‘Read all the Russians and then reread them. They will never fail you,’ advises a former professor of European literature at Calcutta University in Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel The Namesake (2003). For me, reaching for a Russian classic remains the best way to restore faith in writing after a disappointment with some lavishly hyped recent book.
Among the Russians, Turgenev was my first literary love. His name evokes adolescent seaside holidays and my phoneless immersion in reading. My teenage body may have been shaded by Adriatic pines, but my mind travelled to a dacha somewhere outside Moscow, absorbed in the emotional upheavals crafted by Turgenev. I was dimly aware of his social and political novels, but it was his love stories that I found irresistible. They were like the best chamber pieces, lean yet intricate. Among them, First Love (1860) was the one I devoured most eagerly, barely noticing its underlying darkness. To read Turgenev was to read Anna Karenina but without the ennui of Levin’s soul-searching.
My perceptions of Turgenev’s biography were similarly slanted towards affairs of the heart. His life was scarcely stress-free, including brief imprisonment and a period of internal exile, but such episodes seemed minor compared to the dramas of his nineteenth-century compatriots: Pushkin’s and Lermontov’s deaths in duels, Dostoevsky’s mock execution, or even Tolstoy’s soldiering and excommunication from the Orthodox Church. When, after a falling out in 1861, Tolstoy challenged Turgenev to a duel and insisted on guns as the weapon of choice, Turgenev apologized immediately and unconditionally. It is hard to imagine another Russian great being so placating.
A tall, reticent man, six foot four, bear-like and
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Subscribe now or Sign in‘Read all the Russians and then reread them. They will never fail you,’ advises a former professor of European literature at Calcutta University in Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel The Namesake (2003). For me, reaching for a Russian classic remains the best way to restore faith in writing after a disappointment with some lavishly hyped recent book.
Among the Russians, Turgenev was my first literary love. His name evokes adolescent seaside holidays and my phoneless immersion in reading. My teenage body may have been shaded by Adriatic pines, but my mind travelled to a dacha somewhere outside Moscow, absorbed in the emotional upheavals crafted by Turgenev. I was dimly aware of his social and political novels, but it was his love stories that I found irresistible. They were like the best chamber pieces, lean yet intricate. Among them, First Love (1860) was the one I devoured most eagerly, barely noticing its underlying darkness. To read Turgenev was to read Anna Karenina but without the ennui of Levin’s soul-searching. My perceptions of Turgenev’s biography were similarly slanted towards affairs of the heart. His life was scarcely stress-free, including brief imprisonment and a period of internal exile, but such episodes seemed minor compared to the dramas of his nineteenth-century compatriots: Pushkin’s and Lermontov’s deaths in duels, Dostoevsky’s mock execution, or even Tolstoy’s soldiering and excommunication from the Orthodox Church. When, after a falling out in 1861, Tolstoy challenged Turgenev to a duel and insisted on guns as the weapon of choice, Turgenev apologized immediately and unconditionally. It is hard to imagine another Russian great being so placating. A tall, reticent man, six foot four, bear-like and with a head like Father Christmas, Turgenev is remembered as the gentle giant who moved to Western Europe because of his love for the married Franco Spanish mezzo-soprano Pauline Viardot. A menage à trois – allegedly platonic as far as Turgenev was concerned – lasted three decades and took him to Baden-Baden, Paris and London. Viardot adopted a daughter Turgenev fathered in 1842 (and was unaware of until 1850), the consequence of what his biographers describe euphemistically as a ‘summer liaison’ with a serf on his estate. It was complicated, as present-day relationship shorthand would put it. Turgenev wrote First Love in the throes of his non-affair with Viardot. The subject itself is timeless. There are many stories about first love – including those which, like Nabokov’s or Beckett’s, share Turgenev’s title – but few have the bitter-sweet power of his coming of-age masterpiece. The narrative opens with a group of noblemen trying to remember their first loves. While others claim they have nothing special to relate, Vladimir Petrovich proffers a tale so remarkable that he asks for a fortnight to write it down. This framing device enables Turgenev to return to the summer of 1833 and switch to the perspective of a 16-year-old, creating a voice which is pitch-perfect: quaintly roman tic yet timelessly adolescent. While the adult Vladimir is a world-weary bachelor, the restless younger version reads Schiller, skips school work, argues with his mother about what to wear, and is ‘all longing and anticipation’. The boy first catches sight of his 21-year-old neighbour Zinaida, a tall slender blonde, in the garden of her rented summer home and surrounded by suitors.She is ‘slapping them by turns on the forehead with those small grey flowers, the name of which I don’t know, though they are well known to children; the flowers form little bags and burst open with a pop when you strike them against anything hard’.
