the summer they all fall in love with Zinaïda. Meidanov’s tone during the meeting suggests that the love affairs they all shared with Zinaïda were merely a game to him and the older suitors.

Turgenev modestly claimed that a lack of imagination always forced him to work from known characters. He also wrote that First Love was largely autobiographical, based on an affair his father carried on with a beautiful neighbor. To whatever extent the novella accurately portrays the adolescent experiences of Turgenev, the subtle exploration of character is central to First Love, which focuses on the love triangle of Piotr, Vladimir, and Zinaida.

Piotr believes in will and the power of the individual to act. He rejects responsibilities to family or to abstract codes of behavior. He is a creature of passion, but he never seems out of control. Just as he has a rare knack for breaking horses, he is able to dominate the people and situations around him. In a rare communicative moment, Piotr advises his son to “[t]ake for yourself what you can, and don’t be ruled by others; to belong to oneself—the whole savour of life lies in that....” His willful independence parallels that of Bazarov in Ottsy i deti (1862; Fathers and Sons, 1867), the novel Turgenev finished soon after publishing First Love. Unlike Bazarov, Turgenev’s best-known protagonist, who adheres to a nihilistic rationalism, Piotr pursues the ephemeral ideal of passion. Eventually this unending pursuit consumes him, as his deathbed warning indicates.

Like Piotr, Zinaida is a willful character. Part saint and part temptress, she uses her beauty to escape the vulgarity and limitations of her situation. Her frivolity contrasts with the litigious and financial preoccupations of her mother. Her teasing games allow her to assert control over her suitors, and she seems to enjoy their helpless humiliation as much as she enjoys their companionship. The novella reveals, however, that her careless independence disguises a desire to be mastered: “[O]ut there...waits he whom I love, who holds me in his power.” This hidden need to be conquered is graphically revealed in the scene in which Piotr strikes her with his riding crop as though he were reprimanding an unruly mount.

Because of Turgenev’s narrative frame, Vladimir exists as two separate characters: the young protagonist of the novella and the middle-aged narrator. The youthful Vladimir is a creation of his own reading, trying to live through his first love as though it were a romantic novel, continually imagining himself in the role of hero and idealizing the object of his love: “I began picturing to myself how I would save her from the hands of enemies; how, covered with blood I would tear her by force from prison, and expire at her feet.” As Zinaida’s page, Vladimir imagines winning her according to the code of chivalry, but despite his dreams of heroic victory, he is incapable of decisive action when presented with evidence of Zinaida’s true nature. He enacts an imitation of adult passion without understanding it. He reacts to the climactic scene in which his father strikes Zinaida by recognizing the childish simplicity of his own love, but he still cannot understand fully the contradictions of the passion he witnesses. To him it seems “like an unknown, beautiful, but menacing face, which one strives in vain to make out clearly in the half-darkness....”

The middle-aged Vladimir who narrates the story has never fully recovered from the disillusionment of his youth. Although his maturity has enabled him to sympathize with the passion of his father and Zinaida, he has not experienced it himself. Indeed, he implies that such love is tragically doomed, a bright flame that must burn itself out. His only response to the contemplation of life’s beauty and brevity is a concluding desire to pray.