In 1860, Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev wrote the story “First Love.” It is interesting that the author treated this work with particular trepidation, because many of the moments described in the story were taken from the biography of Ivan Sergeevich and his own father. What is it about?
Here he describes his impressions of his first deep feeling and reveals the details of the family drama. How his own first love was reflected in the story, a summary, characters and the main idea is the topic of our article.
The images of the main characters of the work “First Love” are copied from real people:
- Volodya. This hero is the embodiment of the author himself in his youth. The experiences and feelings of Vladimir Petrovich can tell us what Ivan Sergeevich himself once experienced.
- Princess Zinaida Alexandrovna. This heroine also had a real prototype. This is Ekaterina Shakhovskaya, a poetess with whom the writer was in love.
- Pyotr Vasilyevich is the father of the main character. The prototype is the father of Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev - Sergei Nikolaevich, who did not love his wife, entered into marriage because of the promise of material gain.
His wife, Varvara Petrovna, was much older. During his lifetime, Sergei Nikolaevich had success with women, and a stormy romance with Shakhovskaya continued for a long time.
Interesting! The story was filmed four times, not only by Russian directors, but also by foreign ones. For example, a French film adaptation of the book was released in 2013.
Turgenev said that it was important for him to describe everything reliably. There was no resentment left against either the former beloved or the father. The author tried to understand their actions.
The beginning of the story
The action of Turgenev's story "First Love" takes place in 1833. The main character of the book, Vladimir Petrovich, is 16 years old.
The young man lives with his father and mother at a dacha in Moscow, preparing to become a university student.
Unexpectedly, an event occurs in the life of the main character that has a profound impact on him and the life of his entire family.
Next to the dacha of Volodya and his parents there was a poor outbuilding in which Princess Zasekina and her daughter settled.
Volodya accidentally encounters the young princess Zinaida, and he likes the girl. He dreams of getting to know her better.
This was helped by chance. The princess's mother wrote a letter to Volodya's mother. The message was not very literate and contained a request for help. Zasekina asked for patronage.
The young man’s mother was not indifferent to other people’s troubles and ordered the young man to go to the Zasekins’ house and invite him to dinner.
During this visit, Volodya met Princess Zinaida. It turned out that she was twenty-one years old. The princess initially flirts with the hero of the story, but soon stops doing so.
During dinner, it becomes clear that Princess Zasekina is not very strong in manners: she sniffs tobacco loudly, cannot sit quietly in a chair, and constantly complains about her difficult financial situation.
The daughter seems to be the complete opposite - she behaves with restraint, proudly. Zinaida Aleksandrovna communicates in French with Volodin’s father and at the same time looks at him incredulously. She shows no interest in Vladimir himself at dinner. And, nevertheless, before leaving, in a whisper she invites him to visit him in the evening.
The birth of first love
Arriving at the princess, the young man discovers that the girl has many admirers:
- poet by the name of Maidanov,
- Dr. Lushin,
- retired captain Nirmatsky,
- hussar named Belovzorov.
In this company the evening was very fun and noisy. The young man even manages to kiss Zasekina’s hand. The girl does not let Vladimir Petrovich leave her even one step. The young man decides that he is also not indifferent to her.
The next day, Volodin’s father asks about the princess and family, and then he himself went to the Zasekins’ wing.
After dinner, the young man also goes to visit the princess, but she doesn’t even come out. From that moment on, the girl seems to ignore him, and because of this, the hero suffers.
When Zinaida reappears, she feels happy.
So the young man becomes dependent on the presence of his beloved and experiences a feeling of jealousy towards the girl’s admirers. She soon guesses about the hero’s feelings.
Zinaida Aleksandrovna appears very rarely in the house of Volodin’s parents. The young man's mother does not like the princess, and the father sometimes communicates with the girl - little and restrainedly, in some language that the two of them understand.
Important! Wikipedia, in its article on the story, provides users with not only a summary, but also a lot of interesting facts about the creation of the work.
The Mystery of Zinaida
Suddenly the princess changes dramatically - from a coquette she turns into a thoughtful girl. He walks alone for a long time and often refuses to go out when guests come.
Vladimir suddenly understands that the princess is seriously in love. But at the same time, the hero has no idea who kindled this feeling in the princess.
One day the young man was sitting in the garden, on the wall of a dilapidated greenhouse, and suddenly saw Zinaida.
