Passado na Rússia do início do século XIX, o livro de Ivan Turginiev, 'Primeiro amor', descreve o primeiro verão amoroso do narrador quando ele conhece a jovem princesa Zinaida, cuja mãe, em decadência financeira, aluga quartos na residência de verão ao lado de sua família. Com um bando de seis ardentes pretendentes, o apaixonado narrador se desespera para tentar descobrir qual do grupo é o preferido de Zinaida.

O narrador recebe algumas dicas de que o sortudo irá ser encontrar com Zinaida à meia-noite perto da fonte.
Segue então para o jardim para enfrentar seu rival. Ouvindo passos, o narrador se prepara para o ataque apenas para descobrir no último minuto, em um estado de absoluta confusão e espanto, o estranho não é outro senão… Leia o livro é descubra!

Primo amore: piacevole, delicatissimo, si caratterizza per una indubbia vena poetica specialmente nelle descrizioni dei cieli e della natura, quindi nel complesso un'opera di pregio nonché di insospettabile modernità, eppure non ho trovato il capolavoro che mi aspettavo.

Avevo scoperto casualmente - non ricordo più se qui su GR o su a'coso - Acqua di mare di tale Charles Simmons, ed in seguito ho scoperto altrettanto casualmente che quell'idea di Simmons non era altro che un puro remake di un racconto di Turgenev: la faccenda del remake di un racconto che ha ben più di un secolo, basta da sola a dimostrare quanto quel racconto sia moderno. Se poi si va a vedere nel dettaglio, è la protagonista Zina ad essere sorprendente moderna per il XIX sec, così come modernissima è la reazione psicologica del giovane Volodja che pur di fronte a un trauma non porta rancore, non ha risentimento alcuno verso gli adulti che lo circondano e ciascuno dei quali - ognuno a suo modo, per un motivo o per l'altro - si è fatto giuoco di lui.
Ma nonostante tante premesse positive, non mi ha emozionato più di tanto: forse per la brevità del testo (ancora una volta, trovo conferma: i racconti non sono il mio pane); o forse perché avendo già letto il remake dell'americano (il quale veramente non ha aggiunto niente di niente a Turgenev: proprio come si vede nei remake dei film celebri, il suo contributo sta tutto nel far diventare mora una protagonista che in originale era bionda. Che sforzo di creatività... proprio uno sforzo da ernia.) era già tutto conosciuto. Forse mi è mancata un'ultima parola, un po' di sviluppo in più sul tema della nostalgia/malinconia: non che il tema non sia già esplicitato, ma poi muore rapidamente con la morte repentina dei protagonisti.
La traduzione non brilla: in più passaggi ci sono delle ripetizioni, e mi chiedo se siano ripetizioni lasciate lì perché intenzionalmente volute dall'autore o se ci siano finite per una qualche negligenza e trascuratezza della traduzione.

Sentivo una strana agitazione: come se fossi andato a un appuntamento e fossi rimasto solo e fossi passato vicino alla felicità altrui.

Ma la vera sorpresa è stata scoprire che Il canto dell'amore trionfante non era un sottotitolo di Primo amore, bensì un racconto a sé stante. Altra sorpresa: si tratta di un racconto ambientato a Ferrara nel 1542. L'ambientazione in realtà si scopre essere più o meno irrilevante. Anche questo secondo racconto non è nulla che faccia gridare al capolavoro, ma ha un guizzo di originalità che piacerà a tutti, e un' impronta marcatamente dark che piacerà agli amanti del macabro.

finished this book last night, and it was the first thing I thought about when I woke up.
why does Russian literature take hostage of my mind and heart so much?

n  Le jeune amour est toujours déchirant.n

Una lectura cortita y deliciosa.

rus klasiklerini ayrı bir seviyorum ya!

This short story explores the complexity of love, its raptures and tormenting effects on the heart of an inexperienced young man of sixteen, Vladimir, who spends the summer of 1833 in a cottage nearby the Neskuchni gardens in the outskirts of Moscow.

Who doesn’t remember falling in love for the first time? Trying to put into words the rush of contradictory emotions, the awakening of desire tangled with the insecurities of youth and the loss of the innocence of childhood is like trying to describe the immeasurable vastness of the universe, of which we cannot even start scratching the surface. And yet Turgenev masters his art and delivers a tale so rich in nuance, detail and realism that it’s impossible not to relive the inexpressible state of intoxication that is linked to first love.

There is a distinctive European taste to Turgenev’s approach without it resembling the contemporary Romantic authors of the time. Vladimir will enter the adult world of deceitfulness, guilt, jealousy and suffering that so is intrinsically woven into the human psyche and will become painfully aware of the treacherous nature of emotions. Princess Zaskeyin, the object of his fervent adoration, will change the meaning of the young man’s life in ways he cannot predict that will also affect the apparent balance of his family of noble descend, which reflects the ongoing profound change the Russian society was submitted to at the onset of the nineteenth century.

