The reception of Ivan Turgenev's novel “Fathers and Sons” (1862, German translation: 1865) is considered in the article through the example of the works by three Austrian authors of the 19th century. The focus of the article is on the key transferable phenomena, the image of a strong woman subordinating a man (Odintsova in Turgenev, Vanda von Dunaev in Leopold von Zaher-Masoch's “Venus in Furs”), the generations conflict with a certain cultural and typological discursive formation standing behind it, the type of a “new man” representative of the democratic strata that comes to replace the aristocracy (“Fritz's Ball” by Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, “Dissonances” by Ferdinand von Saar).