The girl also noticed Vladimir and ordered him to immediately jump onto the road to prove her feelings. The young man complied with this request, but fell to the ground and lost consciousness for a moment.
Because of what happened, the girl is very scared and in a fit of emotion even kisses the young man, but when he comes to his senses, he leaves and does not allow him to go with her. The young man feels inspired. True, the next day, when they meet, the princess acts distantly.
Later, Volodya and Zinaida meet again in the garden. The young man wants to leave, but the princess does not allow him to do so. The girl behaves kindly and sweetly, says that she is ready to be a friend and jokes that Vladimir can become her page.
This joke is picked up by Count Malevsky, who says that the young man is now obliged to know every little thing about his “queen” and be constantly nearby.
Vladimir attaches great importance to these words and goes to the garden at night to guard the girl, taking with him an English knife.
Suddenly he meets his father, gets scared, drops his weapon on the ground and runs away.
The next day the young man wants to discuss with his beloved what happened. But Zinaida cannot communicate face to face. Her twelve-year-old brother from the cadet school comes to the girl, and she asks the young man to entertain the boy.
In the evening, the princess finds Volodya in the garden and asks what happened and why he is so sad. He replies that he is dissatisfied with the fact that his beloved does not take him seriously. The girl asks for forgiveness. Volodya cannot hold a grudge against his beloved, so after a quarter of an hour he is already running around the garden with all his might with the girl and her brother and enjoying life.
Resolution of the story
The hero tries to communicate with his beloved as if nothing had happened, tries not to keep bad thoughts in his head and not to suspect the girl of anything. But a week later, returning home, he witnesses a scandal between his parents.
The mother says that her husband has a relationship with Princess Zasekina: an anonymous letter has arrived with information about this. The young man cannot believe it.
The next day, the mother announces that she is moving to another city and taking her son with her.
Volodya wants to say goodbye to his beloved before leaving, confesses his love to Zinaida, and says that he cannot love anyone else.
After some time, the young man meets Zinaida again by chance. Vladimir goes horseback riding with his father. Suddenly, his father gives him the reins and disappears.
The young man goes after him and discovers that he is communicating with the princess through the window, persistently says something to the girl, and Zinaida suddenly extends her hand. The father suddenly raises his whip and strikes. The girl is scared, but silently brings her bruised hand to her lips. Volodya is very alarmed by what he sees and runs away in fright.
Some more time passes. The hero of the story moves to St. Petersburg with his parents and becomes a university student.
Six months later, his father suddenly passes away unexpectedly: he receives a letter from Moscow and then dies of a heart attack.
Afterwards, Volodya’s mother sends a substantial sum of money to Moscow.
Four years pass. Suddenly, Vladimir runs into an old acquaintance, Maidanov, in the theater.
He told him that Zinaida now also lives in the northern capital. She is married and wants to move abroad.
After the loud story with Volodya’s father, it was difficult for Zinaida to find a good groom. But since the girl was smart, she was able to do it.
Important! Maidanov even tells the young man where exactly Zinaida lives. Volodya comes to the princess some time later and receives sad news on the spot. His beloved died in childbirth four days ago.
Like Turgenev’s other works, this story can be read online for free on many resources.
What is the story about?
The story “First Love” almost completely reflects the difficult situation that occurred in the author’s life. It describes the details of a family drama. The work is written in an easy, simple language, and thanks to this, the reader can feel the experiences of the characters and better understand the essence of the work.
It is impossible not to believe in the sincerity of Vladimir Petrovich’s feelings and to experience with him the stages of his growing up - from passionate and enthusiastic first love to sympathy.
The work clearly shows how the relationship between Volodya and Zinaida changes, as well as how his attitude towards his own father changes.
The story also well reveals the image of Princess Zinaida Alexandrovna. We see how she transforms from a frivolous flirtatious young lady into a devoted and loving woman. In addition, here Turgenev reflects the deep feeling of Volodya's father.
He didn't love his wife, he married her for money. And he sincerely fell in love with Zinaida, but he had to suppress this feeling within himself.
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Despite what the main character had to endure, he did not hate either Zinaida or his father. On the contrary, he fell in love with his father even more.
In contact with
Vladimir Petrovich (Voldemar) - the hero of the story “First Love”, on whose behalf the story is told. This is an autobiographical image of a story-memoir. A sixteen-year-old boy from a rich, but not entirely prosperous family (his father, who married a woman ten years older than him for convenience, cheats on her), stands on the threshold of adulthood and begins to recognize her little by little. This is facilitated by his love for a girl who amazed him with her exclusivity.
