When I was 19 years old, I was living with a roommate in a tiny apartment in St Petersburg, Russia, just steps from Senate Square, where the protagonist of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment rambles about while in the throes of madness. I was perhaps not far from madness. I had traveled to “Piter”, as the locals call the city, to study Russian literature. But that semester, I hadn’t managed much studying.
The cold and the darkness of the city had undone me, and I soon began to feel as if I were living inside a Russian novel. I walked aimlessly along the dark, frozen canals for hours at a time; after staying over one night at the apartment of some hooligans who had offered me hash, I woke up glistening with bed bug bites. Afterwards, my incessant, paranoid pacing late at night prompted the “host mother” with whom I was staying to eject me from her premises.
Hence, the new apartment with the roommate. A Quaker from Pennsylvania who was also studying Russian literature, he was one of the kindest people I have ever met. With his help and with the help of literature itself, I nursed myself back to sanity. We donned snowsuits indoors and kept water continuously boiling on the stove (an old Soviet trick) to stay warm; and we tore through Pushkin, Lermontov, and Gogol, discussing the books over spartan meals. Then one day, we got to Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, and something very strange happened — something that changed the course of my life.
Any number of paths were open to me then. But my reading of Fathers and Sons and my discussion of it with my roommate prompted me down that most torturous, least remunerative, and yet most delightful one: the writing of fiction. It was a fateful decision, but if I had it over, I’d make it again.
The encounter with Fathers and Sons led me to an obsession with the novel as a literary form. Over the course of my young adulthood, I have witnessed the advent of the blog, the tweet, the Instagram poem, and the Facebook wall screed. But none of these interested me much. These were fine forms for the spouting of invective, or the acquisition of customers, or the airing out of dirty laundry. But only the novel could capture the insane polyphony of passions and ideologies that I felt as I navigated life in the internet age. And only the novel could transmute the complexity of the modern world into something both beautiful and true. Because I believed in this, I worked doggedly for close to a decade to write a novel of my own that I felt would exemplify what is best in the form, thus putting my theory into practice.
How did all this come from reading Fathers and Sons? The Turgenev novel, first published in 1862, tells the story of two college-age friends, Bazarov and Arkady, their families, and their love interests. Bazarov is a nihilist; though the word originated in Germany, it was in 19th-century Russia that it gained currency among terrorists and revolutionaries, and Fathers and Sons itself did a great deal to popularise it. For Bazarov, the upstart son of a country doctor, the word means that he accepts no authority whatsoever: neither church nor state, neither family nor custom.
Arkady, the younger of the pair, worships Bazarov and invites him to stay at the country estate where his widowed father, Nikolai, his father’s mistress, Thenichka, and Arkady’s uncle Pavel all live. Bazarov proceeds to enrage Pavel with his monologues on the uselessness of poetry and art and the vainness of all custom, and with his badly disguised contempt for Pavel, a stiff aristocrat whom he believes to be among Russia’s “superfluous men”. When Pavel encounters Bazarov stealing a kiss from Thenichka, he challenges him to a duel. Bazarov coolly shoots him in the leg and immediately proceeds to tend to the wound. Recounting the event later to Arkady, he quips that it “was of a nature uninteresting from every but the medical point of view”.
Meanwhile, Arkady and Bazarov pay a visit to two lovely sisters, Anna and Katia Odintsov. Anna, the elder of the two, is a cautious and world-weary widow, who has seen enough of life to be grateful for the comfort she has now attained, while Katia, a fresh and lively 18-year-old, is intelligent and independent, but not at all jaundiced. Bazarov falls in love with Anna and is rebuffed; though deeply curious, Anna is far too practical to give herself to such an intense personality. Arkady falls in love with young Katia; she accepts his marriage proposal and the novel leaves them in connubial bliss.
Towards the end of the book, Bazarov returns to his own parents, a rustic country doctor and a superstitious peasant woman, who fuss over him and delight over his arrogant sallies against them. They believe that their brilliant son will become a Great Man. But Bazarov accidentally infects himself with septicemia while treating a typhoid patient, and the slovenly doctor nearby has no treatment with which to cauterise his wound. Bazarov dies at home with cool dignity, making no explanation or apologies for the life he has lived. Before he expires, he breezily advises his father to console himself with the Christian religion for which he, Bazarov, has only contempt.
Bazarov, it seemed to me when I first read the novel in 2010, is a cold-blooded monster. Here is a wretch who despises poetry and art, disdains his parents’ love, cruelly taunts a younger friend who idolises him, arrogantly forsakes all the wisdom of the past, and spends his free moments catching and dissecting frogs. Who could admire such a boor?
My roommate, it turned out. I was shocked to discover that for my gentle roommate, Bazarov was the tragic hero of the novel: a man with the will and the courage to bring great reforms to his country but stifled at every turn by the pettiness and inertia that eventually suffocates him.
