First Love by Ivan Turgenev
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

First Love was my first Turgenev novel ever, and it wasn't just any other translation either but a pretty, Progress Publishers at that! Somehow, I wasn't as impressed as I expected to be. It could have been better, much better, though it did start off as a really promising story.

We come across a group of friends who start talking about their first loves when the narration changes and steps into first person, where this man recounts the story of his first love with a bankrupt minor royalty from the family of the gradually falling Russian aristocrats before the Revolution. The story unfolds gradually, describing aptly the pains and agitations of teenage infatuation, some of which, I could personally relate to, some which made the narrator sound like Young Werther.

It then proceeds to a very sound twist in the end, something so powerful it could have changed the course of the entire story but sadly, it doesn't and the story ends rather abruptly despite its extreme realism. I can't pinpoint what failed for me in this story. It could be the annoyingly repetitive description in the beginning that became painfully sparse in the end or just the fact that Turgenev sounded pretty bored with it in the end himself. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the story for its uniqueness and the poetic merit (even if it was a little too much in places!) Can be read!

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