Summary and Analysis
Chapter 28
Summary
Six months later, Nikolai is giving a farewell dinner for Pavel. During the preceding week, Arkady married Katya and Nikolai married Fenichka. At the party, "Everyone served everyone else with comical attentiveness as if they had agreed to act out some kind of naive comedy." Pavel thanks everyone, embraces his brother, and bids them all farewell in English. Katya suggests to Arkady that they offer a secret toast in memory of Bazarov.
Turgenev briefly informs the reader what each of the characters has done with his life. Odintsova enters into a marriage of convenience with a lawyer and lives in great harmony and "perhaps love" with him. At Marino, the affairs are straightened out as Arkady takes over the farm and Nikolai tends to settling the arguments between the liberated serfs.
Pavel establishes himself in the highest circles of society in Dresden where he is know as "der Herr Baron von Kirsanov." Sitnikov roams around St. Petersburg and claims to be continuing the "work" of Bazarov. In a remote corner of Russia, there is a cemetery where one can sometimes observe two old people visiting the grave where young Bazarov is buried.
Analysis
There is very little to be said about the last chapter, since Turgenev says it all. That is, Turgenev uses the traditional nineteenth-century technique of rounding out the history of all of his characters.
The final chapter does make it clear that Arkady's transition is complete and he becomes the practical man of business who still adheres to many of the more advanced ideas but will not reject all the classical values found in art and literature and music. His father, then, is freed to arbitrate in disputes arising among the peasants and hired help.
Thus, the novel ends with a sense of all things having come to the right end and with everything in the proper perspective.