I simply couldn’t fathom it then. But rereading the novel now, I find I’m able to see things from the opposite perspective. Bazarov’s Russia was filled with stupidity and injustice. Poetry doesn’t have any practical benefits, much as the cultivated classes may love it. To fall in love with a woman is indeed often disastrous. Nature, as sages from Lao Tzu to da Vinci have proclaimed, is the best teacher — not custom or authority. Arkady is in many ways a naïve “donkey”, as Bazarov calls him, and Bazarov’s own parents are doddering fools.
So who was right? Me or my roommate? Well, both of us. And neither of us. The novel as a form, unlike the tweet or the newspaper polemic or the TikTok rant, isn’t designed to score points for one side or the other. Its greatest specimens — Fathers and Sons, but also the likes of Charterhouse of Parma, A Sentimental Education, Bleak House — court precisely this sort of ambivalence.
This is far more consequential than it may at first seem. Today, we have grown accustomed to novels, taking them for granted. But the novel remains a potent — even revolutionary — technology. Because of the ubiquity of storytelling in the modern world, it’s easy to forget just what a violent shift in consciousness the novel brought about. Prior to the novel, religious sermons were the most popular reading material for the masses. These were no doubt interesting and morally edifying to their readers. But with the novel, for the first time, it became possible to enter the subjectivity of another person. In England, the passion for novels among the newly literate middle classes was so great that a moral panic ensued.
But why should the novel matter now, in an age that offers such confectionary pleasures as tightly plotted Netflix shows, frenetic video-game streamers, and TikToks? To answer this question, we must go back to the great mid-century American literary critic Lionel Trilling. Already in Trilling’s day, intellectuals were declaring that the novel was dead, and so he penned his 1948 essay “Art and Fortune” in its defence.
“With the novel, for the first time, it became possible to enter the subjectivity of another person.”
Trilling asserted that the novel is the realm in which abstract ideas become concrete. Take the ideas of Bazarov. Many intellectuals in Turgenev’s day theorised about the value of custom and class, and whether all such things should be forsaken. But Turgenev made this question powerfully concrete. He did not weigh the pros and cons of such a course of action, as an investor — or a philosopher, for that matter — might do. And he did not concoct the most outrageous or engagement-farming opinion on such a matter, as a contemporary influencer might do. Instead, he showed us in heartrending detail the unhappiness of Bazarov’s attempt at love, the sorrow of Bazarov’s parents, and the stoicism of Bazarov in facing death.
For Trilling, this method was especially important, because the world he lived in was chock-full of abstract ideas — ideologies — that had yet to be tested out. “The life in ideology,” Trilling wrote, “from which none of us can wholly escape, is a strange submerged life of habit and semi-habit in which to ideas we attach strong passions, but no very clear awareness of the concrete reality of their consequences.”
This is a thousand times more true in 2025 than it was in 1948. We are all in constant thrall to ideology. As social-media users, we are swayed this way and that by the violent attachments of the crowd, even if the crowd’s belief du jour on Tuesday contradicts its belief on Monday. To be ambivalent is a forgotten technique.
Unfortunately, we’re losing this skill just when we need it most. The speed with which technological change is renovating the world increases exponentially each day. Artificial intelligence threatens to completely upend our notions of work and labour. Strange political ideas like protectionism and monarchy are renaissant. Modern science grants us God-like powers: to select which embryos we wish to bring into the world, which ancient species we wish to revive from extinction, and which tasks we would like to delegate to robots.
This all is the rightful domain of the novelist. Yet too many of our contemporary novelists shy away from the world’s most explosive topics, or else treat novels as mere extensions of their social-media feeds, where it is always obvious who is the bad guy and who the good. Or else we find novels depressingly insular — concerned only with the smallest social milieus or tawdry domestic affairs.
During the era of American prosperity in which “the end of history” was in the air, this may have sufficed. But today, the novel must return to concretising the most gripping ideological issues of the age, just as Turgenev and the great Russian novelists of the 19th century did. This is a potentially dangerous task. Turgenev himself was all but driven from his native land because of the furore that Fathers and Sons stirred up. And there are probably even more third-rail subjects for the American or British writer in 2025 than there were for the Russian in 1862.
I felt an obligation when I was writing my first novel not only to understand but to empathise with my most violently provocative character. I hope I find some readers who love him, and some who loathe him. But most important, I hope I find some readers who prefer to engage with ideas through the reading of novels, rather than online mudslinging. No, literary fiction cannot directly change the world — or it can only rare. But I do believe that whatever new society we build out of the wreckage of the 20th century will require the mental capacities of those who can feel comfortable sitting with their own ambivalence. That is to say, sitting with a good novel.
As for the shrill polemical novels, kitchen-sink realism, and insular auto-fiction under which today’s bookstore shelves groan, I’ll simply repeat a remark of Bazarov at the moment it becomes clear his friendship with Arkady has ended: “Dear lad, it is no misfortune. At all times is something in the world finding out that it has no use for something else.”
