Anthony said his reading of Ivan Turgenev’s First Love may have tipped his preference between Dostoevsky and Turgenev a bit toward the former. While I have not yet had the pleasure of all Turgenev’s Sketches from a Hunter’s Album (I fully intend to), I can see that this is weaker than what I have read. Still, it runs much more to my taste than my old friend Fyodor’s work.
The story, quite simply, of a man’s first love is prefaced by a brief frame: after supper, sitting around the table, some men go around and ask each other to tell the stories of their first loves. One man agrees but says he must write it down and send it to them later; he cannot tell it well ex tempore. The rest of the novella is his manuscript.
Thus the story of an extremely sensitive and romantic young boy falling in love with Zinaïda, a somewhat older, certainly worldier girl, is told at a distance of years, with the benefit of knowledge but also of continued sensitivity and fondness. The narrator isn’t ashamed to tell of his own childish silliness. He doesn’t try to hide or pass judgment on it, but presents the facts as they were and clearly accepts that these fanciful ideas are just part and parcel of a first love—which is what everyone wanted to hear about anyway.
Then I sang “Not the white snows,” and passed from that to a song well known at that period: “I await thee, when the wanton zephyr,” then I began reading aloud Yermak’s address to the stars from Homyakov’s tragedy. I made an attempt to compose something myself in a sentimental vein, and invented the line which was to conclude each verse: “O Zinaïda, Zinaïda!” but could get no further with it.
The narrator’s innocence, in his boyish incarnation at least, makes the dreadful and, truly, as Anthony puts it, shocking ending quite a surprise, although we certainly see it coming before he did. O Zinaïda, Zinaïda!
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