65 pages • 2 hours read
Ivan TurgenevFathers And Sons
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1862A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 27-28Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 27 Summary
Bazarov’s parents are thrilled when he returns. His father promises to let him work in peace and prevents his mother from expressing strong feelings. Bazarov is filled with a “dreary boredom and a vague restlessness” (148), growing even pricklier when his parents attempt to draw him out with conversation about work or Arkady.
Bazarov attempts to get the peasants to discuss their theory of the world and the peasant commune, but they tell him that the commune depends on the master and “the stricter the master the better for the peasant” (149). When he leaves, the peasants dismiss Bazarov’s attempts to philosophize with them: he was just “blabbing his tongue. He’s a gentleman, you see, you think he understands anything?” (149). This undercuts Bazarov’s claims to be more in touch with the peasants than Pavel: He “didn’t even suspect that in their eyes he was still something of a laughingstock” (149).
Bazarov becomes an assistant to Vassily, and his tendency to mock his father cheers the older man as a possible sign of improvement. He brags about his son’s every accomplishment, to the bemusement of the peasants and the priests.
Treating a peasant with typhus, Bazarov cuts himself during the man’s autopsy, and the cut becomes infected because he delays cauterizing the wound. Bazarov begins to lose his appetite and develops a fever. Bazarov shows his father the signs of sepsis, and asks to see Anna. As his father “went around like a man possessed” trying remedy after remedy (154), Bazarov grows delirious. His father begs him to take communion to avoid eternal torment, but Bazarov insists this can wait until he has lost consciousness. Anna arrives, bringing a German doctor, who informs all that Bazarov is dying. Anna feels “terror” seeing his illness, and thinks “she wouldn’t have felt like that if she’d really loved him” (157). Bazarov tells her, “I did love you! It didn’t mean anything then and it means even less now!” (158), and laments that all of his grand plans have fallen away. He asks her to care for his parents, and she kisses his forehead before leaving him to sleep. Unconscious, he receives the last rites. His parents fall to their knees, prostate with grief, as he dies.
Chapter 28 Summary
Six months later, Katya and Arkady are married, as are Nikolai and Fenechka. The family gathers to celebrate this, and to toast to Pavel before he departs for Europe. Everyone is smiling and gentle with one another. Pavel wishes everyone happiness after Nikolai toasts to him: the others do not notice he also says “Farewell!” in English (160). Katya and Arkady quietly toast to Bazarov.
After the emancipation of the serfs, Anna marries a lawyer of liberal views, and they may yet fall in love, though her husband is “cold as ice” (160). Arkady stewards the family estate into becoming more profitable. Nikolai becomes a “peace mediator”—an arbitrator of disputes between landlords and peasants—and is “seen as far too generous by both sides” (161). Katya and Fenechka become friends.
In Germany, the English and Russians admire Pavel, who becomes an affected Slavophile: he “doesn’t read anything in Russian […] but keeps a silver tray in the shape of a peasant’s bast sandals on his desk” (161). He does some charitable work but falls into bitterness and increasing religiosity. Kukshina, too, becomes a German expatriate, in the radical colony at Heidelberg. Sitnikov remains in the capital, “carrying on Bazarov’s ‘work’” though he depends financially on his father and is subordinate to his wife (161).
In a “village graveyard in a remote corner of Russia” (161), the only well-kept grave has a new fence around it, and two young pine trees where birds often land and sing. Bazarov is buried there. His very old parents visit regularly “this place where they seem to feel closer to their son” (162). Peaceful flowers grow on the grave of a “passionate, sinful, rebellious” man, reminding onlookers about “of indifferent nature [and] of eternal reconciliation and life everlasting” (163).
Chapters 27-28 Analysis
The novel comes to an abrupt end after Bazarov leaves Arkady and Anna behind, ending with domestic drama rather than social transformation. Before his death, Bazarov loses every claim to superiority. He has fallen in love despite a fervent belief that emotions are beneath him; the peasants he claims to understand better than most mock him; even his scientific knowledge proves fallible as he fails to treat an avoidable, self-inflicted wound quickly enough to prevent infection. In the most generous reading, his death from an avoidable laboratory accident testifies to his lack of will to live after being unable to reconcile love with his broader mission. His farewell with Anna sees him finally admit the depth of his regard for her, when it is far too late to mean anything. Her horror in response suggests that he aroused passion in her, but not a deep love. The only steady relationship in the end, for Bazarov, is the one-sided, endless devotion of his parents. In the end, his only way of remaining true to his ideals is to unconsciously shudder away from religion. Most mocking of all is the fact that the only person left to carry on Bazarov’s philosophy is the absurd Sitnikov.
The novel’s conclusion restores domestic harmony, as the novel ends with a wedding a happy dinner party. Unsurprisingly, Bazarov’s name is only spoken softy, not as a public toast—reminders of his existence might disturb domestic bliss.
The peasant emancipation brings about only change, and not total transformation. Anna finds an equal partner, if not a romantic hero. Arkady makes reasonable improvements to the estate and settles into comfortable domestic life. Nikolai finds a perfect niche in the new environment as a peacemaker to the community. Pavel find a better way to be a pretentious idealist, embracing Slavophilism without any real relationship to Russia or its peasants. The novel’s final notes play on the concept of infinity—whether one believes in nature and science, or the eternity promised by religion, the vast scale of time makes any one life pale in comparison.
