The Princess has fairly little that's noble about her and is in rather dire straits, but Zinaïda captivates Vladimir from the first glimpse he gets of her: 'I felt an excitement I had never known before'.Īlready twenty-one, and with a circle of admirers that she keeps around to entertain her, Zinaïda toys with boy, even as he is head over heels in love with her.

Things change when Princess Zayeskin and her daughter, Zinaïda, take the place next door. Not that he takes much advantage: his pleasures are solitary ones, nature or his books. Vladimir tells of when he was sixteen, in the summer of 1833.Īn only child of ill-matched parents - his 'still young and very handsome' father having married a woman ten years older ('from mercenary considerations') - he's meant to be studying, preparing for university, but no one is pressuring him very hard and he enjoys great freedoms. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.įirst Love begins with a late-night round of three men sharing stories of their first loves - but one, Vladimir Petrovitch, says he can't recount his story there, preferring to write it down and return with it, as he then does, two weeks later the rest of the novella is his first-love-account. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole.

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review 's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. That is why First Love or Spring Waters are such perfect stories of their kind.' - Erik de Mauny, Times Literary Supplement 'Passion in all its forms always excited Turgenev, but he was happiest portraying its earliest intimations fulfilment made him uneasy.He is best when eschewing all fancy stuff and describing exactly what happened, as he does in First Love' - John Bayley, The New York Times Book Review It is a masterpiece that shows the curious literalism of Turgenev's talent. '(T)he tale that exploits most effectively Turgenev's gifts of pathos and humor, insight and self-awareness - the strengths of his own passivity, so to speak - is First Love.

It is a gesture of artistic defiance to the urgencies of the age - which demanded of an artist as Russian as Turgenev to 'lift the nation' - yet it remains an authentic attendance to those urgencies: the old order versus the new' - Hisham Matar, The Guardian

'Ivan Turgenev's novella First Love is one of the most perfect things ever written.

Also available in translations by Isaiah Berlin (1950) and Richard Freeborn (1999)Ī- : simple and very effective tale of young love.

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First love by ivan turgenev