First Love
- Downloads
- 100+
- First published
- 1860
- Pages
- 212
About this book
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.
From the opening pages
THE guests had long since departed. The clock struck half-past twelve. There remained in the room only the host, Sergyéi Nikoláevitch, and Vladímir Petróvitch.
The host rang and ordered the remains of the supper to be removed.—“So then, the matter is settled,”—he said, ensconcing himself more deeply in his arm-chair, and lighting a cigar:—“each of us is to narrate the history of his first love. ’Tis your turn, Sergyéi Nikoláevitch.”
Sergyéi Nikoláevitch, a rather corpulent man, with a plump, fair-skinned face, first looked at the host, then raised his eyes to the ceiling.—“I had no first love,”—he began at last:—“I began straight off with the second.”
“Very simply. I was eighteen years of age when, for the first time, I dangled after a very charming young lady; but I courted her as though it were no new thing to me: exactly as I courted others afterward. To tell the truth, I fell in love, for the first and last time, at the age of six, with my nurse;—but that is a very long time ago. The details of our relations have been erased from my memory; but even if I remembered them, who would be interested in them?”
“Then what are we to do?”—began the host.—“There was nothing very startling about my first love either; I never fell in love with any one before Anna Ivánovna, now my wife; and everything ran as though on oil with us; our fathers made up the match, we very promptly fell in love with each other, and entered the bonds of matrimony without delay. My story can be told in two words. I must confess, gentlemen, that in raising the question of first love, I set my hopes on you, I will not say old, but yet no longer young bachelors. Will not you divert us with something, Vladímir Petróvitch?”
Contents
About the author
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Book facts
- Author
- Ivan Turgenev
- First published
- 1860
- Reading time
- About 6 hours
- Pages
- 212
- Language
- English
- Genre
- Russian Classics
- Formats
- PDF, EPUB, Read online