Hemingway recommended that young writers read all of Turgenev’s work. That being said, Turgenev was admired–for good reason–by some pretty damn fine writers, including Virginia Woolf, Henry James, Thomas Mann, and (perhaps surprising to some), Joseph Conrad and Ernest Hemingway. As Joseph Finder notes in “ Where Have All the Strivers Gone?” in the New York Times Sunday Book Review, it isn’t fashionable to write about the intersection of class and commerce he argues that perhaps only Tom Wolfe and Jay McInerney “remain defiantly old-school in their portrayal of ambition as a basic aspect of the human character.” Further, Turgenev, like Thackery in “Vanity Fair,” explores with an unblinking scrutiny the importance of class and wealth and ambition, and its hold over humans. His detail-laden realism and attention to social class are out of literary favor moreover, his work is deemed too spare emotionally by some modern critics. Turgenev isn’t given his due in today’s literary circles. Who has better captured that heady universal experience–and the dismay and despair when it doesn’t work out–than the great Russian short story writer Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev, in his elegant novella, “First Love”? The iPod-Facebook generation rides the same emotional roller-coaster as did their mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers, when it comes to l’amour.

Trust me, with two sons in college, and a third in high school, I can testify that this primal experience hasn’t changed. This edition of the book is based on the text published on Project Gutenberg and the translator is Constance Garnett.That crazy, intoxicating feeling of being infatuated by another–totally lost, drawn magnetically to the object of your desire–for the first time. This fact is recurrent in Turgenev's books, since it serves as a way of representing life in his daily life. In this way we will have a first level of narration that will serve to introduce us through a retrospect in the history of the protagonist.Īs for the place, the action takes place in a country house. Turgenev poses as a framework for the story a meeting of friends among whom one, the protagonist Vladimir, will recount his sentimental experience. In the book, the characters who are carried away by feelings have a bad ending, so it is not a story with a happy ending. The central theme of the work raises the debate between rational and sentimental thoughts. Vladimir is a young teenager from Moscow who falls in love with a new neighbor of his summer residence: Princess Zinaída Aleksándrovna. The book tells us about the love experience of Vladimir Petrovich. First Love Book download in PDF, ePub & Mobi by Ivan Turgenevįirst Love is a novella written by Ivan Turgenev and published in 1860.

First love by ivan sergeyevich turgenev