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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
In "First Love, and Other Stories," Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev delves into the intricate tapestry of human emotions, exploring themes of youthful passion, love's complexities, and the bittersweet nature of memory. Comprised of masterfully crafted narratives, the collection employs a lyrical and introspective style, underscored by Turgenev's keen psychological insights and profound understanding of socio-cultural dynamics in 19th-century Russia. Each story invites readers to reflect on their own experiences of affection and longing, while simultaneously being immersed in the beauty and tragedy of fleeting moments. Turgenev, a prominent figure of the Russian literary scene and a contemporary of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, draws upon his own experiences and observations in his writing. His background as a member of the Russian gentry provides a unique lens through which he examines the nuances of relationships and societal expectations. His own youthful encounters likely informed the bittersweet tone in "First Love," a testament to Turgenev's ability to capture the essence of nostalgia and regret. This collection is highly recommended for readers interested in nuanced character studies and the delicate exploration of love's myriad forms. Turgenev's evocative prose not only entertains but also offers timeless reflections on the human experience, making it a must-read for those seeking to understand the emotional landscape of their own lives. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - The Author Biography highlights personal milestones and literary influences that shape the entire body of writing. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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First love, and other stories
Table of Contents
Introduction
This volume gathers a compact selection of shorter prose by Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev, centered on the celebrated novella that lends the collection its title and complemented by works spanning 1854 to 1866. Rather than attempting a complete edition, it presents a deliberately scaled portrait of the author’s art in concentrated forms. Read together, these pieces offer a coherent introduction to Turgenev’s realism and psychological insight, while also displaying his range. The purpose is twofold: to provide an accessible path into his work for new readers, and to offer a resonant sequence for returning readers who wish to see recurring concerns refracted through multiple modes and moments.
The collection’s variety is structural as well as tonal. It includes a novella divided into chapters, an epistolary narrative conducted through alternating letters, a reflective prose sketch arranged in brief sections, a diary-fragment attributed to a deceased artist, and a compact tale. These distinct forms allow Turgenev to explore intimacy, distance, and reflection with different instruments: scene and dialogue, the indirectness of correspondence, the suspension of plot in meditative prose, the immediacy of journal entries, and the compression of a short story. Such generic diversity sharpens the contrasts between voices and vantage points while sustaining a consistent stylistic and ethical sensibility.
Composed and published in mid-nineteenth-century Russia, these works belong to the era in which Russian prose realism achieved a defining clarity of purpose and method. The dates—1854, 1855, 1860, 1864, 1866—mark a steady arc through which the author refined his economical style and deepened his attention to inner life. Without recourse to ornament or programmatic assertion, he aligns narrative design with psychological truth and social observation. The result is fiction that reads with lucid naturalness yet yields layered implications. The historical context enters not as thesis but as atmosphere, manners, and pressures that meet a character’s temperament at crucial moments.
The opening novella sets the keynote: a young narrator recounts a formative infatuation and the summer in which first desire announces itself with irrevocable force. The premise is simple, the effect lasting. Turgenev stages the awakening of feeling within rooms, gardens, and small social gatherings where glances, pauses, and misread signs shape destiny as surely as declarations. The power of the piece lies less in incident than in the cadence of recollection and the tact with which the older self listens to the younger. An elegiac clarity prevails: the past is not excused or indicted, only understood as it discloses its contours.
The epistolary work turns to love and principle across a chain of letters, allowing competing temperaments to press their claims without a narrator’s final arbitration. Each missive carries the sender’s self-portrait, revealing intention, blind spot, and the way language can both expose and conceal. Gaps between letters become part of the story: delays, silences, and the imagined responses in the interval. In this form, Turgenev examines how belief and feeling travel on paper, how persuasion shades into performance, and how sincerity can be undone by impatience or pride. The result is a study in misalignment as intimate as it is social.
