People of different generations often don’t understand each other, because times change, but habits and the awareness of how to live properly remain. The older generation often clings to familiar patterns and fears change; those who carry it sometimes forget that breaking the old is easier than building the new. The novel’s main character is the nihilist Yevgeny Bazarov, who denies everything except science. For nineteenth-century society, he is a scandalous figure. Through his fate and his relationships with the people around him, Turgenev shows a whole range of complex problems, and any solution can’t be unambiguously the right one. Listen to the novel performed by the master of artistic speech Aleksandr Klyukvin.