First Love and Other Stories

Psychologically acute, subtly and sometimes bitterly comic, these six stories all display the elegance and ironic clarity of Turgenev’s finest writing.
Ivan Turgenev (1818-83), perhaps best known for his novel Fathers and Sons, was a master at expanding the significance of a single episode into a story that illustrates a whole life, a whole relationship, even an entire age. With the exception of The Song of Triumphant Love, which is set in Renaissance Italy, these stories are all partly autobiographical. They demonstrate the evolution of Turgenev’s skills and preoccupations, from the diary form of his famous study of a ‘superfluous man’ (1850) and his exposure of the tyranny of serfdom in the small masterpiece Mumu (1854), to his most poignant and nostalgic evocations of love, Asya (1858) and First Love (1860). In King Lear of the Steppes (1870), the longest of the stories, the dominant sentiment is ingratitude as Harlov deals with his two icy daughters and plots his doomed revenge; his failure is, if anything, more devastating than that of Shakespeare’s Lear.