The reflective sketch offers a change of register. Sparely arranged and meditative, it contemplates an emotional and spiritual stillness that can be at once calm and suffocating. Rather than advancing through events, it proceeds by tonal shifts and images that chart the weather of a mind. The sections invite the reader to inhabit suspension: moments when purpose falters, when the will wishes to move yet discovers that movement itself has lost its lure. In this space, the prose gains a serene exactitude. The effect is not thesis but a distilled mood, testing what endurance and attention can make of interior quiet.
The diary-fragment presents notes attributed to an artist writing at the limit of experience. The premise—entries from beyond the writer’s life—creates a paradox of intimacy without future, inviting reflection on completion, fatigue, and the claims of art. The form is confessional yet unsentimental, tracing changes in resolve and tone across brief segments. Without summarizing a life, it dwells on decisive moments of recognition: what it means to have said enough, loved enough, worked enough. The fragmentary shape refuses neat closure and instead accumulates weight through recurrence, returning to themes of vocation, memory, and the threshold where affirmation darkens into renunciation.
The concluding tale, written in the mid-1860s, shows the author’s late mastery of concentration. With few characters and a tight span, it achieves suggestiveness through restraint: an incident, a pattern of looks and gestures, a memory that will not quite settle into certainty. The prose relies on implication rather than flourish, trusting the reader to complete the design. In its brevity one senses the same interests that animate the longer pieces—feeling under pressure, the hazards of interpretation, the unbidden force of the past—rendered with an economy that leaves echoes. It stands as a quiet proof of the author’s supple range.
Across these works, certain concerns recur with persuasive consistency. First attachments and their afterlife; the delicate negotiations of correspondence and conversation; the tension between movement and stasis; art’s consolations and limits; the way time clarifies and distorts. Social settings—drawing rooms, gardens, quiet streets—provide surfaces on which the inner life leaves its trace. Turgenev’s characters often confront themselves indirectly, and this indirectness lends the fiction its enduring tact. The reader is asked not to pass judgment but to register gradations of feeling, the mixture of motives, and the moments when a choice that looks small becomes, in retrospect, decisive.
Stylistically, the hallmarks are clarity, restraint, and an ear for the cadence of ordinary speech. Description is precise without ornament; nature appears not as decoration but as a counterpart to mood. Irony operates gently, setting a tone in which sympathy is possible without sentimentality. The structures—chapters, letters, sections, entries—are cleanly articulated, each form guiding the pace and measure of revelation. Above all, the prose trusts suggestion: a withheld detail, an unsaid word, a pause in dialogue that proves more eloquent than argument. In this economy lies the depth of the work, drawing the reader into active inference and quiet recognition.
The significance of the collection as a whole rests on its unity of vision amid formal diversity. Read in sequence, the pieces become a study in perception: how people see themselves and others, how they are seen, and how that seeing changes over time. The mid-century context anchors them in a specific social world, yet the dilemmas—love’s first shock, the drift of days, the urge to speak and the need for silence—remain legible. For contemporary readers, the appeal lies in psychological exactness without harshness, and in moral seriousness without dogma. These qualities have helped the works endure beyond their moment.
The arrangement here invites both continuous reading and selective return. One can follow the chronological arc from 1854 to 1866 to sense development, or approach the forms in contrast—novella against letters, sketch against diary, tale as coda. Either way, the collection proposes a compact education in Turgenev’s art: how he stages feeling, sets measure to memory, and keeps judgment in reserve while allowing consequences to emerge. It offers, finally, a refined intimacy: not confession for its own sake, but attention shared between author and reader. That attention is the ground on which these works continue to speak with quiet authority.