I remember my own teenage self, aware of something just beyond my understanding and frustrated by the fact that Turgenev could describe a plant so precisely without revealing its name. That first encounter with the novella was in Serbian, my mother tongue, which is close enough to Russian to make the translation feel unobtrusive. As a postgraduate student, already living in England, I read the origin- al version. While writing this piece, now in my sixties, I returned to First Love, this time in English, to find the quote which had made the teenage me puzzle over the mystery of grown-up men – an army officer, a count, a poet, a doctor – submitting to an infantile indignity. During this adult, English rereading, I grasped the genius of Turgenev’s decision to withhold the name of that flower. It is, allegedly, known as the shameplant or touch-me-not, and it may or may not be the same as Mimosa pudica, Shelley’s ‘sensitive plant’. I am not a botanist but I do know that so much about difficult emotion in First Love – passion, submission and shame – is acute and unnameable at the same time. This time round I also realized that my earlier fears about reading Turgenev in English were unnecessary. I enjoyed the period taste of Constance Garnett’s translation and saw why Joseph Conrad described her as being to Turgenev ‘what a great musician is to a great composer’. The period sense of decorum, which is even more pronounced in the original Russian, only partly obscures the reasons for Zinaida’s mastery over men. ‘I’m a flirt, I’m heartless, I’m an actress in my instincts,’ she says before sticking a pin ‘pretty deeply’ into a suitor’s palm. She seemed to me, as a teenager, more like a sadistic schoolgirl than a knowing femme fatale: what was the secret of her attraction? Despite being dubiously aristocratic, Zinaida had une mine de grisette, according to Vladimir’s snobbish mother. On my own first reading, I sensed that the French term grisette (which the dictionary suggests is a young working-class woman) hid improper connotations of availability, but I failed to register the full extent of sexual imagery in Turgenev’s writing. A similar combination of knowing and innocence marks Vladimir’s instant submission:and in the gestures of the girl there was something so fascinating, imperious, caressing, mocking, and charming, that I almost cried out with admiration and delight, and would, I thought, have given everything in the world on the spot only to have had those exquisite fingers strike me on the forehead.
The ecstatic moment is interrupted by mockery from an adult suitor who has been observing the boy, and then by Zinaida’s laugh ter which follows Vladimir as he flees, crimson-faced. He will soon learn that he too will have to expose himself to ridicule and he will do so willingly. The undercurrent of masochistic desire runs through the novella and makes it much more complex than the adolescent romance it purports to be. Some books seduce you too early. You think you understand all there is to be understood, and you don’t bother revisiting to check those early impressions. My belief that Turgenev was a writer of romantic stories made me snobbish, as you can only be about first love if you convince yourself you have outgrown it. I kept good company. ‘Not a great writer, though a pleasant one,’ Vladimir Nabokov said. Few could dismiss as casually as Nabokov. It takes one to know one, as the cliché would have it. In combining dark urges with luminescent prose, Turgenev and Nabokov have more in common as writers than the author of Lolita cared to admit. They were also great Russian Europeans, a trait that seems note- worthy in these days of Russian isolation. Their work as translators and interpreters of Russian culture is as significant as their own writing. Turgenev introduced Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky to Western audiences, Nabokov translated Eugene Onegin. Perhaps because he was living in the West and was well connected (he counted Flaubert and Henry James among his many literary friends), Turgenev was at one stage considered the greatest among the Russian writers, more widely read in translation and more famous than Tolstoy. Ernest Hemingway was a fan: for him, ‘writing fiction felt like boxing with Turgenev, Maupassant and Stendhal’. One aspect of Turgenev’s genius lies in the fact that a novella like First Love is pleasant enough to be gulped down by precocious schoolgirls, while simmering, not far below the surface, with com plex, even taboo, emotions. In this strangest of love triangles which sees father and son simultaneously as rivals and allies in seduction, the titular ‘first love’ applies not only to Vladimir but also to his father and Zinaida, and more devastatingly so. Zinaida’s skills as a dominatrix evaporate the moment she experiences love. Vladimir’s father, who married Vladimir’s mother for money, believes that he can control his passion for Zinaida in the way he controls his fine English mare, but he ends up being consumed by it. Within a year or two, they will both be dead. Vladimir survives to tell the story, yet he too is damaged beyond repair. ‘Fear a woman’s love, fear that bliss, that poison,’ the father urges, and the son seems to live by the advice. Nowhere is the complexity of Turgenev’s prose more in evidence than in the much-debated scene of the final encounter between Vladimir’s father and Zinaida. The boy witnesses it from a distance: She uttered monosyllables, not raising her eyes, simply smiling – submissively, but without yielding. By that smile alone, I should have known my Zinaida of old days. My father shrugged his shoulders, and straightened his hat on his head, which was always a sign of impatience with him . . . Then I caught the words: ‘Vous devez vous séparer de cette . . .’ Zinaida sat up, and stretched out her arm . . . Suddenly, before my very eyes, the impossible happened. My father lifted the whip, with which he had been switching the dust off his coat, and I heard a sharp blow on that arm, bare to the elbow. I could scarcely restrain myself from crying out; while Zinaida shuddered, looked with out a word at my father, and slowly raising her arm to her lips, kissed the streak of red upon it. The French utterance is key to the exchange yet remains opaque. Turgenev does not tell us who is speaking. The Russian – potom pos lishalis’ slova (‘then the words were heard’) – is even less precise than Garnett’s translation. When I first read the story, I was convinced it was Zinaida who spoke, asking Vladimir’s father to leave his wife (hence the feminine form of cette). Critics, however, suggest that it is the father, ordering Zinaida to abandon or give up . . . what or whom, remains unclear. The Japanese scholar Nobuaki Kaku spent thirty years researching First Love and wrote a book outlining various hypotheses. As with that initial glance of Zinaida holding the shameplant, so with this final sighting – Turgenev’s very modern narrative mastery is just as often a matter of omission as it is about telling. As a teenage reader, taking its title at face value, I assumed that Turgenev’s novella is about first love. In adult rereadings, I started noticing the gaps in Vladimir’s account. Turgenev’s depiction of the nature of memory became ever more fascinating: the way it keeps certain moments vividly frozen while obliterating others, the way in which it endlessly reshapes the palimpsest that is our life story. ‘You could omit anything if you knew that you omitted, and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel some thing more than they understood,’ Hemingway wrote. It is a lesson he might have learned while boxing with Turgenev.Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 91 © Vesna Goldsworthy 2026
About the contributor
Vesna Goldsworthy’s novel Iron Curtain was one of the New Yorker Best Books of 2023.
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