It is very important for the author to “pass” the depicted story through the perception and experience of a teenager in love. First of all, this gives Turgenev the opportunity to give a new meaning and a new sound to the traditional theme of love for him. Voldemar's love for Zinaida is still a youthful feeling, growing out of vague forebodings and expectations. It is almost disinterested - not connected with any practical intentions and, in essence, has no clear goal. Love reveals in this Turgenev story its own poetic essence, not overshadowed by everyday contradictions and disappointments. It is in this version of it that the secret potential of harmony inherent in love is revealed.
Talking about his experiences, Voldemar brings together seemingly incompatible states: he is ashamed and cheerful, pleasant and offensive, painful and sweet. Love turns out to be both happiness and suffering, a source of pride and humiliation, fear and hope. The theme “love-slavery” also sounds, also creating combinations of more and more new, previously incompatible meanings: heroic slavery, voluntary slavery, jubilant slavery. In earlier works, these disparate shades of feeling either did not combine, or did not fully develop, or they collided in contrast and even in conflict: now they tend to merge. Turgenev’s “First Love” for the first time shows the harmonious unity of opposites, which is not amenable to logical comprehension, but is intelligible to feeling. Preserving in memory all the inconsistency of his previous states, the hero sees in each of them something valuable and does not find anything similar to them in his life, even the most painful of them are inseparable from the feeling of celebration. All this unfolds against the backdrop of a completely different, tragic worldview, which constitutes the final wisdom of a life lived (it colors the hero’s thoughts in the epilogue of the story).
Zasekina Zinaida Aleksandrovna (Zinaida) - the main character of the story “First Love” by Turgenev. Comes from an impoverished aristocratic family. At first glance, much in her character and life is explained by the contradictory nature of her social position. But the narrator’s observations, and later Zinaida’s love story for Vladimir’s father, reveal an immeasurably deeper content of her image. Behind Zinaida’s eccentric actions one can discern a dissatisfied, inquisitive and passionate soul (these traits bring the heroine closer to Asya). But her spiritual impulses have nothing to do with moral and even less so with social problems. All the intense and varied aspirations of this extraordinary nature are focused on love. This is where psychological surprises are born: selflessness and lust for power, cruelty and kindness coexist in the heroine’s soul. Zinaida can enjoy the suffering of others, finding in it compensation for her own pain, but she is also almost instantly able to experience tenderness for her victim. The heroine can be cruel even from the consciousness of her own strength (it is the desire to feel omnipotent that prompts her to torment her fans). However, it is not for nothing that this triumphant force is called playful: power over people for Zinaida is self-directed and, in essence, selfless. Therefore, the desire to dominate and enslave is often mixed with cheerful carelessness and is always marked by a special grace that reconciles even the most insidious whims of this extraordinary creature.
Zinaida is the first Turgenev heroine, endowed with a sharp skeptical mind. The brighter is the charm of femininity characteristic of her, which surrounds the heroine with an aura of not only human, but also purely feminine exclusivity. Love disrupts the entire habitual structure of her inner life. She bursts into Zinaida's spiritual world like a fatal, spontaneous and formidable irrational force. The heroine of Turgenev’s story “First Love” feels that she is losing her independence and the ability to dominate people so dear to her, she tries to resist passion, but passion still wins. Proud Zinaida endures humiliation and recklessly sacrifices herself. But this is not an ordinary love-slavery situation; the goal of her victims is pleasure and happiness, sacrifices are inseparable from demands, and it turns out that in the depths of voluntary submission to a loved one lies a “fatal duel” of two strong natures.
The denouement is brought about by the intrusion into the love story of the rough and simple prose of life. The extreme tension of feeling, the catastrophic nature of its development, coexist with the everyday life of an “illegal” love affair - with squabbles, quarrels, anonymous letters, family scandals, dubious monetary calculations, the need to somehow extricate oneself from a shameful “story” and hide its consequences, precisely in these trials tragic passion burns out. At the end of the story, the reader learns that Zinaida, having gone through severe mental turmoil, freed herself from the yoke of passion and successfully got married. But Turgenev, apparently, cannot allow his heroine to take one of the usual paths in life. The message about her sudden death interrupts the story about her.
