The two boys of this book both fall in love, but while one ends up happy and married, the other, whose love is unrequited, ends up dead of surgical blood-poisoning. Is it because he would never be able to reconcile his philosophy with his feelings of love (because in loving one person he has to admit that person's independent value)? Or that he is so inflexible he can't change, can't grow up, and instead just dies? On the side of all other books, I have been reading a marvelous book about food (Life is Meals by James and Kay Salter). It contains an anecdote about Turgenev, in which he says "love produces the greatest blossoming of the personality." Arkady is only freed from Bazarov's influence by going under Katya's spell. She mellows him out, lets him have both progressive ideals and musical delight.
There's also the Christian theme, in the book. Bazarov's father convinces him to take the sacrament of extreme unction. He agrees to but wants to wait until he is unconscious. Then, while the sacrament is being given, he seems to wake up and shudder in horror. The scene reminded me of the unction scene in Brideshead Revisited, though in that book the dying man seems to give a sign that he has repented and is grateful for the sacrament. Pavel, too, who also loses his love, and suffers from it so much that he dies metaphorically (Turgenev describes him as "a living corpse" at one point) also has a brush with Christianity. His lost love, on her deathbed, sends him a ring with a cross etched over its original sphynx, and a note that says the cross is the answer to the enigma. Reminds me of Girard, whose theories on mimetic desire I know about only from my favorite lit-pop book.
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