Politics is a game where the mistakes and admissions of your adversary are your good character in public opinion--a definition which goes far to account for the easy predominance of the political sharper,--and so Turgenev, the great artist, he who, in creating Bazarov for an ungrateful public, to use his own words, "_simply did not know how to work otherwise_," found to his cost. The Younger Generation, irritated by the public capital made out of Bazarov and his Nihilism by "the Fathers," flew into the other extreme, and refused to see in Bazarov anything other than a _caricature_ of itself. It denied Bazarov was of its number, or represented its views in any way; and to this day surviving Nihilists will demonstrate warmly that the creation of his sombre figure is "a mistake from beginning to end." The reason for this wholesale rejection of Bazarov is easy to account for; and Turgenev, whose clear-sightedness about his works was unaffected either by vanity, diffidence or the ignorant onslaughts of the whole tribe of minor critics, penetrates at once to the heart of the matter:
"The whole ground of the misunderstanding lay in the fact that the type of Bazarov had not time to pass through the usual phases. At the very moment of his appearance the author attacked him. It was a new method as well as a new type I introduced--that of Realizing instead of Idealizing.... The reader is easily thrown into perplexity when the author does not show clear sympathy or antipathy to his own child. The reader readily gets angry.... After all, books exist to entertain."
An excellent piece of analysis and a quiet piece of irony this! The character of Bazarov was in fact such an epitome of the depths of a great movement that the mass of commonplace educated minds, the future tools of the movement, looked on it with alarm, dislike and dread. The average man will only recognize his own qualities in his fellows, and endow a man with his own littlenesses. So Bazarov's depth excited the superficiality of the eternally omnipresent average mind. The Idealists in the Younger Generation were mortally grieved to see that Bazarov was not wholly inspired by their dreams; he went deeper, and the average man received a shock of surprise that hurt his vanity. So the hue and cry was raised around Turgenev, and raised only too well. Bazarov is the most dominating of Turgenev's creations, yet it brought upon him secret distrust and calumny, undermined his influence with those he was with at heart, and went far to damage his position as the leading novelist of his day. The lesson is significant. No generation ever understands itself; its members welcome eagerly their portraits drawn by their friends, and the caricatures drawn by their adversaries; but to the new type no mercy is shown, and everybody hastens to misunderstand, to abuse, to destroy.