Author Biography
Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev (1818–1883) was a Russian novelist, short-story writer, and playwright whose lucid prose and balanced realism helped connect Russian literature with Western European readerships. Emerging in the mid-nineteenth century, he portrayed the shifting landscape of the Russian gentry and intelligentsia with psychological subtlety and an abiding attention to nature. His breakthrough A Sportsman’s Sketches gave compassionate portrayals of peasant life, while Fathers and Sons crystallized debates over generational change and new social ideas. Writing across novels, tales, and drama, Turgenev became a cosmopolitan mediator of cultures, shaping perceptions of Russia abroad and setting enduring standards for narrative restraint and humane observation.
Educated first in Moscow and then at Saint Petersburg University, Turgenev studied classical languages and literature before continuing his education at the University of Berlin in the late 1830s. Exposure to German philosophy, especially Hegelian thought, strengthened his alignment with Westernizer ideas current among progressive Russian intellectuals. On returning to Russia, he moved within literary circles associated with the critic Vissarion Belinsky and contributed to leading journals. European realism and French prose style also informed his craft, though he maintained a distinctly Russian subject matter grounded in provincial estates and the rhythms of rural life. This education and milieu shaped his cosmopolitan yet critical perspective.
Turgenev’s early career included lyric verse and drama, but his prose sketches soon defined his reputation. The cycle widely known as A Sportsman’s Sketches, published in the early 1850s, combined closely observed landscapes with vignettes of serf and landowner relations, influencing public sentiment against serfdom. His tribute to Nikolai Gogol led to a clash with authorities, and he was detained and confined to his estate for a period, underscoring the tense political climate writers navigated. During these years he refined a flexible, conversational narrative voice that could register conflicting viewpoints without polemic, a stylistic hallmark that would mark his later novels and stories.
From the mid-1850s, Turgenev produced a sequence of major novels: Rudin, A House of Gentlefolk, On the Eve, Fathers and Sons, Smoke, Torrents of Spring, and Virgin Soil. These works chart the fate of the “superfluous man,” the stirrings of the intelligentsia, and the pressures of reform, while exploring love, friendship, and disillusionment. Fathers and Sons, with its portrait of a self-styled nihilist and his elders, sparked intense controversy, yet its even-handed tone and psychological tact broadened his audience at home and abroad. Throughout, Turgenev preferred implication over declaration, staging debates through character and scene rather than authorial comment.
Alongside the novels, Turgenev advanced modern drama with A Month in the Country, a play of restrained passion and social nuance, and he crafted influential shorter fictions such as The Diary of a Superfluous Man, Hamlet of the Shchigrov District, Asya, and First Love. His late cycle of brief meditations, often called Poems in Prose, distills memory, art, and mortality into compact forms. Across genres, he excelled at dialogue, scenic pacing, and the evocation of landscape as moral atmosphere. Critics admired his elegance and moderation, while some contemporaries wished for greater ideological fervor—a tension that helped define his distinctive artistic profile.
Committed to liberal reform and skeptical of coercion, Turgenev opposed serfdom and supported gradual, humane change. He spent extended periods in Western Europe, especially in Germany and France, and became a key intermediary between literatures. His friendships with prominent French and English writers fostered mutual translation, review, and salon discussion, and he frequently introduced Russian talents to European audiences. He also defended artistic autonomy, arguing that literature should render life faithfully rather than serve as blunt political instrument. This position, grounded in cosmopolitan experience, shaped the balanced, dialogic structure of his works, where conflicting convictions are given room to speak.
In his later years Turgenev resided largely in France, continuing to publish fiction and to champion Russian literature abroad. Ill health curtailed his activities in the early 1880s, and he died in 1883; his funeral in Russia drew notable public attention. His legacy rests on a synthesis of clear style, ethical sympathy, and dramatic economy that influenced authors from Chekhov to Henry James. Today his novels and stories are read for their poised depictions of social change, their humane skepticism, and their finely shaded character portraits. Without relying on plot shocks, they invite reflection on choice, responsibility, and the passing of generations.
