Customer Reviews

First Love (The Art of the Novella)

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Turgenev's novella, "First Love" is a compact, but intense, fiction whose realism blends with its literary allusions, dream-like qualities, and point of view to create a work of undeniable power. This is a novella which questions the boundaries between life and art, asking us all the while where love resides in self, family, and society.

"First Love" begins in a style reminiscent of Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales." Following a long dinner party, three men are in the middle of a calm conversation, when the unnamed host proposes that they all share the stories of their first loves. Two men's stories are quickly dismissed, leaving Vladimir Petrovich, a pensive middle aged man, who offers to give his story after having a chance to write it out. Vladimir's story concerns a summer when he was 16. Living in the country with a dissatisfied mother and an agonizingly Byronic father, Vladimir happens upon a dispossessed 21-year-old princess, Zinaida. From her shabby home, the beautiful and mysterious Zinaida commands a court of six men of varying ages and backgrounds - a poet, a doctor, a minor nobleman, a soldier, and Vladimir - each of whom is desperate to win her affection at any cost. For his own part, Vladimir attempts throughout the story to discover the roots of his own fascination with Zinaida.

Part of the appeal of "First Love" is its point of view. It is a true first person narrative - we only ever know Vladimir's experience - the effect is a realistic account of the infatuation, love, doubt, and inner turmoil of a young man told through the hindsight of age and experience. Perhaps I've grown too accustomed to omniscient narration recently, but the desire that Turgenev evokes to know the minds of others, which of course in reality, we cannot, is both appealing and frustrating.

Turgenev's literary background is broad and multicultural - he evinces knowledge of Russian, British, German, and French, Classic and Romantic traditions - all of which give us the sense that the tale being told is at once extremely personal and terribly universal. "First Love" is well-worth the investment of the short time it takes to read.

I read this book one very, very cold winter's night in St.Petersburg, sitting at a sleazy 24-hour bar by the Gulf of Finland, where I was the only guest. I sat there drinking numerous beers, reading this novella - and was practically in tears by the time I had finished it. By then I'd gotten unreasonably buzzed, so I stumbled over to the barlady (who, needless to say, was called Natasha), and congratulated her on being Russian, for that meant that she'd been born in the same country where Turgenev wrote this lovely, tragic, wonderfully sentimental story. I felt stupid the next morning, but was still overwhelmed with the beauty of what I'd read. I am uncertain how much the setting I read this book in had to do with how much I liked it, and I wonder what it'd be like to read it now, sober, at home, but I suspect it of being pretty damn brilliant no matter where you read it. Well, maybe except if you're from California or something. At any rate - "First Love" rocks.

At the risk of not sounding manly, I must admit I love Russian literature! And, Turgenev is one of my favorites. I've also felt that he has never been fully appreciated to the degree he should be. When most people think of Russian literature obvisously authors like Dostoevsky (my favorite author), Tolstoy, and Chekhov come to mind but one rarely hears someone speak highly of Turgenev, or maybe it's merely the people whom I hang around with. "First Love" is so wonderfully written, it's so full of charm, wit, humor, and basic human emotions that as one goes on reading we almost relive our own first love experience. We think back to when we were young and how we felt when we had that crush on someone. How the whole world seemed different and exciting. Well, Turgenev managed to recapture those feelings we may have put aside. The story is about Vladimir Petrovichand he tells how he has fallen for Zinaida, the daughter of a Princess. He takes us along with him as he recalls his memories of what it was like when he first met her. And how he also was able to grow up and learn from this experience. I can't praise this book highly enough. A wonderful read!
Very good translation by Isaiah Berlin. If after reading this you want to read more by Turgenev try "A Month In The Country" and "Spring Torrents".

So Zinaida, the 21-year-old object of desire in FIRST LOVE, tells the 16-year-old narrator.

So the accursed "let's be friends" line that objects of desire crush the hearts of men with dates back to at least 1833. (It's probably been around since the dawn of man, but I've heard it since the 1970s).

