It's often thought to be profoundly prophetic in the sense that it anticipated the coming violence and madness of Russian politics in the 20th century, before, during, after the revolution. I haven't chosen those ones. I've chosen a different book, Toganyev Fathers and Sons, which was published in 1862, 10 years before the possessed. It's different in almost every way from those others. It's not grand, sweeping and epic. It's quite short. It's a lot shorter than War and Peace. It's quite domestic in that it's almost a comedy of manners. It's about a small group of people and their interactions on a set of domestic settings in this house, in that drawing room, on that coach journey. It's very much micro and not macro. It's not violent. And the possessed is deliberately its opposite, in the sense that Dostoyevsky quite liked Farseth and Sons when it came out, or he was quite kind about it. But 10 years later he'd had enough of it, he'd had enough of Togenev, he'd had enough of the kind of fiction that Togenev represented. And in The Possessed there is a character called Karmazinov who is a thinly veiled parody. Parody is probably too polite. It's an absolute attack on Togenev. The kind of man he was, the kind of writer he was. Karmazinov in the possessed is a dilatante, he's a fop, he's a fool, he's a panderer, he panders to the young, he doesn't really understand what he's doing, he's a storyteller who doesn't understand his own stories. That is Dostoyevsky on Toganyev. So, Fathers and Sons is not the possessed. And at the same time, it's a novel that is closely connected to those other epics of Russian fiction and Russian literature in the 19th century, partly because these people all knew each other. They were sometimes friends, sometimes enemies, they were always falling out. In 1861, I think, Toganev and Tolstoy nearly fought a duel over someone's insult about someone's daughter. It was that kind of world. It was a very, very small world, even though they were moving over vast distances inside Russia, but also outside Russia, because this was an age where Russian writers often found themselves in exile. But even in exile, they would regather in London or in Paris or in Berlin and resume their friendships, their fights, their duels, their fallings out. It's a tiny world, but these books all have a connected theme, even war and peace. They are about the clash between the generations, which is the subject of fathers and sons. It's in some ways the definitive, not just Russian novel, but novel, about intergenerational misunderstanding and some of the political consequences of that. It is not as political a book as some of those others, but it has deep political resonance. And all of these books, including The Possessed, including War and Peace, are partly about misunderstandings between the generations. War and Peace could have been called Fathers and Sons. I'm by no means an expert on this, but the title of Toganyev's novel in Russian more literally translates as fathers and children. It's not just about the sons, it's about some daughters too, though it's very much focused on the sons. It's also not just about the fathers. The mothers play a role as well, but the father-son relationships are its key, as they are in many ways in War and Peace is about Andre and his terrible, in his way, terrifying father, and Andre's struggle to break free from his father, to live up to his father. It's about Pierre and the father that he never really knew, the father whose life he surprisingly inherits, and whose world he inherits, whose possessions he inherits. And he has to work out what to do with them. It's about Nikolai Rostov and his lovable but tragic father, and presiding over all of war and peace is Napoleon, Napoleon Bonaparte, who had a complicated relationship with his father in the sense that his father died when he was young, leaving the Bonaparte family effectively penniless because Napoleon's father had gambled it all away, literally gambled it, and then on crazy quixotic business ventures. Napoleon's father lost it all, and Napoleon spent much of his life trying to impress his mother by getting it all back, and in the end he conquered the world. War and Peace's fathers and sons, the possessed, the demons, the devils, is about the generations and the misunderstanding between the generations. Though misunderstanding, which is the key of Toganias' book, doesn't do justice to what Dostoevsky's talking about, because it's not just that the generations, the older generation, the men in their 40s and 50s, and the younger generation, the men in their 20s, don't understand each other. They are in that book liable to kill each other. Fathers and Sons, Toganev's book, is situated in that grand sweep of Russian fictional reflections about what has gone wrong between the generations. But it's also in a narrower sense, right at the heart of a two, three year story that embodies the intergenerational conflict in Russia and beyond Russia from 1860, 1861, 1862, 1863. Each year has in it something, either a piece of writing or an event, which is what Fathers and Sons ends up being about. In 1860, a friend of Turgenev, Alexander Hertzen, who was in exile in London and had been and at various points remained a leader of a certain kind of Russian writer intelligentsia,etzen, who was the great liberal, who'd become more of a socialist. He was in exile. There was a group of people around him. He was a good friend of Togenev. And he was also embittered, disappointed, disillusioned, as so many Russians were in this period, particularly the Russians who had come of age in what they hoped was going to be the great liberal flowering. These were the men who were disappointed above all by the revolution of 1848, the great European revolution that promised a new age of freedom, seemed to herald a kind of emancipation of the mind and an emancipation of politics. And it all collapsed into disappointment everywhere effectively, but above all for the Russians in Russia. Hetzen in 1860, disappointed, angry, frustrated, including with his personal circumstances, wrote an essay called The Superfluous and the Jaundiced, which