First Love (Classics S.)

Rating:
Summary: Adolescent innocence.
Review: An old man reflects on his most dearest love in his life: his first love at 16 for a girl of 21.
His love is not requited for a truly astounding reason.

This short novel is a masterful evocation of an adolescent love, pure and without interest, but dramatic and cruel (whipping).

An unforgettable masterpiece.

Rating:
Summary: Amazing piece of literature
Review: At the risk of not sounding manly, I must admit I love Russian literature! And, Turgenev is one of my favorites. I've also felt that he has never been fully appreciated to the degree he should be. When most people think of Russian literature obvisously authors like Dostoevsky (my favorite author), Tolstoy, and Chekhov come to mind but one rarely hears someone speak highly of Turgenev, or maybe it's merely the people whom I hang around with. "First Love" is so wonderfully written, it's so full of charm, wit, humor, and basic human emotions that as one goes on reading we almost relive our own first love experience. We think back to when we were young and how we felt when we had that crush on someone. How the whole world seemed different and exciting. Well, Turgenev managed to recapture those feelings we may have put aside. The story is about Vladimir Petrovichand he tells how he has fallen for Zinaida, the daughter of a Princess. He takes us along with him as he recalls his memories of what it was like when he first met her. And how he also was able to grow up and learn from this experience. I can't praise this book highly enough. A wonderful read!
Very good translation by Isaiah Berlin. If after reading this you want to read more by Turgenev try "A Month In The Country" and "Spring Torrents".

Rating:
Summary: too melancholic..but beautiful
Review: Before reading this novel, I have expected something really bittersweet and warm from its title...however, was kinda depressed by its dark mood and the melancholic air covering the entire story. Neverthless....however melancholic it is, it is never too heavy, but beautifully sad. Turgenev have catched that naive feeling of teenage and the infatuation of first love.

Rating:
Summary: Sensitively written romantic tale
Review: First Love is enjoyable, romantic, emotional, touching, and just a little bit twisted. It did not move me in any great intellectual way, but it was a compelling read, it did tug at my emotions quite a lot, and the plot was quite well developed for such a compact novella. It is indeed a tale of "first love" -- but to tell more would be to spoil this oft-overlooked gem of a book.

Rating:
Summary: Chitaite kogda pianii!
Review: I read this book one very, very cold winter's night in St.Petersburg, sitting at a sleazy 24-hour bar by the Gulf of Finland, where I was the only guest. I sat there drinking numerous beers, reading this novella - and was practically in tears by the time I had finished it. By then I'd gotten unreasonably buzzed, so I stumbled over to the barlady (who, needless to say, was called Natasha), and congratulated her on being Russian, for that meant that she'd been born in the same country where Turgenev wrote this lovely, tragic, wonderfully sentimental story. I felt stupid the next morning, but was still overwhelmed with the beauty of what I'd read. I am uncertain how much the setting I read this book in had to do with how much I liked it, and I wonder what it'd be like to read it now, sober, at home, but I suspect it of being pretty damn brilliant no matter where you read it. Well, maybe except if you're from California or something. At any rate - "First Love" rocks.

Rating:
Summary: Another Tragic Love Story...Plus
Review: Turgenev creates prose so spare, yet so elegant you find yourself rereading entire paragraphs just to try to net some hidden agenda behind the simplicity. Turgenev's influence on Hemingway was probably never more brilliantly expressed than in these understated words from A Moveable Feast: "I had read all of Turgenev...(of Dostoevsky) frailty and madnesss...were there to know as you knew the landscapes and roads in Turgenev..."

This book is more than a simple love story between a young man and an older woman, though the idea of the shortness and depthlessness of young love is an important theme. There are also such themes as the dissolution and fall into poverty of the Russian nobility as seen in Zinaida and her mother, a former princess; the idea of 19th century Russia shrugging off the chains of serfdom and royal dominance is also explored in the vastly superior Fathers and Sons. Another noteworthy theme is alienation from parents and society in general; Vladimir Petrovich is dominated utterly by his menacing father and carking, gossipy mother. He grows to become a bachelor, rehashing his tragic story before a fireplace in an inn. Towards the end of the book, when Vladimir's father, who shares with Vladimir a strong affection for Zinaida, flogs the young girls arm with a riding crop, as well as the threat the father gives to one of Zinaida's numerous suitors, we are made to wonder exactly what part romantic relationships have in the alleviation or exacerbation of violent mental illness, or at least a violent and cold mindset.

This book, however deep and lovingly crafted, is a cipher next to Fathers and Sons. It's also a lot shorter; first time Turgenev readers might want to start here.

Rating:
Summary: "During the past month, I had grown much older..."
Review: Turgenev's brief novel, "First Love" is about growing older and lossing innocence. Vladimir, the central character who tells the story, makes a large memory excersice to remember, to write and to communicate his unusual first love experience when he was sixteen. He does that in beautiful prose, realistic and lyric simultaneusly.

Love in this novel for Vladimir is mainly an emotional experience, not physichal. There is no sex and, more important, not explicit sexual desire. This could be considered old fashioned or artificial by contemporary readers but somehow Turgenev manages to make it credible and moving.

The translation by Isaiah Berlin is excellent, at least much better that the one I've read into Spanish.

Rating:
Summary: Short, Reaslistic, Powerful
Review: Turgenev's novella, "First Love" is a compact, but intense, fiction whose realism blends with its literary allusions, dream-like qualities, and point of view to create a work of undeniable power. This is a novella which questions the boundaries between life and art, asking us all the while where love resides in self, family, and society.

"First Love" begins in a style reminiscent of Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales." Following a long dinner party, three men are in the middle of a calm conversation, when the unnamed host proposes that they all share the stories of their first loves. Two men's stories are quickly dismissed, leaving Vladimir Petrovich, a pensive middle aged man, who offers to give his story after having a chance to write it out. Vladimir's story concerns a summer when he was 16. Living in the country with a dissatisfied mother and an agonizingly Byronic father, Vladimir happens upon a dispossessed 21-year-old princess, Zinaida. From her shabby home, the beautiful and mysterious Zinaida commands a court of six men of varying ages and backgrounds - a poet, a doctor, a minor nobleman, a soldier, and Vladimir - each of whom is desperate to win her affection at any cost. For his own part, Vladimir attempts throughout the story to discover the roots of his own fascination with Zinaida.

Part of the appeal of "First Love" is its point of view. It is a true first person narrative - we only ever know Vladimir's experience - the effect is a realistic account of the infatuation, love, doubt, and inner turmoil of a young man told through the hindsight of age and experience. Perhaps I've grown too accustomed to omniscient narration recently, but the desire that Turgenev evokes to know the minds of others, which of course in reality, we cannot, is both appealing and frustrating.

Turgenev's literary background is broad and multicultural - he evinces knowledge of Russian, British, German, and French, Classic and Romantic traditions - all of which give us the sense that the tale being told is at once extremely personal and terribly universal. "First Love" is well-worth the investment of the short time it takes to read.

Rating:
Summary: A Tight Effort
Review: Turgenev, a friend of Flaubert, makes a good effort at this slow moving eternity in the ephemeral type novel. The ephemeral being beauty eternity being the cycle of life ending in death. He made every epigram and scene intertwine in a pricking of subconscious introspection. It almost worked. Chekhov seemed to have greater success in creating this sort of ambiance with less words but Turgenev is no less interesting.

The translator was Isaiah Berlin.