eighteen with black hair, an olive complexion, a rather round but pleasing face and small dark eyes." She lives comfortably with her sister but lacks confidence, finding it hard to escape Anna Sergeevna's shadow. This shyness makes her and Arkady’s love slow to realize itself. The Princess – Ánna Sergéyevna's aunt, "...a small shriveled woman with a clenched fist of a face and glaring spiteful eyes under a grey wig..." Rude and overbearing but essentially ignored by the household. Chapter 20 Vasíly Ivánovich Bazárov – Bazarov’s father. A retired army surgeon, and a small countryside land/serf holder. Educated and enlightened, he nonetheless feels, like many of the characters, that rural isolation has left him out of touch with modern ideas. He thus retains loyalty to traditionalist ways, manifested particularly in devotion to God and to his son Yevgeny. "'A comical old chap with a heart of gold'," in his son's words. Arína Vlásevna Bazárova – Bazarov’s mother. A very traditional woman of the 15th-century Moscovy style aristocracy and a pious follower of Orthodox Christianity, woven with folk tales and falsehoods. She loves her son deeply but is also terrified of him and his rejection of all beliefs. Historical context and notes The fathers and children of the novel refers to the growing divide between the two generations of Russians, and the character Yevgeny Bazarov, a nihilist who rejects the old order. Turgenev wrote Fathers and Sons as a response to the growing cultural schism that he saw between liberals of the 1830s/1840s and the growing nihilist movement. Both the nihilists (the "sons") and the 1830s liberals (the "fathers") sought Western-based social change in Russia. Additionally, these two modes of thought were contrasted with the Slavophiles, who believed that Russia's path lay in its traditional spirituality. Turgenev's novel was responsible for popularizing the use of the term nihilism, which became widely used after the novel was published. Fathers and Sons might be regarded as the first wholly modern novel in Russian literature (Gogol's Dead Souls, another main contender, was referred to by the author as a poem or epic in prose as in the style of Dante's Divine Comedy, and was at any rate never completed). The novel introduces a dual character study, as seen with the gradual breakdown of Bazarov's and Arkady's nihilistic opposition to emotional display, especially in the case of Bazarov's love for Madame Odintsova. The novel is