FIRST LOVE is a short but powerful novella that captures a young man's awakening while exploring all the "ecstacy" and "that slow poison" of adult love.

What struck me about reading it was how little people have changed. Societies and manners may shift a bit but the passions and betrayals that take place in the novel are as dramatic and real as anything you hear about today.

"O youth! youth! you go your way heedless, uncaring--as if you owned all the treasures of the world; even grief elates you, even sorrow sits well upon your brow. You are self-confident and insolent and you say, 'I alone am alive--behold!' even while your own days fly past and vanish without trace and without number, and everything within you melts away like wax in the sun...in the snow...."

For such a short work, there were many such passages that really connected with me. Turgenev was a master.

First Love is enjoyable, romantic, emotional, touching, and just a little bit twisted. It did not move me in any great intellectual way, but it was a compelling read, it did tug at my emotions quite a lot, and the plot was quite well developed for such a compact novella. It is indeed a tale of "first love" -- but to tell more would be to spoil this oft-overlooked gem of a book.

In the late 1850's, three wealthy Russians have supper at the home of one of the men. After the plates are cleared away and the middle-aged gentlemen are enjoying cigars, they trade stories of their first loves. Two of them tell stories that are completely lacking of passion and soul, revealing the shallowness of the men themselves. The third, Vladimir Petrovitch, has a story that is so out of the ordinary that he is reticent to tell it. His companions, desperately lacking any passion of their own, beseech him to tell them his tale. Reluctantly he agrees, but in order to do the story justice, he must first write it down, promising to read it to them at a future date.

Thus begins Ivan Turgenev's 1860 novella, First Love. At age sixteen while living in the country, Vladimir meets twenty-one-year-old Zinaida Alexandrovna Zasyekina, the daughter of a titled but very poor family living on the adjoining property. Zinaida is a beautiful and spirited young women and Vladimir falls hopelessly in love with her. Zinaida toys with him mercilessly, enticing him with hints of a deep and romantic affection and, alternatively, pushing him away and treating him with condescending, sisterly affection. (Perhaps the 19th century equivalent of "Let's just be friends.") At one point, she even asks Vladimir to look after her twelve-year-old brother, emphasizing the their age difference and that Vladimir is still just a boy.

Adding to Vladimir's frustration are the numerous suitors who come calling on Zinaida every evening. They are all older than Vladimir and superior to him in either wealth or social class. She plays them all off one another, but occasionally indicates that she favors Vladimir. On these occasions the young man's heart swells and there is no joy greater than the joy felt by a young man in love for the first time. There is also no sadness greater than the sadness brought on by unrequited love.

Vladimir is a sensitive and observant young man and he is able to see through Zinaida's extreme coquettishness and notices a gradual change in her manner. Beneath her façade, he can see that she truly is in love, but not with him. Nor is it one of the other suitors, although at first he suspects it is one of them. The penultimate heartbreak for Vladimir is that Zinaida's secret love turns out to be Vladimir's own father. In the final chapters, this heartbreak story, as all good heartbreak, turns tragic.

Turgenev is one of the early practitioners of literary realism. First Love is told in first person and adheres strictly to the limitations of omniscience that that point of view requires. Turgenev uses that to his advantage in several specific places, such as when Vladimir witnesses an altercation between his father and Zinaida. He is unable to hear what they are discussing, but his visual observation provides enough for for us to understand the depth nature of their relationship.

The true artistry of this novella is revealed at the conclusion when the reader reconsiders the entire story once again, this time taking a far more sympathetic view of both Zinaida (and really, the first time through she's very hard to like) and Vladimir's father. What is finally revealed is that this story is not only a tale about a youthful unrequited love but also about Zinaida's place in society, society's expectations of all of us, and ultimately about the nature of love itself.

Turgenev's influence is even more apparent in the development of psychological fiction. He has a gentle touch that captures complex and nuanced emotional states in his characters and can be seen as a precursor to Henry James and Joseph Conrad. This same approach to fiction can still be seen in such contemporary works as Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach.

