First Love

The woman is wild, a she-cat tamed by the purr of a Jaguar
Money's the matter
If you're in it for love
You ain't gonna get too far
Watch out boy she'll chew you up
(Oh here she comes)
She's a maneater
~Hall and Oates

What a sly little novella Turgenev has given us here! Ivan took a lot of crap for not writing, in 1860, about important societal changes that began after the end of the Crimean war. I am terrible with Russian history, but this would have been around the time that serfs stated agitating in their own defense. One of the czars (Alexander II maybe?) in response to the agitation finally allowed commoners to purchase land. It might have taken until 1917 for the revolution to finally end the monarchy, but their end was on a giant show more countdown clock the moment serfs were given self-determination. So at this hinge moment people were scandalized when Turgenev chose to write about adolescent passion! Or was he only writing about adolescents passion? This story is a scream in favor of the end of the aristocracy. To say the people in the book are subtly cruel, absurdly melodramatic, and entirely ridiculous is to grossly understate the case.

The comically manipulative and conceited Princess Zinaida has men dancing around her doing things like drawing lots for the honor of kissing her hand. The amount of time spent in these sorts of activities gave me a new respect for the efficiencies of Tinder. Many men appear superficially besotted with the beautiful princess, but most seem to be engaging in this dance because it is expected. Our narrator (telling the story years later), Vladimir, is Zinaida's next door neighbor, a 16-year old boy (Zinaida is 21) who seems to be "in love" in the sense that his hormones are kicking in, she is beautiful, and she has been identified as desirable by older and more experienced courtiers. This feels so authentic to 16 year old love, so straightforward, that I found Vladimir irresistible and honestly lamented the end of his innocence which was clearly coming. Unsurprisingly, Zinaida falls not for one if her suitors, but for someone who is not in the room, The identity of that man is somewhat surprising. I don't want to spoil this but I will say that Zinaida says early on she needs a man who will "master her" despite knowing that will be bad for her in the end and she finds that man. It seems like Zinaida is the only one other than Vladimir who loves operatically, and like Vladimir she has chosen badly.

The whole novella is beautifully crafted. Spare prose and a structure that takes the reader step-by-step from idealism to disillusionment to dust.

You love her
But she loves him
And he loves somebody else
You just can't win
And so it goes
'Til the day you die
This thing they call love
It's gonna make you cry
I've had the blues
The reds and the pinks
One thing for sure
(Love stinks)

~The J. Geils Band show less

Another Melville House novella I'd never heard of but bought mostly just because of the Melville House endorsement. I had very little in the way of expectations going in, but the book still managed to surprise me. Rather than being about a "first love" where two young people are breathlessly in love with each other, it's about that kind of "first love" that is an unrequited romantic obsession with an inscrutable other.

With its themes of decaying Russian aristocracy, I expected this little tale to be far more tragic than it was. Don't get me wrong, there is certainly squalor, cynicism, and heartbreak here. But somehow it all felt on a more ordinary, human scale, rather than epic, and I think I liked it better for that.

Another excellent show more Melville House pick. show less

This is a damn good little novel providing rolling emotions of joy, giddiness, loathing, sorrow, and more.

With themes mirroring his own life, especially his distant father and less desirable mother, Turgenev tells the tale of Vladimir Petrovich’s first love, in the countryside of Moscow, in the summer of 1833. The narration is autobiographical, with Petrovich discovering his first desires of adult love at the age of 16, immediately after which he finds his new impoverished neighbor, Princesses Zinaida, age 21, to be the object of his adoration and endless affections. Add a snuff-snorting princess mother, five other overly eager suitors, the aforementioned distant father who isn’t happy in his marriage and a mother who fears her show more husband, the comedy and the inevitable tragedy virtually writes itself.

To say the story is predictable would not be a fair statement. We know it can’t end well. The beauty of the book is its flow, its word usage (fantastic translation by Isaiah Berlin), and the affecting footprint that it leaves, despite the brevity. A boy’s first love going awry, the revelation of the truth, his regret at the end are simple but effective. The passages of love – the desire, the enchantment, the loss of innocence, the first falling, being lost in it, yielding to it, crushed by it, to leave it, the shock of it, and its eventual passing – are all in these pages, without sappiness.

His first love was his most memorable. My last love was my most memorable. Good-bye.

Some Quotes:

In the Foreword, advice from Turgenev’s father:
"'Take what you can yourself, and don't let others get you into their hands; to belong to oneself, that is the whole thing in life.”

On love – the youth desiring love:
“I remember that at that time the image of woman, the shadowy vision of feminine love, scarcely ever took definite shape in my mind: but in every thought, in every sensation, there lay hidden a half-conscious, shy, timid awareness of something new, inexpressibly sweet, feminine… This presentiment, this sense of expectancy, penetrated my whole being; I breathed it, it was in every drop of blood that flowed through my veins – soon it was to be fulfilled.”

