In this masterly unromantic novel, Turgenev drew a character, Bazarov, who served to express what he taught us to call Nihilism and made a movement into a man. In Russia itself the effect of the story was astonishing. The portrait of Bazarov was immediately and angrily resented as a cold travesty. The portraits of the “backwoodsmen,” or retired aristocrats, fared no better. Turgenev had indeed roused the ire of both sides, only too surely.