Historical Context
Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev (1818–1883) wrote the works gathered under the title First Love, and other stories between 1854 and 1866, a period in which Russia moved from late Nicholas I autocracy into the reform era of Alexander II. The dates of these pieces—The Region of Dead Calm (1854), A Correspondence (1855), First Love (1860), It Is Enough (1864), and The Dog (1866)—span the Crimean War, the Emancipation of the serfs, and the first crest of the Great Reforms. Their shared historical context is one of social transition, intellectual ferment, intensifying censorship, and the emergence of a modern Russian public sphere through powerful literary journals.
Turgenev’s formation as a writer coincided with the Westernizer–Slavophile debate that shaped educated Russian society in the 1830s and 1840s. After studies at Moscow University (1833–1834) and Saint Petersburg University (1834–1837), he spent 1838–1841 at the University of Berlin, absorbing German philosophy and the methods of philology and historical inquiry. This Berlin experience linked him to the “Westernizers,” who advocated European models for Russia’s development. The tension between European rationalism and Russian tradition underlies his characters’ sensibilities and the narrative forms—letters, diaries, recollection—that structure these stories and facilitate reflection on the self amid social change.
The mid-nineteenth-century Russian literary field revolved around thick monthly journals (tolstye zhurnaly) such as Sovremennik (The Contemporary), Otechestvennye Zapiski (Notes of the Fatherland), and, later, Russkii Vestnik (The Russian Messenger). Vissarion Belinsky (1811–1848), a powerful critic and Turgenev’s mentor, set a standard for socially engaged prose under censorship that required Aesopian indirection. Serialization shaped composition, favoring discrete installments, diaristic fragments, and epistolary structures, evident in A Correspondence (1855) and It Is Enough (1864). The journals also cultivated a pan-Russian conversation in which a single story could carry political, moral, and aesthetic arguments to a broad, educated readership.
Serfdom defined the material and moral world of Turgenev’s generation. Raised on his family’s estate at Spasskoye-Lutovinovo in Oryol province, he knew firsthand the paternalist routines, domestic hierarchies, and hidden violences of landowner life. His earlier cycle A Sportsman’s Sketches (1847–1852) had sensitized readers to peasant humanity and helped prepare public opinion for reform. The Emancipation Manifesto of 19 February 1861 fundamentally altered rural relations, yet the habits, speech, and spaces of estate culture persisted, furnishing settings and assumptions across these stories, whether the garden paths and salons of Moscow memory in First Love or the moral stillness and constraint evoked elsewhere.
Aristocratic culture in the 1830s–1860s was bilingual and ceremonious. French remained the salon language in Moscow and Saint Petersburg, shaping wit, ritualized flirtation, and codes of honor. Many in Turgenev’s father’s generation were veterans or sons of veterans of the 1812 campaign against Napoleon, carrying an ethos of dueling, discretion, and gallantry. The etiquette of calling, carriage rides, amateur theatricals, and evening readings formed the backdrop for youthful initiation and disillusion. Such customs saturate the imaginative world of First Love and inform the social nuances that recur across the collection, where gestures and silences often speak more loudly than explicit declarations.
The revolutions of 1848 in Europe prompted severe retrenchment under Nicholas I in Russia. The Third Section and the Buturlin Committee tightened censorship, drove literary radicals underground, and cast suspicion on Western influences. In 1852 Turgenev was arrested and confined—first in prison, then under estate supervision at Spasskoye-Lutovinovo—after publishing an obituary meditation on Nikolai Gogol without prior approval. This episode disciplined his public voice and reinforced his reliance on veiled critique, allegory, and private modes of narration. The experience of surveillance, the ethics of speaking truth under constraint, and the weight of official disfavor shadow the tone of his mid-1850s work.
The Crimean War (1853–1856) exposed Russia’s military and administrative backwardness and precipitated a crisis of confidence. Amid wartime censorship and mourning, many writers turned inward or resorted to parable and symbol to discuss stagnation. The Region of Dead Calm (1854) belongs to this climate of moral inquiry under duress. The very metaphor of a lifeless calm, registered during a conflict that demanded renewal, resonated with readers who sensed paralysis in institutions and daily life. Turgenev’s images of suspension, sleep, or deadened feeling are historically charged hints at a society restrained by habit, hierarchy, and fear, yet pressed by necessity to awaken.
