First Love

By Turgenev, Ivan

Book Id: WPLBN0002951026
Format Type:
File Size: 88.01 MB
Reproduction Date: 2009

Title:	First Love
Author:	Turgenev, Ivan
Volume:
Language:	English
Subject:	Fiction, Fiction
Collections:	Audio Books Collection, First Love
Historic Publication Date:	1860
Publisher:	LibriVox Audio Books


Citation APA MLA Chicago Turgenev, B. I. (1860). First Love. Retrieved from http://gutenberg.us/

Description
The title of the novella is almost an adequate summary in itself. The boy-meets-girl-then-loses-her story is universal but not, I think, banal - despite a surprise ending which notoriously turns out to be very little of a surprise. First Love is given its originality and poignancy by Turgenev's mastery of the piercing turning-point (akin to Joyce's epiphanies) that transforms the character's whole being, making a tragic outcome inevitable. Even the nature symbolism is rescued from triteness by lovely poetic similes - e.g. but at that point my attention was arrested by the appearance of a speckled woodpecker who busily climbed up the slender stem of a birch-tree and peeped out uneasily from behind it, first to the right, then to the left, like a musician behind the bass-viol. (Summary by Martin Geeson)

Summary
Electronic recorded live performance of a reading

Excerpt
Fiction