is about the men of his generation, the Superfluous, and the men of the next generation who are the Jaundiced. The Superfluous men, like him, by implication like Togenev, maybe not Dostoyevsky, though he's still part of that generation. The Superfluous men are the ones whose time has been and gone, and everyone knows it. They had a go and it didn't work. They tried and they failed. They had hopes and dreams, ideals when they were young, and they came effectively to nothing. And so they are now, though still alive, shuffled off the stage. They are superfluous. No one can quite see the point of them. They carry on doing what they do, writing little essays, composing their nice novels, fighting about the literary feuds that have kept them going and kept them alive. But their time is done. In the same essay, Hurtson says, the next generation, who you might expect would be the ones with renewed energy and renewed hopes, the people who are going to build a better world, like his generation, had thought they would build a better world when they were younger. But no, Hurtson says, the new generation are the jaundiced. They're disillusioned in a different way. They're partly disillusioned because they're so consumed with contempt and hatred for their fathers, for their father's generation, that they can barely think straight. There's no one, Hertzen says, that the jaundiced hate more than the superfluous, which is odd because if they're superfluous, you don't really need to worry about them. But also, the jaundiced generation are scarred by the disappointments of their father's generation, and they haven't quite got the energy to do more than complain. In fact, Hertzen says of the younger people, they spend half their time repenting because they're full of self-loathing, and half their time chastising. They're either beating up on themselves or they're beating up on someone else, but they're not doing anything. They're also fighting their petty battles, their literary feuds, they're replicating the older generation without even having got old. And Hertzen says in this essay, there is another generation coming. So he can see, he thinks, beyond the young men to the next wave of young men, who are, he says, not from Moscow, not from St. Petersburg, they're likely to be from the provinces, they might be from Ukraine, he says. They're angrier, but they're also much more determined. They are not the jaundiced, they are the ones, the word he uses for them is they are the muscular ones, who are actually going to come along and sweep all this away. It's as though he's saying Russia, Russian, intelligentsia was trapped in 1860, in this dance between the superfluous and the jaundiced, each deeply pissed off with the other. There's a wave of something new coming, which is going to make both of them irrelevant. In 1861, the great event happened that Hertzen's generation had been longing for all their lives. It was the symbol of the kind of freedom that they had been championing, the emancipation of the serfs in Russia. That was their great cause. It had been a lifetime in coming. It was the symbol for them at least of the Europeanization of Russia, which is one of the things they wanted. Trying to live up to Western European liberal values, because the problem with Russia from that perspective is it was so medieval. It was a slave society, a serf society in that sense. It was backward and theocratic and autocratic. And the emancipation of the serfs was the symbol of the Great Leap Forward. But like almost all long anticipatedanticipated, long-heralded, dreamt of political events, when it finally happened, it was a disappointment to everybody. Nobody was satisfied. It was a horrible compromise, if compromise is a polite enough word, for something that left many serfs as badly off as they were before, trapped in a new set of completely exploitative economic relationships. It compensated not the serfs for having been serfs, but their owners for having lost their property. It did nothing really to liberalize Russia more generally. Censorship was still in place. There was a little Thor, but not much more than a Thor. It remained, for almost everyone still a deeply repressive society, it remained a theocratic society. The radicals thought it didn't go far enough, the conservatives were horrified that it went too far, and the liberals were caught in the middle being shouted at by both sides and still themselves, the Hetzen's, frustrated with this seismic event that somehow came out as a non-event. In 1862, Toganyev publishes Fathers and Sons, which is set in this period. It is about the era of the emancipation of the serfs. It's about the era of this intergenerational conflict. Its characters, if it was going to be given another title, could be called the superfluous and the jaundiced. The fathers and their generation are portrayed by Taganieff as somehow on the edge of things. But my God, the younger generation are angry, but it's not clear to what purpose. And it is the domesticated version of this, so it is not grand, it's not sweeping, it's not political. It doesn't try and take on the emancipation of the serfs or anything else as a great political issue. It tries to talk about the personal relationships that are shaped by living in these times. And then in 1863, so this is year, year, year, year, another book was published. This was by Nikolai Chieneshevsky, and it was called What is to be Done, and it was a reaction to Toganyev's Fathers and Sons. Chynashevsky was a radical, a nihilist, maybe a proto-terrorist. He was certainly seen as such by the Russian state. He was in jail. He wrote his book when he was in jail, there's a threat to public order. And he had been infuriated by Toganev's gentle, delicate little novel. And he wrote in reaction to it a book which came to embody the thing that Hetzen had been hinting just three years earlier, which was there was a generation coming who weren't going to put up with any of this, who were going to sweep away not just the superfluous, but the jaundiced. What is to be done is a truly radical book. It's a bit mad. It is variously described as revolutionary or utopian. It's about young people, not in delicate domestic situations, trying to deal with their frustration and their anger. It's about young people breaking away completely trying to form new societies, new kinds of relationships, including free love relationships, throwing away all the trappings of the past, all of the trappings of the society in which they found themselves, trying to reinvent the human condition. What is to be done points the way to the possessed, because the possessed more than anything is a reaction to what is to be done. It's Dostoevsky trying to suggest this is where that madness leads. What is to be done also points the way to the Russian Revolution, because it was the title that Lenin borrowed two generations later for his book that started Bolshevism. 