is this profound vitality in Turgenevscharacters that carry his novel of ideas to its rightful place as a work of artand as one of the classics of Russian Literature. «