/lit/ - Literature

ITT: Post a book, get recommended (English)* translations. Post something on your backlog and hopefully I and other anons can help you narrow down your options

*unless requested otherwise

I'll start with Turgenev's Fathers and Sons (which has also been translated as Fathers and Children)

What are you thoughts on this novel? Me myself, I've read only Chapter 1 so far, and already think I'm gonna love it. If anything, I'm reading it in Russian, since all the English translations I came across happened to be of utterly shit-tier quality.

>>9038081
Is active nihilism not just saying "fuck it, I'll be an empty tool to whatever ideology is forced on me most vividly?" Does the recognition that one is never truly free of ideology mean the death of nihilism?

I'm sure this has only become more prevalent in recent times but even before the age of information there must have been some underlying socio-political ideology to the most radical backwater of human existences. Even if you have to go as deep as the Kantian categories wouldn't nihilism eventually give way to conceptual thinking as simple as binary thinking, whole/partitive differentiation, cause and effect etc? From there it seems like child's play to subtly condition an ideological background with which to play with.

As an example I'll use the archetypal nihilist. Bazarov from Turgenev's "Fathers and Sons" may espouse nihilism but in his every action there is some measure of either the Russian merchant class (his socio-economic situation) or of Orthodox Christian morality (the ideology of his mother and his household). This is definitely a loaded example but it gets the point across.

How does one attempt a life of nothing from a starting point of something? Am I just reading too much into the etymology and trying to find a mysticism of the zero in an ideology that is essentially just Epicureanism?

Fathers and Sons by Turgenev, a short 19thC Russian novel about nihilism, vanity, love, and communication across the generation gap - a family saga that is not overly sentimental. I read the Pete Carsson translation.

A young graduate returns to the provincial family home with a new friend, a nihilistic doctor who ruffles feathers by his forthright views on society. There is love, disease, death, a duel, and a lot of character observation of memorable figures from up and down society, within a relatively short space.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jW3PFC86UNI