Contagion and Disgust in Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Children

The dualistic pairs of romanticism/rationalism and nature/science have traditionally shaped readings of Turgenev’s Fathers and Children. This article, building on affect theory and theories of the grotesque, examines Bazarov as a character who does not fit into either model. As an outsider, he represents a threat of infection to all the other characters in the novel. His excessive, animalistic life force elicits disgust in those surrounding him and forces them to distance themselves from him for fear of a “life contagion,” which would insert an uncontrollable, repulsive life-energy into their predictable genteel existence. Additionally, Bazarov is characterized by a grotesque affective system, that is, he experiences feelings that are contradictory and elude a definitive reading, right up to the novel’s end. After being exposed to his ambiguous and incongruous feelings, the other characters are at risk of “affective contagion”: they might start experiencing feelings as grotesquely as Bazarov does. This trend towards ambiguity rather than legibility defies the expectations of clarity in psychological prose that critics at the time demanded and that readers have been taught to look for. This article thus proposes pervasive illegibility of character as a previously unidentified trait of Russian Realism, and uses Fathers and Children’s Bazarov as a vivid case study.