First Love by Ivan Turgenev trans. by Isaiah Berlin Review

This novella immediately caught my eye at the secondhand bookstore in my college town. I’ve trained my eye to catch Penguin Classics spines, as they’re pretty distinct against a rainbow of colors, and I am almost always interested in reading the back or picking it up if it’s a classic I’ve heard of or meant to read. I looked it up on Goodreads, and for some reason, it was on my "Want to Read" list despite me completely forgetting how I heard of it. I must have seen it online at some point and added to my TBR, then promptly forgot about its existence. As I get older, this seems to be a recurring thing that happens. As you can tell, I did end up purchasing this extremely thin volume (I can never resist the siren's call of a short book) and reading it over the span of a few days.

This is my first venture into Russian literature, if I’m not mistaken. I really enjoyed it. Although some of the cultural aspects went over my head—for example, the novel is based on a woman the narrator is enamored with, but throughout the plot he basically competes for her attention while she’s entertaining a bunch of other young men who also want her just as badly as him. Is that the common courting practice at the time? I’m not sure, but I’ve learned to just shrug and go with it when it comes to older books.

But onto the important things, i.e. how it made me feel in my heart. Honestly, this short story/book didn’t really reveal much about first loves or the phenomenon of it to me. I truly think that this is the case with a lot of old literature, because contemporary work and media builds on themes and concepts from older work that was groundbreaking at the time but now is quite commonplace and even overdone at times. But despite this, I liked it, I really did. Books about obsessive and compulsive infatuation over someone you don’t actually know enough about to truly love? So therefore it feels more intense? Long, winding sentences describing the process of understanding one’s first foray into new emotions and impulses such as love, lust, and desire? Just take my money.