Turgenev lived during changing times in Europe. Later events would sweep away the aristocracy in his native Russia, but during his lifetime the social order, and the aristocracy that it supported, was already crumbling. The characters in First Love reflect this along with the very nature of the story that the older Vladimir tells to his shallow and passionless companions.

An old man reflects on his most dearest love in his life: his first love at 16 for a girl of 21.
His love is not requited for a truly astounding reason.

This short novel is a masterful evocation of an adolescent love, pure and without interest, but dramatic and cruel (whipping).

An unforgettable masterpiece.

Turgenev creates prose so spare, yet so elegant you find yourself rereading entire paragraphs just to try to net some hidden agenda behind the simplicity. Turgenev's influence on Hemingway was probably never more brilliantly expressed than in these understated words from A Moveable Feast: "I had read all of Turgenev...(of Dostoevsky) frailty and madnesss...were there to know as you knew the landscapes and roads in Turgenev..."

This book is more than a simple love story between a young man and an older woman, though the idea of the shortness and depthlessness of young love is an important theme. There are also such themes as the dissolution and fall into poverty of the Russian nobility as seen in Zinaida and her mother, a former princess; the idea of 19th century Russia shrugging off the chains of serfdom and royal dominance is also explored in the vastly superior Fathers and Sons. Another noteworthy theme is alienation from parents and society in general; Vladimir Petrovich is dominated utterly by his menacing father and carking, gossipy mother. He grows to become a bachelor, rehashing his tragic story before a fireplace in an inn. Towards the end of the book, when Vladimir's father, who shares with Vladimir a strong affection for Zinaida, flogs the young girls arm with a riding crop, as well as the threat the father gives to one of Zinaida's numerous suitors, we are made to wonder exactly what part romantic relationships have in the alleviation or exacerbation of violent mental illness, or at least a violent and cold mindset.

This book, however deep and lovingly crafted, is a cipher next to Fathers and Sons. It's also a lot shorter; first time Turgenev readers might want to start here.

I am one of those modern American readers who scratches their heads at the idea that Turgenev's stature in his own time rivaled, if not exceeded, Dostoevksy's and Tolstoy's. This is the first piece I've read that has given me a sense of what all the fuss is about.

While I'm sure that some feminist critic has taken Turgenev to task for the femme fatale qualities of Princess Zinaida, the depiction of the main character's by turns painful and euphoric infatuation with her is brilliant. It's vivid in its own right, but almost doesn't have to be: it pushes so many memory buttons that it creates an overwhelming sense of "Been there, done that. Maybe aging isn't so bad. . ."

The novella as a whole has a most unRussian sense of economy and tight structure. Indeed, it's probably the one piece I've read out of translation from Russian that I wouldn't mind being longer: the characters are well-drawn and sympathetic, their foibles and weaknesses so compelling, that I wanted to hear more about them.

If there's a flaw in this piece -- and this is debatable -- it's that Turgenev became too fixated on a point of suspense. He seems uncertain about whether he has already shown too much of his hand and plays a kind of peekaboo with details that makes the main character seem a little slow at comprehending what was happening. The story itself is so compelling that the suspense seems almost like a gimmick. It might have been better to lay it all out from the beginning and then indulge us with more perspectives on the story.

My particular edition had "First Love" paired with "A Fire at Sea" -- a self-serving autobiographical short story that loses much in comparison to similar stories written at roughly the same time, like Conrad's _Lord Jim_ and Stephen Crane's "Open Boat". This hardback, by Viking Press, is quite lovely and well typeset, so if you're only interested in "First Love", it's worth tracking down.

I love the way Ivan Turgenev writes; his language is wonderful; his paragraphs well formed and lengthy-true art of a very good writer who was also very well educated. I especially love the way Constance Garnett translates his work from the Russian. It's a story of a 16 year old boy's love interest; his feelings are so well written one can not help but to feel his many live and vivid emotions.