Peter Vasilievich (Father) - the father of the hero-narrator. He is still a young and very handsome man with a strong will, courageous, passionate, self-confident and despotic in power. The writer's father served as the prototype. A consistent egocentrist of the Pechorin type, he seeks pleasure and power over people in life, guided by the principle: “Take what you can, but don’t let it be in your hands, belong to yourself - that’s the whole point of life.” In seeking Zinaida's love, he at first seems to be realizing his life principle, subordinating her to his will. But later something else becomes clear - the one who looks like a ruler, to whom sacrifices are made, in the end he himself turns out to be a victim of passion - he acts as a humiliated supplicant, cries from the consciousness of his weakness and dies, bequeathing to his son: “Fear a woman’s love, fear this happiness , this poison..."
Turgenev, reviews of which are given in this article, were first published in Russia in 1860. It tells about the emotional experiences of the young protagonist, his first real love, who had to face dramatic and sacrificial relationships between adults.
History of creation
The story “First Love” by Turgenev, reviews can be found in this article, was written by the author in St. Petersburg at the beginning of 1860.
As the writer himself admitted, he created the work on the basis of his own emotional experience, as well as events that actually happened in the writer’s family. Turgenev later admitted that he described everything as it was, trying not to embellish anything. One of the main characters was his father. Later, many condemned the writer for such frankness, and especially for the fact that he did not hide the fact that all these were real events and not fiction.
Turgenev himself was firmly convinced that there was nothing wrong with this, since he had nothing to hide from the public.
Plot of the story
Turgenev's story "First Love" received mostly positive reviews. Both from readers and literary critics.
The plot of the story “First Love” by Turgenev, reviews of which are in this article, is the memoirs of an elderly man. At the end of his life, he recalls the very first romantic feeling that visited him in his youth.
At the center of the story is the main character named Vladimir. He is only 16 years old. He lives with his family on his parents' country estate. There he meets the charming 21-year-old Zinaida Alexandrovna Zasekina, a princess who moves in next door. He immediately falls in love with a beautiful girl, who also shows him signs of attention.
There are many obstacles in his way. Firstly, Zinaida is surrounded by a large number of other young people, each of whom strives to achieve her favor. And secondly, his feelings turn out to be non-reciprocal. Zinaida is capricious, has a playful character, she often mocks the hero, ridiculing him for various reasons. For example, for his comparative youth.
The Mystery of Zinaida
The story “First Love” by Turgenev,” reviews of which are given in this article, captivates the reader. Especially when it turns out who was the true object of Zinaida’s love. This is Vladimir’s father, whose name is Pyotr Vasilyevich.
The main character secretly watches the scene of his father's romantic meeting with Zinaida, which, however, ends in a breakup. Pyotr Vasilyevich decides to leave the young girl. However, his wife becomes aware of the husband’s affair. The family leaves the estate.
Soon Pyotr Vasilyevich dies. He is struck by a stroke. At the end of the story, the main character learns that Zinaida married Mr. Dolsky. He is going to see her, but does not have time. Princess Zinaida dies during childbirth.
Prototypes of the story's heroes
As already mentioned, Turgenev’s story “First Love” is based on real events. In reviews of the work you can find direct references to the prototypes of the main characters.
The prototype of Pyotr Vasilyevich is his father, whose name was Sergei Nikolaevich Turgenev. His personal life was not entirely successful. He married for convenience to a woman who was much older than him, but wealthier. The writer's mother is Varvara Petrovna Lutovinova. When they got married, she was 28 years old, and Turgenev's father was 22.
Sergei Nikolaevich never felt love and tenderness for his wife. Therefore, after several years of relatively happy family life, he began to openly stare at other women. He succeeded in this; Turgenev’s father was popular with the opposite sex. His most famous mistress, with whom he had the longest relationship, Ekaterina Lvovna Shakhovskaya. Shortly after breaking up with her, he died at a relatively young age. He was only 40 years old.
Turgenev's father's mistress
Princess Shakhovskaya became the prototype of Zinaida Alexandrovna in Turgenev’s story “First Love”. You can find reviews of the product in this article. She was a poetess, young Turgenev himself was really in love with her, but she gave preference to his father.
Her fate turned out as described in the story. Soon after breaking up with Sergei Nikolaevich Turgenev, she married Lev Kharitonovich Vladimirov. Six months later, they had a boy. Shakhovskaya had a hard time giving birth; a week after the birth of the child, she died.