The accession of Alexander II in 1855 inaugurated the Great Reforms, most dramatically the emancipation of more than twenty million serfs in 1861. Subsequent measures—judicial reform (1864), local self-government via zemstvos (1864), military reform (1860s), and educational expansion—created unprecedented mobility and uncertainty. Works from 1860 to 1864 register the mingled hope and anxiety of this moment. First Love (1860) turns a private recollection into a meditation on generational transition, while It Is Enough (1864) probes the spiritual consequences of a rapidly secularizing culture. Both exemplify Turgenev’s habit of treating intimate consciousness as an index of public transformation.
The early 1860s also saw the rise of radical utilitarianism and scientific positivism, associated with Nikolai Chernyshevsky and Nikolai Dobrolyubov at Sovremennik. The term “nihilist” entered the lexicon, and disputes about art’s purpose sharpened. Turgenev’s novel Fathers and Sons (1862) dramatized the generational clash and drew partisan fire from both conservatives and radicals. The stories of 1864–1866 reflect this debate’s pressure: they hesitate between faith in rational clarity and skepticism about materialist reduction. The diaristic uncertainty of It Is Enough and the eerie suggestion of The Dog register a writer testing the limits of reason, sympathy, and artistic conscience in a polarized culture.
Turgenev’s life was deeply European. He traveled widely and, from the early 1850s, was closely attached to the singer Pauline Viardot and her husband Louis Viardot, living for long stretches in Baden-Baden and later Paris. This cosmopolitan milieu brought him into sustained contact with Gustave Flaubert, George Sand, the Goncourt brothers, and later younger writers. It encouraged formal economy, psychological nuance, and an openness to the fantastic that complements Russian social themes. The border-crossing sensibility helps explain why even intensely Russian settings in these stories often carry European echoes in manners and thought, and why metaphysical speculation sits comfortably beside social observation.
Epistolary and diaristic forms have a distinguished Russian lineage from Karamzin’s sentimental experiments to Pushkin’s playful prose. In the 1850s and 1860s, letters and journals served both as realistic devices—mirroring the lived habits of the educated class—and as strategic shields against censorship, allowing personal opinions to appear as private utterances. A Correspondence (1855) uses the exchange of letters to stage social expectations and self-deception, while It Is Enough (1864) deploys the diary to capture unstable mood and philosophy. The trustworthy or unreliable voice in first-person documents became a crucial instrument for navigating truth amid institutional scrutiny and public controversy.
Questions of women’s education, property, and moral agency intensified in mid-century Russia. Legal reforms remained partial, and marriage often functioned as a family strategy rather than an individual vocation. Salon culture offered limited spaces for influence, but the radical 1860s also produced new female types—the student, the translator, the professional—contested in print and life. Turgenev’s stories register these debates through women who manage salons, refuse or accept suitors under pressure, or articulate philosophies inflected by their constrained circumstances. The complexity of Marya Alexandrovna’s and Zinaida’s choices, for instance, reflects a social world negotiating between inherited patriarchal codes and nascent ideals of autonomy.
Language itself was historical terrain. Among nobles, French conversation remained habitual, while literary Russian was consolidating its expressive range after Pushkin and Gogol. Turgenev’s prose is famed for clarity and musicality, often hinting at French cadence while remaining decisively Russian. This bilingual sensitivity allowed him to code class distinctions, mark generational difference, and stage misunderstandings across social groups. It also facilitated circulation: stories were quickly translated in European periodicals, and journal serialization at home encouraged immediate discussion. The interplay of languages and print venues shaped the tone and pacing of these works, which balance conversational intimacy with public readability.
