A
Literary Saloon
&
Site of Review.

Trying to meet all your book preview and review needs.

Contents:

Main

the Best

the Rest

Review Index

Links

to e-mail us:


support the site

the complete review - fiction

First Love

by
Ivan Turgenev

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

- Return to top of the page -

Our Assessment:

A- : simple and very effective tale of young love

See our review for fuller assessment.

  From the Reviews:

• "Ivan Turgenev's novella First Love is one of the most perfect things ever written. 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
  
  
• "(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 masterpiece that shows the curious literalism of Turgenev's talent. 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
  
  
• "Passion in all its forms always excited Turgenev, but he was happiest portraying its earliest intimations; fulfilment made him uneasy. That is why First Love or Spring Waters are such perfect stories of their kind." - Erik de Mauny, Times Literary Supplement

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. 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. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

- Return to top of the page -

The complete review's Review:

       First 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.
       Vladimir tells of when he was sixteen, in the summer of 1833. An 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. Not that he takes much advantage: his pleasures are solitary ones, nature or his books.
       Things change when Princess Zayeskin and her daughter, Zinaïda, take the place next door. 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".
       Already 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. Zinaïda likes to play games, and Vladimir isn't quite sure where the games begin and end. In his naïveté he doesn't quite see it, but Zinaïda is torn too, and obviously a reason she likes having him around is because of the complete innocence he represents.
       Turgenev captures both these characters exceptionally well in his simple descriptions and scenes. Most remarkable is how he weaves in the suggestive but subtle hints of what else is going on: Vladimir is blinded by his passion, and though he notes a variety of details of what is happening around him he fails to see the full picture. Truth must almost literally trip over him before he realizes it.
       Love can be difficult to present in fiction, and puppy-love is notoriously so, but Turgenev finds a near-perfect balance here. First Love remains a classic of first love -- in part also because Zinaïda is more than a mere object for adolescent projection. A fully realized character, she is undergoing something that the young Vladimir can't fathom but which Turgenev provides considerable insight into.
       Zinaïda can do as she wishes with the young lad, but she also unburdens herself -- even if he can do nothing with her casual asides such as:

I must have someone who can master me .... But, merciful heavens, I hope I may never come across anyone like that !

- M.A.Orthofer, 25 October 2013

- Return to top of the page -

Links:

• Melville House publicity page
• Penguin publicity page
• Insel publicity page
• Reclam publicity page
• Первая любовь - Russian text

• Asylum
• Fingers & Prose
• Jefferson Flanders
• fredbubbers.com
• The Guardian
• in lieu of a field guide
• Journey Into Our Imagination ...
• Libellule
• Mindful Pleasures
• The Mookse and the Gripes
• The New York Times Book Review
• Reading Matters
• Time's Flow Stemmed
• Veteran Dilettante

• Ivan Turgenev at books and writers

• See Index of Eastern European literature
• See Index of Books Written Before 1900

- Return to top of the page -

About the Author:

       Russian author Ivan Turgenev (Иван Сергеевич Тургенев; Ivan Tourgueniev, Iwan Turgenjew, Ivan Turgueniev) lived 1818 to 1883.

- Return to top of the page -

© 2013-2021 the complete review

Main | the New | the Best | the Rest | Review Index | Links