In his helpful introduction to the Modern Library edition of _Fathers and Sons_, Herbert Muller writes that Ivan Turgenev’s _A Sportsman’s Sketches_, which appeared in 1852, had created an effect similar to _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_ in America. _Fathers and Sons_ (1862), treating revolutionaries like most of Turgenev’s books, had an even more lasting effect. Although both the uproar and the Nihilist movement died down, Muller declares that the novel “helped to form the mentality of the later revolutionaries who established the Soviet Union.” The story deals with the return from college of Arkady Kirsanov and his friend Yevgeny Bazarov. Nihilist Bazarov dominates his disciple Arkady. Conflict quickly erupts. Arkady’s father Nikolai is hurt by the distance between them, and his uncle Pavel seizes upon a pretext for a duel in which Bazarov wounds him. Bazarov’s father Vassily, pathetically eager to be close to his son, finds the gulf between them even greater than that separating Arkady and Nikolai. The two generations--one giving allegiance to religion and the old regime, the other to science and revolutionary Nihilism--have lost almost all rapport with each other. Turgenev treats the perennial aspect of this theme, yet he particularizes it to mid-nineteenth century Russia. Eventually the gap between the Kirsanovs is narrowed as Arkady marries and returns to administer the estate with his father. But before Bazarov leaves he lashes out at Arkady: You’re not made for our bitter, rough, lonely existence.... Our dust would get into your eyes ... you’re admiring yourselves unconsciously, you like to abuse yourselves; but we’re sick of that--we want something else! we want to smash people! It may be, as Muller says, that Turgenev’s mind was with the sons and his heart with the fathers, that he tried to be fair. Here is a case in which, regardless of intent, a novelist helped to shape a movement which disrupted a world. Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky reacted violently to Turgenev’s work. The former challenged him to a duel and the latter attacked and caricatured him mercilessly as Karamazinov in _The Possessed_ (1872), a violent attack upon Nihilism. In his introduction to the Modern Library edition, Avrahm Yarmolinsky declares that Dostoyevsky’s avowed intention in writing it was to drive home certain convictions of his, regardless of whether or not he met the requirements of the art of fiction. He wanted to deal a body blow to the rebels who threatened what he considered to be the foundations of Russian life. Originally he conceived his novel as a political lampoon, a pamphlet against the revolution.