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There is a special charm in re-reading Russian classics as an adult — the same works that we used to write school essays on. It consists at least in looking at well-known heroes from the height of life experience and trying to understand the motives of their actions anew.
Why is Bazarov so casually handling his life?
To a tragic end (being a physician, Yevgeny Bazarov becomes infected at the autopsy of a man who died of cholera), our hero is led by hard views. They create in a young person the illusion of control over the situation, the world and himself.
Bazarov is a realist who fights against any manifestations of idealism. With adolescent arrogance, he denies everything subjective (and with it the human) as opposed to the objective and knowable. As a result, he is denied elementary anxiety — an inherent experience in the face of the unknown, unpredictable. His slender convictions of a naturalist and a realist are attacked when he encounters something that sooner or later always appears in our lives — love and death.
Despising the «aristocrats» Bazarov falls in love with the wealthy landowner Odintsova. And gets rejected. Love often destroys our naive attempts at control: we do not fully control either the feelings of another or our own. And death reminds us of impotence, unpredictability and inevitability. Not cauterizing a dangerous cut in time, Bazarov defies death (heroes sometimes have an imaginary feeling of their own omnipotence and immortality) and loses. But his act can also be seen as an unconscious suicide.
Bazarov is doomed — like everything rigid, unable to absorb the ambiguity and inconsistency of the world
Anxiety is our natural regulator, which warns of danger and makes us look for help outside or inside ourselves. It would probably be too human for Bazarov to start worrying and admit: «I may not be able to cope with the infection.» His inner heroic script required death rather than worries about his possible mortality.
Protest heroism was, perhaps, a kind of delayed teenage rebellion against the idealistic or petty-bourgeois life of the “fathers” generation.
But the progressive can perish in its infancy if it completely rejects the conservative: long-lived, active, time-tested, like the same hellish stone that was used to cauterize the wound in those days.
What would have happened if Bazarov had not died?
He would have to live his life, at some point moving into the rank of «fathers», whose ideas and values will be swept away by a new generation that will reject everything that was acquired by the fathers. And Bazarov is not one of those who can recognize the possibility of processing the experience of previous generations and including it in the new one that the future inevitably brings. Therefore, Bazarov is doomed — like everything rigid, incapable of absorbing the ambiguity and inconsistency of the world.