1860, 1861, 1862, 1863. To Ganev's book, Fathers and Sons, is right in the middle of this. It is both in the spirit of Herz and the superfluous and the jaundiced. It is in its way cynical but also gentle. And it points the way to a future which is going to be radically different from that. Cynical, yes, but not at all gentle. The future of political violence, and terrorism, and revolution, and a complete overthrow of the established order. So Tagania's book is right in the middle of that. It's not a particularly forward-looking book. It's a recognisable type of novel that isn't very Russian, and it was very popular outside Russia because it's kind of Russia as seen through the eyes of a Western European novelist, though Toganyev was deeply Russian. There's a Western European sensibility to it. And it brings to mind not just the books that it's going to produce in furious counter reaction, but much earlier pieces of writing. When I was reading it, I was nagged all the way along by the thought it just reminded me of something and I couldn't think what it was. There was some book that I felt was structured a bit similarly or had a similar arc to it. then about two-thirds of the way through it came to me, the book it reminded me of was Pride and Prejudice, which is not a great Russian political novel. And the reason it reminded me of Pride and Prejudice is that it has a similar setup. So Pride and Prejudice could be called Fathers and Daughters, or One Father and His Daughters. But it begins with the story of two young men, one slightly frightening, seemingly austere, reserved to some people extremely rude, and his friend, who is clearly nicer, gentler, a little bit under the spell of or the thumb of his more domineering companion. And it's the story of these two men going to a place and finding themselves among fathers and daughters. And that's more or less the setup of fathers and sons too. So in Pride and Prejudice, it's Darcy, the slightly scarier one, and Bing Li, the nicer one. In Fathers and Sons it's Bazarov, the central character, who is angry and rude and is frightening to the older generation but also pretty frightening to the women that he meets. He's not nice. And then his much nicer friend called Arkady Kirsanov, who's clearly under his thumb or has fallen under his spell, and will do most things that Bazarov tells him to do, but not everything crucially. And these two young men are travelling together, they're clearly friends, and Kirsanov spends quite a lot of time either saying to people, oh don't worry about Bazarov, he's not as bad as he seems, or saying to Bazarov, can't you just be a bit nicer? Bazarov is Darcy, Kirsanov is Bingley. The difference, though, is that Mr Darcy in Pride and Prejudice, underneath it all, is a thoroughly decent chap, and he has principles. In fact, he's deeply principled, it turns out. And by the end, weirdly, lovable. Bazarov isn't. he's not lovable, particularly on the surface, and he's not lovable underneath. He really is angry, he really is rude, and he is also unprincipled. In fact, he is unprincipled on principle because he has embraced a philosophy which has a name which is shared with the philosophy that was embraced by Czerny Shevsky, the philosophy that is being parodied in the possessed. The name for it is Nihilism. It was very fashionable at the time, so Toganyev's novel is partly a novel about this young person's philosophy, Nihilism, and what it means. It's in some ways a parody of it, but it's also actually pretty sympathetic to it, not to the philosophy itself, but to the thought that if you are in that generation, if you are in your twenties, it would be deeply appealing. What makes Dostoyevsky so angry about fathers and sons is he thinks that Toganyev ultimately is pandering to nihilism, trying to understand it, being quite polite about it. What makes Chernyshevsky so furious about Fathers and Sons is that he thinks that Togenev is mocking nihilism and giving a typically aloof older person's take on what he sees as a younger person's fashion, whereas for Chernyshevsky, nihilism is the truth. Togenev pretty much everyone with this book. Nihilism is at its heart, and Bazarov, I don't think anyone would call Mr. Darcy a nihilist, really does believe it. And the book is set up as the journeys of a young nihilist in rural Russia, across a couple of estates, through the ferment of the emancipation of the serfs, but it barely registers. It registers a bit, but it barely registers. But going across a series of families and a series of relationships and how his nihilism navigates that and what reaction it produces, particularly among the generation the father of his friend. So the first estate they visit is Kirsanov's estate, where Kirsanov's widowed father lives, who's portrayed as an old man. And as with all these books, when you read what counted as old, then it makes you feel really old if you're my age, because he's an old man, he's in his early 40s, and his brother, a man called Pavel, similar generation. Bazarov is a particular kind of nihilist, so that word came to mean all sorts of different things. You could be a revolutionary nihilist, you could be a nihilist, and this is the implication of Dostoevsky, who falls very easily into violent terrorism. You can be a communist nihilist, you can be an anarchist nihilist. Bazarov is none of those things.