First Love

Vladimir is sixteen, spending a summer at his family’s country place, when the impoverished Princess Zinaida moves into the wing next door with a crowd of suitors already trailing her. He joins them, half in worship and half in torment, until he learns who actually holds her heart, and the discovery rearranges everything he thought he understood about his own household. Turgenev called this 1860 novella the one thing he had written that he could still reread with pleasure, and he admitted the source was his own youth. It is short, cruel, and tender at once, and Russian readers from the emperor down argued about it. This free PDF and EPUB edition also carries the accompanying stories from the collection.