For two weeks Marino goes on as if Bazarov had always been there. He works. Thenichka loses her shyness and one night wakes him because Mitia is in convulsions. He stays two hours, half joking, half yawning, and helps. The servants grow fond of him, except Prokofitch, who hands him dishes sourly and calls him a dressed-up pig. Paul dislikes him with his whole soul. Nikolai is a little afraid of the influence on Arkady, and still likes to watch the experiments. Bazarov has brought a microscope.
One morning Nikolai, hidden by the arbour, hears Bazarov call him a good fellow and also a man on the shelf, a man whose song has been sung. He misses Arkady's reply and walks slowly back to the house. The talk goes on without him. Bazarov has noticed the Pushkin. A man who is no longer a boy should be given something practical, Büchner's Stoff und Kraft, for a start. The same day Arkady comes in while his father is reading, takes the book with a kindly, childish gentleness, leaves the German volume, and goes out with Pushkin under his arm. Nikolai tells Paul that their songs have been sung, that he had hoped to draw nearer to his son and is being left behind. He has organised the peasants, been called Fine Kirsanov through the province, and kept reading, and still he is told his day is past. He tried the Büchner. Either he is a fool or the book is rubbish, and he thinks the first more likely. A letter from their kinsman Koliazin, in the province for the Revision, invites them fifty versts to be shown off. Neither brother will go. Paul says he does not intend to give in. There will be a skirmish with Arkady's doctor.
That evening Paul comes to tea angry and ready. Bazarov calls a neighbour a petty aristocrat. Paul offers the English aristocracy, inborn dignity, principles, the public good, and the duty that keeps him fastidious in the country. Bazarov asks what folded hands do for that public good. The Russian of today does not need liberalism, progress, and principles. The useful course is denial. They deny everything. First the site must be cleared. Paul says the people are patriarchal and cannot live without faith. Bazarov agrees, and says that this proves nothing. The people hear Elijah going up to heaven in the thunder. His own grandfather guided the plough. They demolish because they are a force, Arkady adds, and a force need render account to no one. Paul shouts that he is a fool, that four men and a boy will be trampled by millions. From a little candle, Bazarov says, Moscow burned. Raphael is not worth a copper groat. Let Paul name one institution that does not deserve rejection. The village commune. The family. Bazarov gives him two days to think, and leaves with Arkady to dissect frogs.
The brothers remain. Paul says these are the young men of the day, our successors. Nikolai repeats the word, despondent. He remembers a quarrel with his mother, when he told her they came of different generations and that the pill was bitter but she must swallow it. Now their turn has come. Paul will not call that magnanimity. Ask one of these youths whether he will take white wine or red, and he will answer, as if the universe were watching, that red is his customary rule. Thenichka has been peeping from the doorway and does not enter until the quarrel stops. Nikolai tells her the samovar can go. Paul says bon soir and goes to his study.
