First Love

by Ivan Turgenev, Ivan S. Turgenjev, Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev, et al.

Book Overview

Isaiah Berlin's translation of the legendary Russian novella of growing up and heartbreak

When the down-at-heel Princess Zasyekin moves next door to the country estate of Vladimir Petrovich's parents, he instantly and overwhelmingly falls in love with his new neighbour's daughter, Zinaida. But the capricious young woman already has many admirers and as she plays her suitors against each other, Vladimir's unrequited youthful passion soon...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0140443355
• ISBN13: 9780140443356
• Release Date: December 1978
• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Length: 112 Pages
• Weight: 0.22 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.1" x 7.7"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

What is love?

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.

"Let us be friends--that's what."

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.

Adolescent innocence.

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.

"During the past month, I had grown much older..."

Turgenev's brief novel, "First Love" is about growing older and lossing innocence. Vladimir, the central character who tells the story, makes a large memory excersice to remember, to write and to communicate his unusual first love experience when he was sixteen. He does that in beautiful prose, realistic and lyric simultaneusly.Love in this novel for Vladimir is mainly an emotional experience, not physichal. There is no sex and, more important, not explicit sexual desire. This could be considered old fashioned or artificial by contemporary readers but somehow Turgenev manages to make it credible and moving.The translation by Isaiah Berlin is excellent, at least much better that the one I've read into Spanish.

Short, Reaslistic, Powerful

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.