Product Description

At the end of a dinner party, the remaining guests drink wine and tell stories of their first love. For one of them, it will be a dark journey into his past, reawakening unbearable memories of his obsession with the beautiful Zinaida; and the cruelty and betrayal that followed … United by the theme of love, the writings in the Great Loves series span over two thousand years and vastly different worlds. Readers will be introduced to love’s endlessly fascinating possibilities and extremities: romantic love, platonic love, erotic love, gay love, virginal love, adulterous love, parental love, filial love, nostalgic love, unrequited love, illicit love, not to mention lost love, twisted and obsessional love….

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #231538 in Books
• Published on: 2007-08-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 112 pages

About the Author
Ivan Turgenev (1818-1883) was born in the province of Oryol, Russia. In 1843 he fell in love with Pauline Garcia-Vardot, a young Spanish singer, who influenced the rest of his life. After 1856 he lived mostly abroad and became the first Russian writer to gain a reputation in Europe. His series of six novels, which reflects a period of Russian life from the 1830s to the 1870s, are Rudin (1856), Home of the Gentry (1859), On the Eve (1860), Fathers and Sons (1862), Smoke (1867) and Virgin Soil (1877). He also wrote plays, short stories and novellas, of which First Love (1860) is the most famous.

Customer Reviews

Beautiful contrasts in mood and variations on love.
These six stories offer subtle variations on the theme of first love, often beautifully evoked through the first person narrative to highlight the autoboigraphical nature of some of the episodes. Turgenev creates contrasts of moods which capture either the ecstacy or misery of falling in love. For example, in the title piece, 'First Love', the young boy feels the bliss of his first crush and first kiss, which is finally defeated by his own father. The main message of the book is that nothing is permanent, and that love does not lead to a happy marriage nor to fullfilment. This is enhanced by the episodic nature of the tales which often capture just one moment of a larger timescale. The book is also historically interesting as it contains some of the first Russian literature to have become widely known throughout Europe in the nineteenth century. If you enjoy these stories I would recommend you try some of Turgenev's longer novels.

Turgenev, Pritchett, Berlin
Simply beautiful. One of the most overlooked of the nineteenth-century writers, Turgenev (like his friend Maupassant) was a master craftsman as well as an amzing observer of people and scenes; this little book, together with Scenes From a Hunter's Album, is his best. And here is surely the best of all the translations into English from the Russian novels: V.S. Pritchett's lucid, pared-down style fits the bill so well. Don't look further for a translation of First Love. It also has a terrific little essay by Isaiah Berlin as an introduction. Well done to Penguin for keeping this in print for almost 30 years. Maybe they should try now to reprint the marvellous collections of short stories by Pritchett, too...

Moving short story about youth and love

An accessible translation allowed me to read this like any other story; nothing difficult about it. It is extremely moving in parts, as he loves for the first time a girl who many love, including his own father. And the memory of her and his father is memorable for us all, with some universal writing about love's nature, its effects and youth. I wish i'd read this earlier!