First love (novella)
First love , Russian Pervaja ljubov (Первая любовь), is a short story by the Russian writer Ivan Turgenev . It was first published in 1860 in the monthly magazine Biblioteka dlja tschtenija . The novel tells the love story between a 16-year-old and a five-year-old woman. First Love is one of Turgenev's most popular and well-known short prose works. It is largely based on autobiographical memories of youth. As one of the Russian “classics”, the text is now regularly used in foreign language lessons at schools and universities.
content
Vladimir Petrovich, the sixteen-year-old protagonist of the novel , remembers the story of his first love wistfully as a man now aged and tells two friends at midnight how he spent his holidays in the country with his parents and the beautiful five years older Zinaida Alexandrovna met. She comes from an impoverished noble family and moves into the neighboring wing of the same manor house with her mother, the Princess Zasjekina. Vladimir falls head over heels in love with the capricious young lady from Moscow, but soon realizes that he is not the only admirer. On the contrary, young men swarm around the girl like moths in the light. But she only flirts with them and doesn't even think about choosing one. Instead, she demands sadistic proofs of love from them: Dr. Luschin, for example, who suffers particularly from being in love and who expressly warns Vladimir against Zinaida, allows the girl to stick a needle through his hand. Zinaida even seems to be supported in her unrestrained behavior by her mother, who is in chronic financial difficulties.
Your relationship with the sensitive Vladimir is also particularly tricky. Partly naive, partly calculating, partly open-hearted, partly closed, she plunges her helpless victim into an emotional rollercoaster of bliss and depression. In doing so, she takes the minor as a lover even less seriously than all the other gallants. After all, in a cocky, bossy mood, she declares him to be her personal page, who always has to follow her (but can therefore also be close) and to whom she frankly reports about her little amours. Ultimately, however, she only uses Vladimir as a compliant toy and makes fun of his immature age.
One day Zinaida's behavior changes. It seems to have become more serious, but at the same time even more wanton: as a token of his love, Vladimir is supposed to jump from a high wall. When Vladimir plunges himself into the depths, lands unhappy and briefly loses consciousness, Zinaida hugs and kisses him so long and hard that Vladimir is already hoping. His disappointment was all the greater when he discovered that Zinaida did indeed fall in love, but not with him: Her passionate kiss for the son only served as a substitute and was in truth his aloof father, Pyotr Wasiljewitsch. He is ten years younger than his wife, and the two of them have a mere marriage of convenience, so that the "poison of Zinaida's animal love" has an easy time of it with him. In one of the tragic closing scenes, Vladimir secretly observes the last meeting of the unequal couple: When Zinaida is standing at her window and kissing the wound on her arm that Pyotr has inflicted on her with his riding whip, the latter rushes into the house obsessively.
Eight months after the end of the vacation, bad news came from Moscow and Pyotr asked to visit his wife. A few days later he dies of a stroke and his wife transfers a large amount of money to Moscow. Only years later does Vladimir find out that Zinaida married the rich Monsieur Dolsky and died giving birth to their child.
shape
The novella is a typical framework narrative . The host and two friends are still sitting together after the other guests have already gone home and decide to tell the story of their "first love". After the first two have just pulled out of the affair, the third asks for a respite, because he is a bad narrator and would rather write the story down and read it aloud at their next meeting in two weeks.
His following narrative, which is divided into 22 chapters, is presented in the first person. The narrator is not interrupted by his two listeners.
Interpretations
The text is by no means completely realistic; Turgenev's descriptions of feelings are too impressionistic, his descriptions of nature too lyrical and the mention of everyday facts too symbolic. Examples: As in Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther , positive and negative emotions are seldom shown directly, but often indirectly, in the mirror of nature (plants, animals, weather). When Vladimir learns from Zinaida how to unwind wool and she twists the threads around his hands in the process, then it is not just about typical and real work, but also provides a symbolic indication of how Vladimir von Zinaida is literally caught and dependent is made. When the penniless Prince Zasjekina, who lives separately, stubbornly insists on her title of nobility, writes faulty Russian and lives in a shabby outbuilding of Piotr's manor house with her pretty flirtatious daughter, then this not only underlines the contrasts of a declining class of nobility, but also suggests how such decadence does bourgeois world (Vladimir and his family) threatened and already infected: Piotr did not marry his wife, who is ten years older than him, out of love, he treats her accordingly coldly, repeatedly cheats and argues with her so often that she has already quarreled wanted to separate him.
"Less the later social novels than the stories show this author at the height of his art of representation: Stories like First Love [...] or the incomparable story The Singers are among the most beautiful prose pieces in world literature."
"However, it would be a mistake to want to judge the intimate love story, which appears particularly authentic due to its reserved style, exclusively from a psychological point of view, however much the author depended on the subtle observation and aesthetically effective design of the fateful love experience Novella only through the apt reflection of the social conditions of contemporary Russia, which provide the external framework for the event. The novella summarizes the class character of late feudal tsarist society in moral categories: the two listeners (in the framework story) recognize something much darker than immorality from Wladimir Narrative, a general guilt , a national crime that the declining class - the Russian aristocratic class - commits on the following generations by demoralizing them through their behavior and - as in the case of Vladimir - all ethi deprived of certain concepts of value without being able to put something new in their place. "
literature
Translations
- First love . Narrative. Translated by Fega Frisch. Bern: Joke 1948. (Parnassus Library. 80.)
- First love . Novella. Illustrated by Herbert Becker. German by Ingo Manfred Schille. Berchtesgaden: Falken Verl. 1959.
- First love and other stories. Transferred from Ottomar Schwechheimer a. Walter Richter-Ruhland. Munich: Goldmann 1967.
- First love. Narratives . Translated from the Russian by Herbert Wotte . With an afterword by Gerhard Dudek. Berlin: construction publ. 1974
- First love . Russian German. Übers von Kay Borowsky 1976. Stuttgart: Reclam ISBN 978-3-15-001732-6
- First love . Translated by Ena von Baer. Insel Verlag, Frankfurt 2000. ISBN 3-458-34332-6 .
- First love . New translation by Vera Bischitzky . Verlag CH Beck, Munich 2018. ISBN 978-3-406-72757-3 .
Secondary literature
- E. Kagan-Kans: Ivan Turgenev and Henry James : "First Love" and " Daisy Miller ". In: American Contributions to the 9th International Congress of Slavists. 1974, pp. 251-265.
Film adaptations
The novella has been filmed several times since 1941.
- 1970 First Love Director: Maximilian Schell (Switzerland / FRG, 1970)
- 2001 All Forgotten , directed by Reverge Anselmo, with Kirsten Dunst as Sinaida, Nathaniel Parker as father and Nick Stahl as Wladimir