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Sixteen-year-old Vladimir, spending the summer of 1833 at his family's country house near Moscow, falls in love with the beautiful, capricious Princess…
Sixteen-year-old Vladimir, spending the summer of 1833 at his family's country house near Moscow, falls in love with the beautiful, capricious Princess Zinaida, who lives next door and amuses herself by tormenting a whole circle of admirers. He is happy just to be her page, until he begins to suspect that she loves someone else, and discovers who it is in a night scene he will never forget. This volume adds other stories by Turgenev.
Context and significance
Ivan Turgenev (1818–1883) published 'First Love' in 1860 and said it was the most autobiographical of his works. It is one of the most delicate stories about adolescence in any language. The translator is the American Isabel Hapgood, who also translated Hugo's Les Misérables. Read Turgenev's Fathers and Sons.
About the author
Ivan Turgenev (1818–1883) grew up on an estate in central Russia owned by his tyrannical mother, who controlled thousands of serfs. He studied in Berlin, and his Sportsman's Sketches, with their sympathetic portraits of serfs, made him famous; an obituary of Gogol earned him a month in detention and exile to his estate.
He spent much of his life abroad, following the singer Pauline Viardot, whom he loved for forty years, and became a friend of Flaubert and a bridge between Russian and Western literature. His novel Fathers and Sons gave the world the word nihilist.