We watch as, compelled, the pair are pulled by a powerful attraction towards each other. We begin the story thinking that we are exploring Vladimir’s coming-of-age initiation into the mysteries of love we quickly learn that Zinaida and Petr Ivanych, Vladimir’s father, are not immune to the power of love and desire. Turgenev’s story captures the sway an enchanting young woman full of spirit and life can hold over men the crazy, intoxicating feeling of being deeply infatuated for the first time the gut-churning attraction of the unattainable Other.īut first love is not restricted to the very young. Turgenev shows us how Zinaida’s family is clinging to a shabby social respectability Vladimir’s mother dismisses Zinaida as an “adventuress.” But Vladimir is drawn into the circle of suitors around the young beauty, and, while he is aware he is acting the fool, can not help himself–he becomes obsessed with the girl. “First Love” ostensibly tells the story of a 16-year-old Russian student, Vladimir, who falls hard for the 21-year old Princess Zinaida. Turgenev understood the travails of the human heart–he spent his life in pursuit of a married woman, the then celebrated singer Pauline Garcia-Viardot–and his fiction often provides a window into that secret and guarded space. Hemingway recommended that young writers read all of Turgenev’s work. That being said, Turgenev was admired–for good reason–by some pretty damn fine writers, including Virginia Woolf, Henry James, Thomas Mann, and (perhaps surprising to some), Joseph Conrad and Ernest Hemingway. As Joseph Finder notes in “ Where Have All the Strivers Gone?” in the New York Times Sunday Book Review, it isn’t fashionable to write about the intersection of class and commerce he argues that perhaps only Tom Wolfe and Jay McInerney “remain defiantly old-school in their portrayal of ambition as a basic aspect of the human character.” Further, Turgenev, like Thackery in “Vanity Fair,” explores with an unblinking scrutiny the importance of class and wealth and ambition, and its hold over humans. His detail-laden realism and attention to social class are out of literary favor moreover, his work is deemed too spare emotionally by some modern critics. Turgenev isn’t given his due in today’s literary circles. Who has better captured that heady universal experience–and the dismay and despair when it doesn’t work out–than the great Russian short story writer Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev, in his elegant novella, “First Love”? The iPod-Facebook generation rides the same emotional roller-coaster as did their mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers, when it comes to l’amour. Trust me, with two sons in college, and a third in high school, I can testify that this primal experience hasn’t changed. That crazy, intoxicating feeling of being infatuated by another–totally lost, drawn magnetically to the object of your desire–for the first time.
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