Analysis of the work
In the analysis of the work “First Love” by Turgenev, it is worth noting that the author was best able to depict the emergence of a bright and great feeling that visits every person, as well as the development of love that emerged from a fleeting youthful infatuation.
The author claims that love can give a person a huge range of different feelings. Moreover, they may not always be positive. Love not only gives delight or peace, but can also instill hatred and anger in the soul.
In this work you can follow all the stages of love. The main character first experiences moments of happiness and rapture, then a feeling of black jealousy. And also annoyance and disappointment when it turns out that his main rival is his own father.
Narrative Features
Simplicity of presentation is one of the main advantages of all of Turgenev's prose. The reader does not have to constantly arrange complex facts into a single chain. Instead, the straightforward plot creates an impression of realism and sincerity. All the lines sound very natural, because everything actually happened in the author’s life. For this reason, working on this story gave him such pleasure.
The story “First Love” by Turgenev, the analysis of which is given in this article, is divided into chapters. Each of them contains a specific, completely independent plot. Thanks to this structure, the writer can more easily convey his ideas to the reader and demonstrate the full range of development of the characters’ feelings.
The climax of the story comes in chapter 12. It describes in detail the whole range of powerful and contradictory feelings that the main character experiences for Princess Zinaida. The reader has a unique opportunity to look into the souls of the characters. Find out how they really feel and how they experience the events that are happening.
Images of heroes
It is also important that almost all the characters in Turgenev’s story are in development. The protagonist's father is presented clearly and contrastingly. At some point, the reader can even sympathize with him, because his life is doomed. He is married to an unloved woman, and all his relationships on the side are doomed.
Throughout the story, the image of the main character, Princess Zinaida, also changes radically. Her image is undergoing a process of evolution. She transforms from the frivolous girl she was at the beginning into a truly loving, strong and independent woman.
It is interesting that in the end she turns out to be not as frivolous as she might have seemed at the very beginning of the story. Closer to the middle of the work, she appears before us in the image of an unhappy girl who is doomed to suffer in this life because of love. She is literally constantly tormented and gnawing from the inside by the thought that her love for a married man has no future. However, she steadfastly and courageously endures all the hardships that befall her. This speaks only of one thing - during her affair with Pyotr Vasilyevich, she turned into a wise woman who knows the value of her feelings.
The main character of the story
In fact, the main character of the story is a real child. Youthful maximalism in him prevails over many rational feelings. For example, he wants to kill his rival, who is preventing him from reuniting with Zinaida Alexandrovna.
However, when he finds out that he has to compete with his own father, all his stormy mood goes away. He forgives everyone around him and looks at the situation in which he finds himself in a completely different way. Agree, the act is very naive and childish in its own way.
Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev is a famous Russian writer, whose work is of interest to readers of many countries and generations.Fame came to this greatest writer not only thanks to novels and stories. Numerous stories, plays, and prose poems played a major role. He was a very versatile writer.
The author did not chase quantity. It is known that he wrote his works slowly, nurturing the idea for a long time. Despite this, his works regularly appeared on the pages of magazines and as separate books.
Turgenev wrote the famous story “First Love” when he was already 42 years old. In his work, he tried to comprehend the years he had lived and understand his past. Therefore, the entire literary plot is imbued with autobiography.
The history of the creation and conception of the story “First Love”
Turgenev's story with a beautiful and unusual title, “First Love,” was written by the author while he was in the city on the Neva. It is known that the basis for the author’s plot was the events that once happened to the writer himself. And so, being in St. Petersburg from January to March 1860, he took on his new work, the idea of which had long been born in his head.
According to the plot, the author talks about emotional experiences that aroused new feelings in the main character. A small childhood love on the pages of Turgenev's story turns into adult love, filled with tragedy and sacrifice. It is known that almost every hero of this work had prototypes, since this story was written on the basis of the author’s personal emotional experience and the events that once happened in his family.
As the writer himself later admitted, he tried to portray all events as they are, without hiding or embellishing anything.
“The actual incident is described without the slightest embellishment.”
The author believed that there was nothing wrong with him telling the truth, he had nothing to hide, and someone would take his story as a model and this would help avoid many mistakes and tragedies. This Turgenev story was first published in Russia, the year of its publication was 1860.