Space and movement in the 1850s–1860s changed with the expansion of roads and railways, notably the Saint Petersburg–Moscow line completed in 1851. Travel accelerated encounters between capitals, provincial estates, and emerging industrial towns. Turgenev’s settings—Moscow lanes, country gardens, rented dachas, posting stations—map a society in motion yet haunted by memory. Landscape functions as moral climate: summer light frames youthful revelation; winter stillness evokes moral exhaustion; suburban peripheries host transitions in status and feeling. Such spatial symbolism ties private narratives to national geography, making the reader feel how Russia’s physical modernization coexisted with psychological habits formed in an older order.
Religious and philosophical currents intersected uneasily. Orthodoxy retained ritual authority, yet Western skepticism, German idealism, and the new natural sciences all claimed plausibility. Spiritualist séances and tales of apparitions circulated in salons during the 1860s, offering a vernacular metaphysics paralleling scientific debate. Turgenev, personally reserved and often agnostic, explored this crossroads artistically. The haunted inwardness of It Is Enough and the uncanny suggestion of The Dog draw on contemporary fascination with death, afterlife, and the limits of perception. These motifs test whether ethical feeling can survive when inherited certainties fade and whether art can mediate between rational doubt and human longing.
By mid-decade, reform momentum met resistance. The failed Polish uprising (1863) hardened official attitudes; a new censorship statute (1865) extended preventive controls; and Dmitry Karakozov’s attempt on Alexander II’s life in April 1866 ushered in a reactionary turn. Journals shifted tone or closed—Sovremennik was suppressed in 1866—and editors like Mikhail Katkov at Russkii Vestnik gained influence. Writers responded with increased indirection, symbolic compression, or retreat into apolitical genres. The sobriety and restraint evident in stories from 1864 to 1866 reflect this climate, in which personal conscience had to navigate narrowed public channels without surrendering moral or aesthetic seriousness.
Contemporary readers recognized in these works the lineaments of a society on the brink—old estates dissolving, new classes emerging, belief unsettled, feeling sharpened. Abroad, Turgenev’s clear style and humane irony made him Russia’s most immediately legible prose ambassador in the 1860s, preparing later European enthusiasm for Russian fiction. Taken together, the stories from 1854 to 1866 record the passage from Nicholas I’s immobilized order to Alexander II’s volatile reforms, from sentimental recollection to metaphysical doubt. Their historical textures—dates, places, names, and institutions—are not ornament but structure, binding intimate experience to a nation’s self-scrutiny and to a continent’s contested modernity.
Synopsis (Selection)
Preface
Turgenev briefly frames the volume, noting the provenance and dates of the pieces and the reflective mood that links them—memory, love, and quiet disenchantment.
First Love (1860)
A teenage boy in 1840s Moscow is overwhelmed by his first infatuation with a captivating young princess, stumbling into the rivalries and secrecy of adult passion. The novella follows his swift education in desire and disillusion without dwelling on outcomes.
A Correspondence (1855)
Told through letters between Alexyéi Petróvitch and Márya Alexándrovna, this epistolary tale charts a tentative attachment as mismatched temperaments and social caution erode romantic expectations. Their exchange reveals the gap between ideal feeling and practical life.
The Region of Dead Calm (1854)
A meditative sequence in which a reflective narrator contemplates a state of suspended motion—‘dead calm’—in people and surroundings. Through quiet scenes, it evokes emotional stasis and the faint impulse toward change.
It Is Enough (1864): A Fragment from the Diary of a Dead Artist
Presented as the posthumous diary of a painter, this fragment records a final season of illness, memory, and artistic reckoning. In terse entries he weighs beauty, faith, and attachment against the peace of renunciation.
The Dog (1866)
A compact, uncanny romance in which a man's fascination with an enigmatic woman is shadowed by the recurrent appearance of a mysterious dog. Blending psychological tension with a hint of the supernatural, it suggests the pull of fate.
