Keith Gessen (George T. Delacorte Assistant Professor of Magazine Journalism) contributed an essay on Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons to the September 5, 2020, issue of The New Yorker.

When I first read Fathers and Sons, I was in college, all I cared about were the sons, their willingness (in Bazarov’s case) to die for their beliefs, their certainty. Reading the book again, 25 years later, I found myself rooting for the fathers. What might they do to bridge the divide? And why were the sons so mean to them, after all the fathers had done?

Detail from Ilya Repin’s 1874 portrait of Ivan Turgenev via Wikimedia Commons.