Essay Database

To discuss Bazarov in terms of his Byronic traits and ancestry, several terms should be defined. The phenomenon of "Byronism" alone deserves an entire monograph study. It is not my intention to definitively establish a definitive conception of "Byronism;" rather, it is to identify traces of European and Russian Byronic imitations and influences on Turgenev as author and creator of Bazarov. To avoid encountering serious debate on the specific characteristics of Byronism as a literary …

…by searching for a direct correlation between the concepts of Byronism and those of Russian nihilism, a search that proved relatively unsuccessful because of the connection of Byronism to Romanticism and nihilism to realism, two literary movements often diametrically opposed to one another. In this study I traced Turgenev's influences in creating the literary nihilist Bazarov and found the connection that I had sought in Turgenev's inspirational roots in Byron, European Byronism, and Russian Romanticism.