First Love

3 hrs. 7 min.

Classics

Language Russian

Author Ivan Turgenev

Narrator Vadim Maksimov

Description

"…In everything I thought, in everything I felt, there lurked a half-conscious, bashful foreboding of something new—unspeakably sweet, feminine…"

The novella “First Love” captivates with the sincerity of its tone, emotionality, and the tenderness of a l i r i c a l heart. It contains a fateful mystery of love, a passion that’s changeable, capricious, compelling with its power—and yet at the same time destructive.

Turgenev never concealed the autobiographical nature of this novella, where the prototypes for the main characters were the writer in his youth, the object of his first love—the princess E. L. Shakhovskaya—and his father. The novella is permeated with “the secret charm of real memories of first love, young elation and young sorrow.”

The father of the writer—Sergey Nikolaevich, a retired cuirassier officer—was a man remarkably handsome, but morally and mentally insignificant. The son didn’t like to recall him and characterized him as “a great catcher by the grace of God.” This spendthrift’s marriage to the not-so-young, but very wealthy Varvara Petrovna Loutovіnova was purely a matter of calculation. The marriage was unhappy and didn’t restrain Sergey Nikolaevich. One of his many “pranks” is described in the novella “First Love.”