First love, and other stories

First Love, and Other Stories gathers Ivan Turgenev's finely wrought explorations of desire, memory, disillusionment, and social constraint. The title novella, framed as an act of recollection, transforms adolescent passion into a study of power, humiliation, and belated understanding. In prose of remarkable lucidity and restraint, Turgenev joins psychological delicacy to the realism of nineteenth-century Russian fiction, while retaining the lyric melancholy and structural elegance that link him to the European novella tradition. Turgenev, born into the Russian landed gentry in 1818, wrote with intimate knowledge of aristocratic households, serfdom, and the emotional evasions of his class. Educated in Russia and Europe, he became a cosmopolitan mediator between Russian society and Western liberal thought. His own complicated family history, sensitivity to generational conflict, and lifelong attention to unfulfilled love deeply inform these stories, giving them both autobiographical resonance and social breadth. This volume is ideal for readers seeking an entry into Turgenev's art beyond the novel Fathers and Sons. It rewards those interested in subtle characterization, moral ambiguity, and the quiet devastations of feeling. Elegant, humane, and piercingly observant, these stories show why Turgenev remains one of the great anatomists of the heart.