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
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Bazarov
- 17/10/2010 02:12:03 PM
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oh, and
- 17/10/2010 06:42:38 PM
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Re: oh, and
- 18/10/2010 12:09:10 AM
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Arkady
- 17/10/2010 02:15:54 PM
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Well, that makes sense
- 17/10/2010 05:12:09 PM
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Re: Well, that makes sense
- 18/10/2010 12:04:05 AM
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See, I liked Arkady
- 17/10/2010 06:08:57 PM
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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
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Good book.
- 17/10/2010 06:37:16 PM
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I loved it. Great book.
- 18/10/2010 10:49:27 PM
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I think it's very relevant. It's also unusually un-Russian.
- 18/10/2010 11:54:03 PM
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Yeah... the Russian nobility at the time seems to have been kind of un-Russian, really.
- 20/10/2010 04:03:34 PM
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It felt very Russian to me as well
- 20/10/2010 04:12:50 PM
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There was little of the usual ... histrionics that happen in Russian novels.
- 22/10/2010 07:02:12 PM
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I really wish I'd bought a properly annotated version.
- 22/10/2010 07:07:16 PM
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The answer to that is to just read a great book on Nineteenth Century Russian history.
- 22/10/2010 10:55:06 PM
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Not just Russian, though, there's a lot of mentions of other European history.
- 22/10/2010 11:19:28 PM
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Nikolai and Pavel - I love them.
- 22/10/2010 07:14:11 PM
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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
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*NM*