Fathers and Sons

"They are so swollen-headed, these young men of today! If you ask one of them, 'Which wine do you prefer, red or white?' I am in the habit of preferring red!' he will answer in a bass voice and with such a solemn expression on his face as though the whole of the universe were looking at him at that instant....",

says Paul Petrovich in Turgenev's Fathers and Sons.

There will always be a 'generation gap', at least one, but we change sides, inevitably, given time. I well remember being even more pompous, foolish and pretensious than I am now but possibly being surrounded at a non-descript university by worse examples of ingenus who, on the basis of some so-so 'A' levels and having read nearly 35 books, regarded themselves as God's gift to future of intellectual culture.

My own most telling analysis of the schism between generations so precious to each coming one were the lines,

Hendrix lives and we're all aware

that Dad don't know and Mum don't care,

I'd like to go for a walk and find

that the woman I love is also blind.  

It was either that, or maybe another, that was self-consciously done in the spirit of All the Young Dudes, the anthem of such disaffection for those of us of that vintage but one is up against it if deciding to take on Bowie even on a song he was big enough to be able to give way.

Cat Stevens was also very good on the subject.

I'm not entirely convinced that Fathers and Sons is obviously Turgenev at his best. With 'nihilism' as the younger generation's agenda, they are an easier target than when it was, say, Rock Against Racism, CND or hunt saboteurs.

In the end, I compressed by various attempts at satire on 'campus Marxists' to a few lines in another poem,
           across the campus

where students are reciting 

scriptures taken from Ulyanov 

as jealous as Puritans 

and righteous as lounge bar spivs.

               (Escape Artist, for Rosemary)

and, in the words of Thomas O'Malley, the alley cat, I'm very proud of that, not necessarily for the lines themselves but for the fact that I finally dealt with the issue in a nonchalant way and didn't even give them a whole poem to themselves.

I'm still concerned, though, whether it should just say 'Lenin' or whether 'Ulyanov' brings with it any affectation that is meant to be attributed to them rather than me.

I'm sure it will be possible at some future time, depending on how long one has left, to look back at oneself as one is now and think, like Capt. Mainwaring, 'oh, no, no, no', and so it's a condition that, once acknowledged, one can't ever escape. But if that's the level of self-doubt, scepticism and reflection on the effects of time that Turgenev has prompted before I'm halfway through a re-read of his so-called masterpiece then perhaps it is a 'thought-provoking' masterpiece.