Fathers and Sons

by Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev

"Tell me something, though, about the world in general," Bazarov interrupted. "The world stands on three fishes, does it not?"

"It does that, batiushka," the peasant replied with the quiet, good-humoured sweetness of the patriarchal age. "But above it stands the will of the masters. The baré are our fathers, and the harder the barin drives, the better for the muzhik."

Shrugging his shoulders contemptuously at this statement, Bazarov turned away, while the peasant slunk off homewards.

"What did he say?" asked a sullen-looking, middle-aged peasant who had been standing at the door of his hut during the course of the foregoing colloquy. "Was he talking of arrears of taxes?"

"Of arrears of taxes!" retorted the first peasant, his tone now containing not a trace of its late patriarchal sweetness, but, rather, a note of purely dry contempt. "He was chattering just for chattering's sake—he likes to hear his own tongue wag. Do not all of us know what a barin and the likes of him are good for?"

"Aye," agreed the second peasant; whereafter, with much nodding of caps and gesticulating of fists, they fell to discussing their own affairs and requirements. So alas for Bazarov's scornful shrug of the shoulders! And alas for that knowledge of the way in which the peasant should be talked to whereof the young Nihilist had made such boast when disputing with Paul Petrovitch! In fact, never had it dawned upon the mind of the self-confident Bazarov that, in the eyes of the muzhik, he was no better than a pease-pudding.

However, he succeeded in discovering for himself an occupation. This was when, in bandaging a peasant's leg, Vasili Ivanitch's hands shook a little through senility, and his son hastened to his assistance: and from that time forth Bazarov acted as Vasili Ivanitch's partner, even though he maintained unabated his ridicule both of the remedies which he himself advised and of the father who hastened to put them into practice. Yet in no way did his son's raillery annoy Vasili Ivanitch: rather, it heartened the old man. Smoking his pipe, and drawing his dirty overall in to his waist with both thumbs, he would listen delightedly to the scoffer, and chuckle, and show his blackened teeth the more in proportion as the sallies contained a greater measure of venom. Nay, stupid or simply senseless as many of these witticisms were, he would frequently catch them up, and repeat them. To take one instance, he, for several days in succession, kept assuring every one in the village and in the town that "we call this the nine o'clock office"—the sole basis being the fact that once, on learning of his (Vasili Ivanitch's) habit of attending Matins, Bazarov had made use of the phrase in question.

"Thank God, Evgenii has ceased to mope," he confided in a whisper to his wife. "In fact, you should have heard him rating me to-day!"

Also, the thought that he had such an assistant in his labours filled the old man with pride.

"Yes, yes," he would say as he handed some peasant woman in a man's jacket a phial of medicinal water or a pot of cold cream, "you ought daily to thank God that my son happens to be staying with me, since otherwise you could not possibly have been treated according to the latest and most scientific methods. Do you understand? I say that even Napoleon, the Emperor of the French, has not at his disposal a better physician than my son."