Few novels in all the history of literature have had so profound an influence on national destiny as Fathers and Sons. It anticipated a type and shaped a tendency that helped change the face of the world. The intellectual movement which Turgenev chronicled and the "Nihilist" character he brought into being gave the first impetus to what later culminated in the Russian revolution. As a work of creative art, Fathers and Sons is given the highest possible rank among works of realistic fiction by revo-lutionists and conservatives alike.