Bazarov’s Heir: Revisiting Zola’s Souvarine and Turgenev’s Influence on Germinal

Abstract: Scholars have typically dismissed the notion of Ivan Turgenev’s direct literary influence on Zola’s Germinal (1885). This essay, however, seeks to re-evaluate the novel’s “nihilist” character Souvarine as a descendant of Turgenev’s first and most famous literary nihilist, Bazarov of Fathers and Children (1862), and to highlight the similarities between the two authors’ approaches to representing the “jeunesse russe” of the 1860s. Examples of Zola’s nonfiction writing on Russia are also analyzed in order to illuminate his attempts at historical fidelity to the events of the Russian 1860s and his generally sympathetic treatment of the figure of the Russian anarchist.