'First Love' by Ivan Turgenev

My final read of 2025, this is a novella presented as fiction, but by all accounts very heavily based on a real series of events in Ivan Turgenev's life. It was written in 1860 when he was an established writer and some years after the real people on which the major characters are based were safely in their graves.

The book tells a simple story, but one that is powerful and memorable. The narrator is a middle aged man reflecting back at the request of two close friends on his first experience of romantic love.

He was about sixteen years of age when he fell in love for the first time with a rather older girl (19 or so?) who moved into a nearby house with her mother, an impoverished aristocrat. The girl, named Zinaida Zasyekin (but heavily modelled on a real neighbour of the Turgenevs called Princess Ekaterina Lvovna Shakhovskaya) was attractive in both her looks and her personality being coquettish and fun to be around.

His love for her becomes rather obsessive - a 'sick sweet longing' he calls it - and beautifully portrayed. She teases him pretty mercilessly, flirting with him and several other admirers too. Then the story takes an unexpected twist which I will not spoil by discussing here, but the upshot is that the narrator learns a lot of lessons about some less attractive aspects of human behaviour and the corrupting influence of money which effectively destroy his innocence.

It is perhaps a little shorter than I would have liked, being only 100 pages long. Characters are not as fully developed as they might have been, but it is still very beautifully crafted and well-worth reading. My penguin classics edition contains a translation by the great liberal philosopher Isaiah Berlin demonstrating another of his very many talents.