The plot of Turgenev's story "First Love" is constructed as if it were a memoir. The story is told from the perspective of an elderly man who remembers his first love. The author took as the main character of his story a young man, Vladimir, who was barely 16 years old.
In the story, the main character and his family go to relax on a family estate, which is located outside the city. In this rural calm and tranquility, he meets a young and beautiful girl. Zinaida was already 21 years old at that time. But Vladimir is not at all embarrassed by the age difference. This is how the main female character appears in Turgenev’s story - Zinaida Aleksandrovna Zasekina. Of course, she is young and beautiful, so it’s hard not to fall in love. Yes, Vladimir fell in love with Zina, but it turns out that he is not the only one in love. Around a pretty girl there are constantly candidates for her affection.
But the girl’s character turns out to be not the most diligent. Realizing that men really like her, Zina is not averse to sometimes making cruel jokes on them. So she doesn’t like Vladimir at all, but seeing his suffering, she decides to play a little prank on him, showing her capricious and playful disposition. Sometimes Zinaida Alexandrovna makes fun of him in front of everyone because he is too young. But Turgenev’s hero endures all this, because he is deeply in love. And only after some time, Vladimir unexpectedly learns that Zinaida is also very much in love and this object of her love is his father.
One day he witnesses a secret meeting between Zinaida Alexandrova and Pyotr Vasilyevich, his father. From everything he saw and said, he understood that his father had left the girl forever, because the whole family was leaving back to the city from the village. And a week later, Vladimir’s father suddenly has a stroke and dies. Zinaida very soon marries some Mr. Dolsky. Four years later, the young woman dies in childbirth.
Prototypes of the heroes of Turgenev's story “First Love”
All Turgenev's heroes in his story “First Love” have fictitious names, but according to the memoirs of contemporaries, they all have prototypes. As soon as the story came out, everyone recognized real people in it: the writer himself, his mother, father and the girl with whom the author was in love. Let's take a closer look at their prototypes:
♦ Vladimir, Turgenev’s main character, is the author himself, Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev.
♦ Zinaida Alexandrovna - Princess Ekaterina Lvovna Shakhovskaya, who was a poetess. It is known that the young author was deeply in love with her, but it soon became clear that she was his father’s mistress. Her fate: wedding and death after childbirth was in reality.
♦ Pyotr Vasilyevich, the father of the main character - Sergei Nikolaevich Turgenev, who married a woman for convenience. Varvara Petrovna Lutovinova was much older than him, and he did not love her at all. Hence his affairs with other women.
It is known that due to the fact that the writer’s father’s marriage was not for love, Sergei Nikolaevich’s novels were frequent. His wife, the writer’s mother, took care of the housework and stood firmly on her feet. Therefore, the couple lived on their own. In the story, the author shows such a married couple, from whose relationship their son, a completely young creature, suffers. The author himself is easily recognizable in it. This whole story takes place at a time when Ivan Turgenev lives in a village in the Moscow region to prepare for exams to enter the university.
The young man is passionately in love, and the girl flirts and jokes with him. Volodya completely forgets about his studies and thinks only about Zinochka. That’s why so much of Turgenev’s story is devoted to describing the experiences and feelings of a young man, which are constantly changing and in some ways even resemble a storm or flash. It is worth noting that Volodya is still happy, although the girl simply laughs at him. But still, anxiety gradually increases, and soon the young man begins to understand that Zina is not so simple: she has a secret life and she is also in love with someone.
Soon, not only the hero, but also the readers begin to guess who Zinaida is in love with. The tone of the entire narrative of Turgenev's story changes greatly and the word "love", which before was stormy and enthusiastic, becomes dark and tragic. The girl’s feelings turn out to be much deeper than those of the main character. And Vladimir understands that this is true love. It’s so different, everyone has their own, which is impossible to understand and explain. And as confirmation of this is the ending of the story, where the hero witnesses the explanation of two people in love who cannot be together.
But Volodya is not offended by them, realizing that this love is real and he has no right to condemn or interfere with such true love. This love is multifaceted, beautiful, complex. The author himself tried to find it all his life.
Composition of Turgenev's story
In its composition, Turgenev's story “First Love” is a rather simple work, but deep and meaningful. It contains twenty chapters. The narrative is constructed in the form of memories, so the presentation is sequential and in the first person, since the author is the main character himself, who talks about what happened to him in his youth. Although the name, of course, has been changed: Vladimir Petrovich.
