First Love, and Other Stories

Considered one of the finest love stories in Russian literature, "First Love" is narrated by a middle-aged man recalling a transformative summer in Moscow when he was sixteen. He encounters Zinaída, a striking and enigmatic young princess who draws a circle of admirers into her orbit, and finds himself swept into thefirst full-body experience of desire and despair. But Turgenev's genius lies in what the narrator only understands years later: that first love is never quite what we believed it to be in the moment, and memory reshapes its object until we barely recognize the boy we were. The other stories in this collection share Turgenev's characteristic psychological precision and his elegiac sensitivity to the way time and loss transform everything they touch. This is a book for anyone who has ever been young and certain that their first love would be their last, and who now knows better.