In the evenings they gather at her house to play games and discuss literature, but mainly to play games. However, Zinaida has collected a circle of devoted admirers each of whom wishes to be more. Thanks to the deceased husband’s feckless ways they live in straitened circumstances in a run-down cottage. He now has the distance to be able to look back on his youth with the dispassion that comes from worldly wisdom, and the bulk of the narrative takes the form of his first-person account of that fateful summer.Īt their holiday home Vladimir and his wealthy parents find they have new neighbours, a rather slovenly princess who is always getting into financial scrapes and her lovely 21-year old daughter Zinaida Alexandrovna. For some reason the three men have decided to swap accounts of their first loves, but Vladimir insists on writing his down in order to capture the subtle nuances. The story is told by the 40-year old Vladimir Petrovich to a couple of friends, casting his mind back a quarter of a century. The title suggests a light summer romance of the ‘old enough to know better, young enough not to care’ variety, but Turgenev instead delivers a powerful dissection of the infatuations of youth. What could have been trite, in Turgenev’s hands achieves universal significance as he depicts the powerful emotions experienced by someone who is leaving childhood behind and entering the world of adult relationships, with all their joys and heartbreaks. As for the title, it turns out both Vladimir and Zinaida experience first love, though not with each other.Ivan Turgenev’s 1860 novella charts the course of a 16-year old boy’s infatuation with the princess next door in the summer of 1833, while on holiday at the family dacha just outside Moscow. Furthermore, the author shows we can never fully know other people who they are, however intimate we are. In conclusion, Vladimir is introduced to the complications of adult behavior, which consist of loss and betrayal through his first attachment yet it helps him mature and cope with such feelings. Several years later, Vladimir finds out Zinaida died in childbirth. Shortly afterwards Vladimir’s father dies abruptly of a stroke, his mother sends a large sum of money to Moscow, the insinuation seemingly being that Zinaida had a child as a result of the affair. This newfound knowledge explains the quarrels Vladimir witnessed his parents having, which were more than usual, and eventually the Petrovich family returns to town. The definitive heartbreak for Vladimir is that Zinaida’s secret love turns out to be Vladimir’s own father whom he idolizes very much.
Nor is it one of the other suitors, although at first he suspects it is one of them. Beneath her façade, he can see that she truly is in love, but not with him.
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