Turgenev's story begins with a short prologue, which shows the background of all these memories and introduces the reader to what they are about to learn. So, Vladimir, being an old man, in one of the companies tells the story of his first and tragic love. He does not want to tell his friends it verbally, as they did, but tells them that he will definitely write this story and read it to them the next time they meet. And he keeps his word. After this comes the story itself.
Detailed analysis of the twelfth chapter of Turgenev's story
The twelfth chapter, which is the culmination of the entire plot, occupies a special place in the entire Turgenev story. It is here, in this chapter, that the hero’s feelings reach their highest intensity. In it, the author describes the feeling that he has never had better in his life. The plot of this chapter allows us to understand a girl who at first seems frivolous and not serious, but it turns out that she is capable of suffering and deep and serious feelings. But only these “illegal” feelings become a real tragedy for her, and, most likely, this pushes her to commit unpredictable and sometimes cruel acts.
The author claimed that what he had to experience at the age of 16 was simply bliss, which, unfortunately, would never be repeated. The writer measured a lot of things in life through love, and therefore he puts his heroes in Turgenev’s story through the test of love. Ivan Sergeevich shows that his heroes must be fulfilled as individuals. Turgenev's psychologism is always secret; he does not give an open description of them, only general hints that helped readers plunge into the depths of sensuality. This chapter contains many experiences of Vladimir, which show his inner world, and this helps to understand the content of the entire work.
With the help of his work, Turgenev was able to relive his youthful excitement and show the reader all the versatility of love.
Vladimir Petrovich - (Volodya / Voldemar) - the main character of Ivan Turgenev’s story “First Love”. It is from his face and about his first love that the story is told.
First we see the adult Vladimir Petrovich, who, while visiting, agrees to write down and then tell his story of first love.
He was then only 16 years old, and he had just parted with his French tutor. He and his parents moved to the dacha, where he slowly prepared for university. At the dacha he loved to ride a horse and shoot crows with a gun.
Zinaida Zasekina is a princess, the main character of Ivan Turgenev’s story “First Love”. We meet her when she is 21 years old and not yet married. She had just arrived with her mother at a modest dacha. They have great titles, but no money, and live in poverty. Despite this, she has many fans, whom she plays with as she pleases.
A young man named Volodya, her neighbor, who is only 16 years old, falls in love with her and joins the ranks of fans. Usually, she gathers everyone at her place, and they play different games, such as forfeits or rope, or even invent their own.
Volodya's father (Peter Vasilievich) is a handsome, calm and self-confident man who married Volodya's mother, who is 10 years older than him, for convenience. He does not love his wife, nor his son, and practically does not raise him, but sometimes he can play or talk with him.
When his son turned 16 years old, Peter started an affair with his first love - Princess Zinaida Zasekina, their neighbor in the country. Pyotr Vasilyevich’s wife found out about this affair, but he managed to convince her to forgive him, after which they had to urgently leave the dacha for the city.
Volodya's mother(Marya Nikolaevna) - a minor character, Volodya’s mother and Pyotr Vasilyevich’s wife. Despite the fact that Volodya was her only child, she did not pay attention to him. She was often worried and constantly jealous of her husband. I immediately began to have a negative attitude towards my new neighbors, the Zasekins. She said about the princess that she was very rude and impudent, and called Zinaida proud and an adventurer. Forgave her husband for his betrayal with Princess Zinaida.
Princess Zasekina- a minor character, Zinaida's mother. An unpleasant and ill-mannered person. She spent all her money and now asks everyone to stand up for her, asking to borrow money.
Belovzorov- a minor character, a hussar, one of Zinaida’s admirers. I could move mountains for her. He constantly asked her to marry him.
Malevsky- a minor character, count, one of Zinaida’s admirers. He was smart and good-looking. Volodya considered him a fake. He wrote an anonymous letter to Volodya’s mother, where he reported about her husband’s relationship with Zinaida.
Lushin– a minor character, doctor, one of Zinaida’s admirers. A straightforward and cynical person, he could tell the truth to Zinaida’s face.
Maidanov- a minor character, poet, one of Zinaida’s fans. He loved to sing it in poems of his own composition.
Nirmatsky- a minor character, a retired captain, one of Zinaida’s fans.
Sergey Nikolaevich- an episodic character, together with the owner, listened to the story of the main character Vladimir Petrovich about his first love. Sergei Nikolaevich did not have his first love; according to him, he immediately started with the second.
