Like the later love stories in Torrents of Spring and in Smoke, it has a psychological and animal force, rare in Turgenev’s early work because of his romantic idealism or the conventions of the time. He once told the Goncourts when they were discussing the sexual act that, afterwards, he did not feel sadness or relief – as they said they did – but, rather, felt en rapport with his surroundings. ‘Things take on a reality which they lacked a moment before. I am aware of myself; the table becomes a table again. The relationship between myself and nature is restored, re-established and begins again.’ The boy in this story does not experience the act, but he becomes aware of an aspect of reality that he had not conceived to be possible.

First Love begins as a comedy. A sordid and down-at-heel Princess has come to the neighbourhood, bringing with her a wild and capricious daughter, Zinaida, who is obviously used as bait to young men by the mother. The youth is faintly aware that she is not, as his mother says, ‘comme il faut’ but he is entranced by Zinaida. Love, for Turgenev, is like some brief summer whirlwind or storm that sweeps through his people and transforms them. Such a storm, a freak of indifferent nature, catches the boy. His head is turned by the girl and by her antics as she plays off her comic suitors one against another. All is quietly set out in the leisurely manner of Turgenev’s comedies until the moment when, in his sulky jealousy, the boy supposes she has made a decision and has chosen a lover. Who is he? He watches her from his parents’ garden at night, carrying a knife with him and determined to kill the man who is visiting her. The man is his own father. Melodrama – but no, that is not Turgenev’s way. We see him drop the knife, his jealousy turning to horror, to despair, then to awe and admiration. Now he understands the situation of the girl, her embarrassed tenderness with him, the quarrels that are beginning between his parents. One evening when he goes out riding with his father outside the town he is told to dismount while the father rides on. The wait is long. The boy looks for his father and finds him standing in the street at an open window of a strange house, talking to Zinaida. He listens. She is obviously refusing his father something, possibly telling him to break with her mother or her ludicrous, cynical circle of admirers. There is one of those moments of stillness or timelessness which Turgenev knows perfectly how to catch: it is the mark of all his tales that they proceed from one point of test to the next, like the acts of a play.

My father gave a shrug of his shoulders, and set his hat straight on his head, which with him was always a sign of impatience…then I could hear the words ‘Vous devez vous séparer de cette…’ Zinaida straightened herself and held out her hand. Then something unbelievable took place before my eyes. My father suddenly lifted his riding-crop, with which he had been flicking the dust off the folds of his coat, and I heard the sound of a sharp blow struck across her arm which was bared to the elbow. It was all I could do to prevent myself from crying out. Zinaida quivered – looked silently at my father – and raising her arm slowly to her lips, kissed the scar which glowed crimson upon it.

The boy slinks away as the father bounds into the house. ‘This is love, this is passion,’ the boy thinks. ‘But how could one bear to be struck by any hand, however dear – and yet, it seems, one can.’

We have seen the caprices, the comic antics and mooning aspect of love; we have seen feelings change into their opposite. Even the boy’s worship of his father dissolves in the events of his ordinary life as a student. Life is affirmed not only in its intense moments but in its continuing: the fact that the boy cannot know all, indeed that no one knows all, gives Turgenev’s realism its truth-telling quality.