Turgenev’s character portrayal is not only delicately accurate but also revealing of gender and class disparities. Princess Zaskeyin may appear capricious and flirtatious at first glance, but her condition is one attached to her deplorable role as a mere object of beauty to be possessed, a trophy to be exhibited to attract suitors and a steady source of income for her impoverished mother. On the other hand, the masculine dominance is but a farce when passion is unleashed and threatens to shatter all superficial decorum, leaving all the characters equally exposed to the turmoil of unrequited or, and forbidden love.

Shrouded in melancholic prose that taunts the reader with passages of lush descriptions of inner and outer landscapes, this tale is an affirmation of life as a continuous process that is partially revealed in stages but never fully disclosed.
Mind and heart might become one in Turgenev’s crystalline storytelling, where the interior world of the characters flows unhindered to the shores of the reader’s conscience, sending the warning that love is a dangerous weapon that can inflict wounds impossible to heal… but what a catastrophe to never suffer from its vicious bite!

Recently I have found myself drawn to novels about looking back to the past, about nostalgia and youth. I guess it is a sign that I am getting older or perhaps it is a consequence of the tough time I have been having in my personal life, where, without going into too many details, death has been on the agenda quite a lot. I find myself currently feeling highly emotional, over sensitive, and sentimental. Just yesterday, in fact, I was flicking through Alain-Fournier’s beautiful French novel Le Grand Meaulnes, and almost burst into tears [which is certainly very unusual for me] when I came across this passage:

“Weeks went by, then months. I am speaking of a far-away time – a vanished happiness. It fell to me to befriend, to console with whatever words I could find, one who had been the fairy, the princess, the mysterious love-dream of our adolescence.”

The 'fairy,' the 'love-dream of our adolescence,' is Yvonne, a young girl who, in short, comes to signify, both for the central characters and the reader, the magic of youth and the impossibility of recapturing the period of your life when everything was new and an adventure. So, anyway, bearing all that in mind, it seems as though this is both the perfect and the worst time to read Ivan Turgenev’s First Love [Первая любовь, Pervaya ljubov], which deals with very similar ideas and themes.

The novella begins with a group of men, ‘not old, but no longer young,’ sharing the stories of their own first loves. However, only one of the party has an interesting tale to tell, which took place one summer when he, Vladimir Petrovich, was sixteen. That it was summer is, I believe, significant, because it is of course generally thought to be a season of sunshine and gaiety and positivity, when everything is alive, when the days are longer, the blood is warm, and anything seems possible. Moreover, the age of sixteen is one of the pivotal years of one’s life. One is [to paraphrase that wise old bird, Britney Spears] not a child, not yet an adult; one is open-minded, willing to experience, but may not [certainly at the time the novel was written, if not these days] have any real life experience of your own. Indeed, Vladimir describes himself as ‘expectant and shy'; and while he wanted to give the impression of maturity admits that he was not yet allowed to wear a frock coat. He also points out that his father was ‘indifferent’ to him and his mother neglectful, which meant that he had the necessary freedom to chase those new experiences, and all the more reason to look for love and attention from someone else.

“O youth! youth! you go your way heedless, uncaring – as if you owned all the treasures of the world; even grief elates you, even sorrow sits well upon your brow. You are self-confident and insolent and you say, ‘I alone am alive – behold!’ even while your own days fly past and vanish without trace and without number, and everything within you melts away like wax in the sun .. like snow ..”

The object of this love is Zinaida, a 21 one year old, impoverished princess who has just moved to the area with her boorish mother. In Benito Perez Galdos’ towering novel Fortunata and Jacinta, Juanito first meets the woman who comes to be his lover on a stairway, while she eats a raw egg, the juice running down her fingers. This is not only a fabulous way to introduce a character, but is clearly meant to say something important about the character herself, and Turgenev does something similar here. When Vladimir first spots Zinaida she is in her garden surrounded by a group of men, and so one knows instantly that she is popular with the opposite sex. Moreover, she is, in turn, tapping each of her suitors on the forehead with a flower. What this suggests, and what the rest of the text backs up, is that she is a lively, free-spirited, young girl. In fact, it comes as no surprise in this regard that she was, apparently, much admired by Gustave Flaubert.



