Fathers and Sons

A student comes home from Petersburg with a friend who believes in nothing and says so, and the two generations in the house find they cannot talk to each other. Turgenev made the word nihilist famous here and was attacked by both sides - the radicals said he had slandered them, the conservatives that he admired them. Sixty plates of nineteenth-century painting, from Polenov's Moscow courtyard to Lessing's landscapes, set the novel's arguments in the wider world of Russian and European art.