You are probably right. I may be worked up over nothing here. It is just that I started getting annoyed when seeing Kukshina, because as she is clearly an idiot, her positions are tainted, and one of those is on the potential of women. And then it just kept turning out that all the men were choosing the most natural women they could find, intelligence being somewhat too much -- except for Bazarov, which I suppose is a redeeming point (for both him and Turgenev's women).
Hm. I looked at Kukshina as a silly blip. Turgenev seemed to me to be poking fun at people like her and also Sitnikov, who wanted to be important but didn't quite get it. So he latched on to the "progressive woman," and drank champagne while hating the thing of the day. Which, while fun, is hardly what one should shoot for. And they certainly wouldn't have put up with each other if either knew better.

Russian Book Club: Fathers and Sons by Turgenev.
17/10/2010 01:39:16 AM
- 973 Views
Bazarov
17/10/2010 02:12:03 PM
- 783 Views
oh, and
17/10/2010 06:42:38 PM
- 667 Views
Re: oh, and
18/10/2010 12:09:10 AM
- 664 Views
Arkady
17/10/2010 02:15:54 PM
- 643 Views
Well, that makes sense
17/10/2010 05:12:09 PM
- 655 Views
Re: Well, that makes sense
18/10/2010 12:04:05 AM
- 661 Views
See, I liked Arkady
17/10/2010 06:08:57 PM
- 598 Views
Oh...Rebekah, I was going to mention that I saw your post only much later because I was very drunk.
17/10/2010 05:13:41 PM
- 677 Views
Good book.
17/10/2010 06:37:16 PM
- 684 Views
I loved it. Great book.
18/10/2010 10:49:27 PM
- 626 Views
I think it's very relevant. It's also unusually un-Russian.
18/10/2010 11:54:03 PM
- 600 Views
Yeah... the Russian nobility at the time seems to have been kind of un-Russian, really.
20/10/2010 04:03:34 PM
- 649 Views
It felt very Russian to me as well
20/10/2010 04:12:50 PM
- 606 Views
There was little of the usual ... histrionics that happen in Russian novels.
22/10/2010 07:02:12 PM
- 661 Views
I really wish I'd bought a properly annotated version.
22/10/2010 07:07:16 PM
- 686 Views
The answer to that is to just read a great book on Nineteenth Century Russian history.
22/10/2010 10:55:06 PM
- 681 Views
Not just Russian, though, there's a lot of mentions of other European history.
22/10/2010 11:19:28 PM
- 620 Views
Nikolai and Pavel - I love them.
22/10/2010 07:14:11 PM
- 758 Views
Perhaps it's Pavel's "The Chap"-ish nature that makes the novel seem less Russian to me.
22/10/2010 10:53:56 PM
- 740 Views