Rating: WARTY!
Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev was a Russian author who was born 18 years into the nineteenth century (two years after Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, Or The Modern Prometheus and died almost exactly the same number of years from its end. This novella, Первая любовь (Pervaia Liubov - First Love) was written in 1860. And this is yet another of my forlorn attempts at reading classics, I'm sorry to report.
The novel features three men who agree to tell each other of their first love. We get only one of these stories - one which was evidently rooted in Turgenev's own experience with his first love Catherine Shakovskoy which was, according to Wikipedia, "...an infatuation that lasted until his discovery that Catherine was in fact his own father's mistress."
The man who tells this story, Vladimir Petrovich, who is only sixteen when he meets twenty-one-year old Zinaïda Alexandrovna Zasyekina, an impoverished princess who is staying in rather lowly circumstances with her mother. The poor circumstances of the princess, and the quite well-to-do circumstances of Petrovich put them on something of a par with each other, but the arrogant, self-obsessed, narcissistic young princess sees him merely as one more moth drawn to her flame. Petrovich is too dumb in his youth to see through her games.
As in Turgenev's own life, Petrovich eventually learns Zinaïda 's interest is only in his own dad, Pyotr. The story was tedious and pointless. It wasn't even very well written, but to be fair, with a translation, it's hard to say how much of this is the original author's and how much the translator's. Here’s a writing issue to consider, however: the following struck me as an oddly-written sentence. I don’t know if this was in the original, or if it arose out of the translation from the Russian, but this is what I read: “I could have stayed in that room for ever, have never left that place.” I can see how the second clause follows from the "I could" of the first, but adding "and" might have made it less of a jarring read. It took me a second to figure out what the author was trying to do. Isn’t "I could have stayed in that room for ever and have never left that place." A bit more clear?!
Some sentences ran on and on and on to paragraph length, such as this one: "Upon this my father informed my mother that he remembered now who this lady was; that he had in his youth known the deceased Prince Zasyekin, a very well-bred, but frivolous and absurd person; that he had been nicknamed in society ‘le Parisien,’ from having lived a long while in Paris; that he had been very rich, but had gambled away all his property; and for some unknown reason, probably for money, though indeed he might have chosen better, if so, my father added with a cold smile, he had married the daughter of an agent, and after his marriage had entered upon speculations and ruined himself utterly.". I cannot recommend this novel./p>
