Assessment of Young Love

Ivan Turgenev is the first Russian author I've read in awhile. First Love is relatively short and was easy to read. I really enjoy some of the intensity of the Russian writers.

I wrote on my good reads review "Again I find myself wishing for half-stars to rate a book. First Love is excellent in that it captures what a first love is like - exquisitely torturous. Three stars is too few, but four might be too much. That said it really catches the feel of falling in love for the first time for everyone that doesn't wed their first love. My first love was truly disastrous. Luckily, it didn't have quite the same ending as Vladimir's".

In all reality, my first and second love were disastrous. My first love, L. K. lost a bet with the girls at lunch and had to ask me out to be her boyfriend. I was ecstatic. Much like Zinaida though she was only playing games. Apparently, the girls of my 7th grade class would play a rendition of truth or dare by flicking the top of a coke tab. If you were the unfortunate soul that lost by successfully flicking off the tab, you had to do some horrendous thing that was written down by all the other girls and placed in a cup. L. K. flicked the tab and drew the horrendous task of asking me out. By the end of 4th period through much frenzied note passing I had my first girlfriend and first love. By the end of 5th period I was going to her birthday party. By the end of 6th period I had been summarily dismissed. But, the following day I was asked by L.K. to admit that it was me who kicked a soccer ball through the styrafoamesque roof of the boys' locker room even though it was in fact, her crush David who had done it. David was given detention and as a result was grounded and unable to go to the aforementioned birthday party. While I eventually declined the generous offer by L.K., I considered it because it would allow me to retain my invitation. I was uninvited to the birthday party and David tried to fight me in the hall, leading to us both getting a detention.

The second love, B.S. I managed to ask to every single high school dance other than senior prom. I was asked to the senior prom - but eventually ditched at the afterparty as my date and her ex-boyfriend managed to patch things up at some point when I was getting punch. She disappeared into the after-after party and I went home. But, B.S. had said yes to every invitation, but somehow we never made it to a dance together, save for one - the Sadie Hawkins dance my Sophomore year. Though, B.S. probably didn't lose a bet to ask me to the dance, I have my suspicions that I was merely a back-up plan to the back-up plan and hopelessly available. Both could have been my Zinaida...

Suffice it to say though my first loves did not have the same strange ending as Vladimir's, I understood what Turgenev was writing and what Vladimir was feeling throughout the book. While, I might not have jumped off the wall for L.K., at 16 I very well could have jumped twice as far for B.S. There were a couple of passages though that really stood out for me in the book.

First, Turgenev's interesting take on liberty.

"'Liberty', he repeated. 'Do you know what really makes a man free?'
'What?'
'Will, your own will, and it gives power which is better than liberty. Know how to want, and you'll be free, an you'll be master too'" (Turgenev, 50).

Knowing and being able to lack or want will make you free, free from obsession, free from being indebted to others. It's a pretty good philosophy.

Second, I found a phrase slightly hysterical when young Vladimir finds out all the truth that the love of his life has fallen in love with and consummated her love with his own father. Which, I might say was a great twist, even if it was constantly building up to it from about half way in the book because I kept thinking, it's his father, no it's not, it's his father, no it's not until we know. Again, Turgenev conveys Vladimir's conflicting emotions perfectly. But this little paragraph was funny nonetheless.

"We moved back to the town. It was a long time before I could shake off the past; long before I could begin to work again. My wound healed slowly, but towards my father I actually bore no ill feeling. On the contrary, he somehow seemed even to have grown in my eyes. Let psychologists explain this contradiction if they can" (Turgenev, 97). Very funny.