Bazarov sits down to tea as if the marsh were still on his boots, and the brothers watch him without speaking. Arkady looks from his father to his uncle and back. Bazarov has walked to a marsh by an aspen coppice and flushed five woodcock, but he is no sportsman. He prefers physics, the natural sciences, to anything else. Paul Petrovitch, already irritated that a doctor's son will not be diffident, asks about the Germans with a politeness that is working hard. Bazarov yawns and says the German savants have energy, and that the Russian ones, with permission, do not. If he is told a fact, he agrees with it. That is all.
Paul says he cannot abide the Germans of Germany proper. They once had Schiller and Goethe, whom his brother loves, and now they are chemists and materialists. A good chemist, Bazarov answers, is worth a score of poets. He believes in nothing at all. A science may exist as a trade exists. Science in the mass does not. Paul keeps granting postulates. Bazarov asks whether this is an examination in tenets. Paul goes pale. Nikolai Petrovitch steps in, delighted, he says, by the natural sciences, and mentions Liebig's work on soils, as if the guest might help the farm. Bazarov will be at his service, but Liebig can wait. The alphabet comes first. They have not reached the letter A.
Nikolai sends his brother to see the steward. Paul rises without looking at anyone. It is terrible, he says, to have lived five years in the country, remote from superior intellects, and to discover that one's knowledge is rubbish. The younger generation know more. He turns slowly and leaves, and Nikolai follows. Behind the door Arkady says the tone was too sharp, that his uncle is offended. Bazarov will not fawn on rustic aristocrats. He has found a water beetle, dytiscus marginatus, and wants to show it. Arkady says the uncle is not the man Bazarov thinks. He deserves pity rather than ridicule. Always one ought to be fair. Bazarov does not see the connection. Then listen, Arkady says.
