Fathers and Sons – Ivan Turgenev

I bought a few second hand books on eBay last week and along with a couple of Ursula K. LeGuin Earthsea volumes and The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoyevsky, this was amongst them. I hadn’t heard of Turgenev before, but I gather he was one of the three greatest Russian novelists, along with Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky.
Fathers and Sons concerns two young men, the angry nihilist Bazarov and his softer, gentler disciple, Arkady. The two men travel between their parents’ homes and the home of Anna Sergeyevna, and argue about politics and philosophy all the way along, and also both experience love, one happily, one unhappily. Turgenev displays a clear ability with this work but I can’t help wondering if this is not one of his lesser works. I expect Anna Karenina spoiled me!
However I would certainly like to read more of Turgenev’s work, for I did enjoy Fathers and Sons.