I read this book directly after I finished “Germinal,” and I’m reflecting now on how both Zola and Turgenev have meditated on youth and vigor and having for oneself a set of guiding principles. Yet both authors seem to offer, at least superficially, little more than a condemnation of nihilism and of the status quo, at least as it requires exploitation of the lower classes of workers in the mid-19th century.

A character in “Germinal” is even quite similar in his views to Barasov …