At the Table and Fathers and Sons

This study will compare and contrast Karolina Pavlova's At the Tea-Table and Ivan Turgenev's Fathers and Sons. The study will focus on the conflicts in the two works involving characters who live according to what might loosely be called feminine or masculine principles. In addition, the contradictions in the definitions of these principles will be explored.

For example, in Turgenev, the feminine principle is held by Nikolai, who values art, romantic love, and religion. The masculine principle is held by Bazarov, who values materialism, science, nihilism and violent revolution, while disdaining the values of the feminine principle. In Pavlova, on the other hand, the masculine principle is held most significantly by the Princess who embodies a love for art, literature and philosophy, and a tendency toward domination, especially in her relationship with Khozrevsky.

Despite these differences in the specifics of the masculine and feminine principles, both works feature this central conflict between the two forces in the human being and in society. At the root of the works' portrayal of these differences is the question of what it is to be human.

The argument of this study will be that to be human is to vulnerable--to love, to art, to beauty--and he or she who tries to deny this human vulnerability in himself or herself (Bazarov in Turgenev, and the Princess in Pavlova) ultimately deny an essential part of their own being.

At times, the conflict concerns characters at

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important part in the story, but only as a naif off whom Bazarov plays his ideas. The far more important character, in terms of setting off Bazarov's radically masculine ideas, is Arkady's father Nikolai. Nikolai and Bazarov do battle in the open, as opposed to the hidden battle waged between the Princess and Khozrevsky in Pavlova's story. Nikolai is the traditionalist who accepts the existing establishment as it is, seeing convention as the foundation holding the world together. Nikolai believes in the values of art and religion, values which to him are evidence of the special worth of humanity. Bazarov, on the other hand, is not only a nihilist but a materialistic scientist who believes humanity to be on the level of frogs: I shall cut the frog open, and see what's going on in his inside, and then, as you and I are much the same as frogs, only that we walk on legs, I shall know what's going on inside us, too (Turgenev 14). Bazarov is similar to the Princess, despite the fact that he scorns art and she is herself an artist, despite their genders, despite the fact that she would likely be horrified at such a comparison. They are similar in that both adopt the masculine guise of the strong individual who is beyond the traditio

Category: Literature - A