First Love (Russian: Первая любовь, Pervaya ljubov) is a novella by Ivan Turgenev, first published in 1860. It is one of his best loved and most celebrated pieces of short fiction.
Vladimir Petrovich, a 16-year-old, is staying in the country with his family and meets Zinaida Alexandrovna Zasyekina, a beautiful 21-year-old woman, staying with her mother, Princess Zasyekina, in a wing of the manor. This family, as with many of the Russian minor nob...
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First Love (Russian: Первая любовь, Pervaya ljubov) is a novella by Ivan Turgenev, first published in 1860. It is one of his best loved and most celebrated pieces of short fiction.
Vladimir Petrovich, a 16-year-old, is staying in the country with his family and meets Zinaida Alexandrovna Zasyekina, a beautiful 21-year-old woman, staying with her mother, Princess Zasyekina, in a wing of the manor. This family, as with many of the Russian minor nobility with royal ties of that time, were only afforded a degree of respectability because of their titles; the Zasyekins, in the case of this story, are a very poor family. The young Vladimir falls irretrievably in love with Zinaida, who has a set of several other (socially more eligible) suitors whom he joins in their difficult and often fruitless search for the young lady's favour. Zinaida, as we find throughout the story, is a thoroughly capricious and somewhat playful mistress to a set of rather love-struck suitors. She fails to...
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