"Then that doctor will be this fellow's father. H'm!" And Paul Petrovitch twitched his moustache. "What exactly is your Bazarov?" he enquired of Arkady.
"What is he?" Arkady repeated smiling. "Do you really want me to tell you what he is, Uncle?"
"If you please, my nephew."
"He is a Nihilist."
"A what?" exclaimed Nikolai Petrovitch, while even Paul Petrovitch paused in the act of raising a knife to the edge of which there was a morsel of butter adhering.
"A Nihilist," repeated Arkady.
"A Nihilist?" queried Nikolai Petrovitch. "I imagine that that must be a term derived from the Latin nihil or 'nothing.' It denotes, I presume, a man who—a man who—well, a man who declines to accept anything."
"Or a man who declines to respect anything," hazarded Paul Petrovitch as he re-applied himself to the butter.
"No, a man who treats things solely from the critical point of view," corrected Arkady.
"But the two things are one and the same, are they not?" queried Paul Petrovitch.