negative, pathetic and humorous sides.

"In his novel Turgenev did not at all side with the 'fathers' as the
unsympathetic progressive critics of that time insisted, he did not
wish to in the least extol them above the 'children' in order to
degrade the latter. Just so he had no intention of showing up in the
character of the representative of the 'children' some kind of model
of a 'thinking realist' to whom the young generation should have bowed
and imitated, as the progressive critics who received the work
sympathetically imagined. Such a one-sided view was foreign to the
author; he sketched both the 'fathers' and the 'children' as far as
possible impartially and analytically. He spared neither the 'fathers'
nor the 'children' and pronounced a cold and severe judgment both on
the ones and the others. He positively sings a requiem to the
'fathers' in the person of the Kirsanovs, and especially Paul
Kirsanov, having shown up their aristocratic idealism, their
sentimental aestheticism, almost in a comical light, ay almost in
caricature, as he himself has justly pointed out. In the prominent
representative of the 'children,' Bazarov, he recognized a certain
moral force, the energy of character, which favourably contrasts this
strong type of realist with the puny, characterless, weak-willed type
of the former generation; but having recognised the positive side of
the young type, he could not but show up their shortcomings to life
and before the people, and thus take their laurels from them. And he
did so. And now when time has sufficiently exposed the shortcomings of
the type of the generation of that time, we see how right the author
was, how deep and far he saw into life, how clearly he perceived the
beginning and the end of its development. Turgenev in "Fathers and
Children" gave us a sample of a real universal novel, notwithstanding
the fact that its plot centres on the usual intimate relations of the