[From the German film Erste Liebe, which is based on Turgenev’s novella]

Vladimir later describes the girl’s personality as a mixture of ‘cunning and carelessness, artificiality and simplicity, calmness and vivacity’ and I think this does a fine job of summing her up. She is not wholly one thing or the other; she is mysterious, enigmatic, never transparent, seemingly cruel at times, and yet somehow always charming. For example, she instantly gives the boy a nickname, Voldemar, and deliberately plays on his intensifying feelings, while at the same time showing him tenderness and favouring him over the other men in her life. She is, in short, the kind of girl I have myself lost my fucking mind over more than once. And that is strangely comforting in a way, that, even over one hundred years ago, men were giving their hearts to these beautiful, maddening young women. [First Love was, so it is said, based on Turgenev’s own experiences].

“She tore herself away, and went out. And I went away. I cannot describe the emotion with which I went away. I should not wish it ever to come again; but I should think myself unfortunate had I never experienced such an emotion.”

Interestingly, the situation in the garden does not only tell us about Zinaida. It also reveals something about the men in her life and hints at the reasons for her betrayal of Vladimir [yeah, she does him wrong]. Her admirers all fawn over her, they are all servile, eager to please. This is made clear by the fact that they allow her to hit them on the head with a flower. Later, one buys her a kitten, when she asks for one, and looks to get her a horse. Vladimir is no different. When Zinaida, not expecting him to comply, asks him to prove his love by jumping off a wall, with a 14 foot drop, he does just that. And yet the girl herself says that she can only love a man who would ‘break her in two’ i.e. who would not be her lapdog. This is one thing that I have never understood about men, or a certain type of man. Take my own brother as an example. He hangs around the women he likes, doing their bidding, buying them presents, in the hope that this will somehow show him to be a lovely, sensitive guy, and yet it never works. He never gets the girl because he comes across as weak and pathetic. And this is exactly what happens in First Love. In this way, you have to credit Turgenev with nailing a still-relevant, seemingly universal aspect of human relationships and psychology.

“There is a sweetness in being the sole source, the autocratic and irresponsible cause of the greatest joy and profoundest pain to another, and I was like wax in Zinaïda’s hands; though, indeed, I was not the only one in love with her. All the men who visited the house were crazy over her, and she kept them all in leading-strings at her feet. It amused her to arouse their hopes and then their fears, to turn them round her finger (she used to call it knocking their heads together), while they never dreamed of offering resistance and eagerly submitted to her.”

While First Love is increasingly packaged as a single, stand-alone book, and is, more often than not, described as a novella [by me in this review, no less], it is, in fact, not much more than an obese short story. Yet for such a short work, it is admirably sophisticated. For example, in terms of the structure, there is a lot of very satisfying mirroring going on. Both Zinaida and Vladimir are young, both are in a sense abandoned to themselves by their parents, and, more importantly, both experience their first loves during the course of the narrative. I think it is easy to overlook that Zinaida is not only an object of affection, that she too is going through one of the most tumultuous, defining moments of a person’s life, and it is this that gives the text a greater depth and makes her a more rounded and sympathetic character, because, let’s face it, young love is a bitch, and no one ever really handles it very well or emerges from it spotless. Oh, don’t get me wrong, it’s wonderful too; I wholeheartedly recommend it, but, even so, I couldn’t wish it on anyone with an entirely clear conscience.

I was much more tolerant/understanding of the heroine’s marked displays of coquettishness this second time around. Good story. Must read. Four stars!

"I burnt as in a fire in her presence ... but what did I care to know what the fire was in which I burned and melted--it was enough that it was sweet to burn and melt."

This was a poignant story of a 16 year old Vladmir Petrovich's first love.  It starts off with 40 year old Vladmir at a gathering of friends who are all telling their first-love stories when it's his turn, he can't because it's still too complicated for him.   He only agrees to tell them by writing it all down and that is this book.  

In Vladmir's manuscript for his friends, he tells a beautiful and intimate story of his loss of innocence as he falls in love with Princess Zaskeyin who is 21 and 5 years his senior.  The princess has many suitors all whose emotions she toys with.  Vladmir can see intellectually that she is insincere but his heart leads him deeper and deeper into what he believes is true love.  When the final betrayal comes, he is wholly unprepared.  It's not hard to guess how it will end, but it still packs a powerful punch.   

I loved Turgenev's Father's and Son's and was happy to see that this novella didn't disappoint.  I'll be reading more from him.

This was my first encounter with Turgenev. Just like the main character of this book, I fell in love.
Deeply, too.

Wow. What a range of emotions I have gone through! My heart could hardly take all the twists, uncertainty, and excitement.
The ending felt like a harsh slap of reality. That’s exactly what I adore about Russian Literature — realism.

Turgenev writes beautifully and clearly. His sentences flow effortlessly and there is not one unnecessary word in them. Whatever expectations I had, they were exceeded.

I absolutely recommend it. It is impossible to stop reading once you start.

“What I experienced then, I remember, was something similar to what a man must feel when first given an official post. I had ceased to be simply a young boy; I was someone in love. I say that my passion began from that day; and I might add that my suffering began on that day too.”