On love – the enthrallment:
“…I forgot everything; my eyes devoured the graceful figure, the lovely neck, the beautiful arms, the slightly disheveled fair hair under the white kerchief – and the half-closed, perceptive eye, the lashes, the soft cheek beneath them… I blushed terribly…, fled to my room, threw myself on the bed and covered my face with my hands. My heart leaped within me. I felt very ashamed and unusually gay. I was extraordinarily excited.”
On love – the youth sinking into the first love, innocence gone:
“… the image of Zinaida still hovered triumphant over my soul, though even this image seemed more tranquil. Like a swan rising from the grasses of the marsh, it stood out from the unlovely shapes which surrounded it, and I, as I fell asleep, in parting for the last time clung to it, in trusting adoration.
Oh, gentle feelings, soft sounds, the goodness and the gradual stilling of a soul that has been moved; the melting happiness of the first tender, touching joys of love - where are you? Where are you?”

On love – better to have loved than not at all:
"She quickly turned towards me, and opening her arms wide, put them round my head, and gave me a strong, warm kiss. God only knows for whom that long farewell kiss was seeking, but I tasted its sweetness avidly. I knew that it would never come again.
'Good-bye, good-bye,' I kept repeating.
She tore herself from my embrace, and was gone. I went too. I cannot even begin to convey the feelings with which I left her. I never wish to experience them again, but I should count it a misfortune never to have had them at all."

Lastly – on youth and its inevitable passing:
"O youth! youth! you go your way heeding, 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 ... like snow ... and perhaps the whole secret of your enchantment lies not, indeed, in your power to think that there is nothing you will not do; it is this that you scatter to the winds - gifts which you could never have used to any other purpose. Each of us feels most deeply convinced that he has been too prodigal of his gifts - that he has a right to cry, 'Oh, what could I have not done, if only I had not wasted my time…
What has come of it all - of all that I had hoped for? And now when the shades of evening are beginning to close in upon my life, what have I left that is fresher, dearer to me, than the memoirs of that brief storm that came and went so swiftly one morning in the spring?..." show less

A party is over, but two men remain late with the host, smoking cigars. After midnight the talk turns to first loves, and one of the men, Vladimir Petrovich, admits he has a story to tell. So much of a story, in fact, that he insists on taking the time to tell it properly -- by writing it down. His first-person narrative thus becomes Ivan Turgenev’s coming-of-age novella, First Love. Initially published in 1860, it's translated from the Russian by Isaiah Berlin and now published as part of Penguin Books’ 20-title Great Loves series.

Petrovich is a sensitive, 16-year-old Muscovite who spends the summer of 1833 with his parents at a country house. He’s dazzled to discover that an aging princess and her beautiful, 21-year-old show more daughter, Zinaida, occupy an adjoining house. Estranged a bit from his parents and on his own most of the time, young Petrovich is drawn into the adult world of Zinaida and the men who court her. Though a mere hundred pages, the novella captures not only 19th-century Russia, but also the thrill of first love, betrayal and the loss of innocence, and the complications of a later opportunity to reunite.

“I never wish to experience [those feelings] again,” Petrovich writes, “but I should count it a misfortune never to have had them at all.” Ah yes, that’s first love! Highly recommended. show less

It's official, I need more Turgenev in my life. He could narrate the mundane and I'd be engrossed. His portraits and scenes are so vivid. A sixteen year old boy falls in love with the impoverished, capricious princess next door, so does a decent chunk of the neighborhood. Her heart, however, belongs to his father - this doesn't stop her from demanding adulation from the other poor sods. Things never end well for russian heroines though!

Late evening after dinner, three middle-aged men remember their first love. For two of them the experience had no noteworthy aspects, but the third gave an account of his passion for an "older" woman when he was sixteen. As the daughter of a coarse, impoverished princess she had several admirers when mother and daughter moved next door to Petrovich. He was immediately smitten. Nothing has changed for lovelorn teenagers in the almost two hundred years since this story was written, they are still beyond help or advice, with no choice but to wait and see what happens. Beautifully written with an excellent translation by Isaiah Berlin, this slim book is well worth reading.

I had read "First Love" before - somewhere in my early teens, in Russian. I knew what the story was about, I knew the end (or so I thought) and I had always appreciated Turgenev. About 20 years later, I get the chance to read it again, in English this time. And the story is still as good as ever - the narrative of the middle-aged man about his first love, at the time when he was 16; a first love that never happened really - the woman, a few years his senior, fell in love with someone else instead.

What I did not remember (or maybe I did not have the experience - both in reading and in life - to see) is how early in the story are the hints about who Zinaida will end up in love with. I knew it was clear long before the protagonist figured show more it out but the signs are there from almost the start. Maybe I saw them because I knew what was coming... What I don't remember for sure was the end of the story - the fact that our protagonist almost meets Zinaida a few times later in his life. In my memory this story finished when his family came back in the city - apparently my younger self did not like what happened after that and just forgot it.

The story is worth reading but only if the reader is ready to immerse themselves in the Russian mid-19th century. What sounds silly and annoying now is what had been the norm back then - complete with the bad poetry (and some good one) and the poor princesses and the men that were surrounding them. And the reader should never forget that this is the story of a 16 years old - even if it is told by him when he is a bit older - things at 16 look different. show less