In the evenings they gather at her house to play games and discuss literature, but mainly to play games. However, Zinaida has collected a circle of devoted admirers each of whom wishes to be more.
Thanks to the deceased husband’s feckless ways they live in straitened circumstances in a run-down cottage. He now has the distance to be able to look back on his youth with the dispassion that comes from worldly wisdom, and the bulk of the narrative takes the form of his first-person account of that fateful summer.Īt their holiday home Vladimir and his wealthy parents find they have new neighbours, a rather slovenly princess who is always getting into financial scrapes and her lovely 21-year old daughter Zinaida Alexandrovna. For some reason the three men have decided to swap accounts of their first loves, but Vladimir insists on writing his down in order to capture the subtle nuances. The story is told by the 40-year old Vladimir Petrovich to a couple of friends, casting his mind back a quarter of a century. The title suggests a light summer romance of the ‘old enough to know better, young enough not to care’ variety, but Turgenev instead delivers a powerful dissection of the infatuations of youth. What could have been trite, in Turgenev’s hands achieves universal significance as he depicts the powerful emotions experienced by someone who is leaving childhood behind and entering the world of adult relationships, with all their joys and heartbreaks. But it had its many admirers, including the French novelist Gustave Flaubert, who gushed in a letter to Turgenev, "What an exciting girl that Zinochka is!" The Countess Lambert, a close acquaintance of Turgenev, told the author that the Russian emperor himself had read the novella to the empress and been delighted by it.Ivan Turgenev’s 1860 novella charts the course of a 16-year old boy’s infatuation with the princess next door in the summer of 1833, while on holiday at the family dacha just outside Moscow. Others condemned the impropriety of that subject matter, namely a father and son in love with the same woman and a young woman who was the mistress of a married man. Some criticized its light subject matter that did not touch upon any of the pressing social and political issues of the day. Here Turgenev is retelling an incident from his own life, his infatuation with a young neighbor in the country, Princess Catherine Shakhovskoy (the Zinaida of the novella), an infatuation that lasted until his discovery that Catherine was in fact his own father's mistress.Ĭritics were divided. The author claimed it was the most autobiographical of all his works. First Love was published in March 1860 in the Reader's Library.
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