My tale is soon told. But I must admit, gentlemen, that when I brought up the topic of first love, I was really relying on you old bachelors; not that you are really old – but you’re not exactly young, are you? Vladimir Petrovich, won’t you regale us with something?’

‘My first love was certainly not at all ordinary,’ replied Vladimir Petrovich, after a moment’s hesitation. He was a man of about forty with dark, slightly greying hair.

‘Ah!’ said the host and Sergey Nicolayevich with one voice. ‘That’s much better, tell us the story.’

‘Why, certainly…no; I’d rather not. I’m not good at telling stories. They come out either too bald and dry, or else much too long and quite unreal; but if you’ll allow me, I will write down all I can remember and then read it to you.’

At first they would not agree, but Vladimir Petrovich finally had his way. A fortnight later they met again, and Vladimir Petrovich kept his word.

This is what he had written down:

1

I was sixteen at the time. It happened in the summer of 1833.

I was living in Moscow, with my parents. They used to take a house for the summer near the Kaluga Toll-gate, opposite the Neskootchny Park – I was preparing for the University, but worked little and slowly.

Nobody interfered with my freedom. I did what I liked, particularly after the departure of my last tutor – a Frenchman who had never got used to the idea that he had been dropped ‘like a bomb’ (so he said) into Russia; he used to lie in bed helplessly for days on end, with an exasperated expression on his face. My father treated me with good-humoured indifference; my mother scarcely noticed me, although she had no other children; she was absorbed by other cares. My father, who was still young and very handsome, had not married her for love. He was ten years younger than my mother; she led a gloomy life, was in a constant state of irritation and always anxious and jealous – though never in my father’s presence. She was very frightened of him – his manner was severely cold and aloof…I have never seen anyone more exquisitely calm, more self-assured or more imperious.

I shall never forget the first weeks I spent in the country. The weather was magnificent – we left Moscow on the ninth of May, St Nicholas’ Day. I used to go for walks in our garden, or in the Neskootchny Park, or sometimes beyond the Toll-gate; I would take a book with me – Kaidanov’s lectures, for example – though I seldom opened it, and spent most of the time repeating lines of poetry aloud to myself – I knew a great many by heart then. My blood was in a ferment within me, my heart was full of longing, sweetly and foolishly; I was all expectancy and wonder; I was tremulous and waiting; my fancy fluttered and circled about the same images like martins round a bell-tower at dawn; I dreamed and was sad and sometimes cried. But through the tears and the melancholy, inspired by the music of the verse or the beauty of the evening, there always rose upwards, like the grasses of early spring, shoots of happy feeling, of young and surging life.

I had a horse of my own; I used to saddle it myself and go riding to some distant place. At times I would break into a gallop, and imagine myself a knight riding in a tournament (how gaily the wind whistled in my ears!) – or, lifting my face up, receive into myself the whole blue radiance of the sky.

I remember that at that time the image of woman, the shadowy vision of feminine love, scarcely ever took definite shape in my mind: but in every thought, in every sensation, there lay hidden a half-conscious, shy, timid awareness of something new, inexpressibly sweet, feminine…This presentiment, this sense of expectancy, penetrated my whole being; I breathed it, it was in every drop of blood that flowed through my veins – soon it was to be fulfilled.

The house we had taken was a wooden building with pillars and had two small, low lodges. In the lodge on the left was a tiny factory for the manufacture of cheap wall-paper. Occasionally I used to wander over to it and watch a dozen or so village boys, lean, tousle-headed, with pinched faces, in long greasy smocks, as they jumped on to wooden levers and forced them down on to the square blocks of the presses, and in this way, by the weight of their shrunken bodies, stamped the brightly coloured patterns on the paper. The other lodge was empty and to let. One day, about three weeks after the ninth of May, the shutters of this lodge were opened and women’s faces appeared in the windows – a family had evidently moved in. I remember how that day at dinner my mother asked the butler who our neighbours were, and hearing the name of Princess Zasyekin, first said, not disrespectfully, ‘Ah, a princess…’, but then she added, ‘A poor one, I expect.’ ‘They came in three cabs, ma’am, and the furniture isn’t worth mentioning.’ ‘Well,’ replied my mother, ‘it might have been worse.’ My father gave her a cold look which silenced her.

And indeed Princess Zasyekin could not have been a rich woman; the house she had taken was so decrepit and narrow and low that no one of even moderate means would have been willing to live there. Actually all this meant nothing to me at the time. The princely title had little effect on me. I had just been reading Schiller’s The Robbers.

2

I was in the habit of wandering about our garden every evening with a gun looking for crows. I had an inveterate loathing for these wary, cunning and predatory birds. On the day in question I strolled as usual into the garden and, having scoured every walk in vain (the crows knew me and only cawed harshly now and then from afar), I happened to come near the low fence which divided ‘our’ property from the narrow strip of garden which ran to the right beyond the lodge and belonged to it. I was walking with my head bowed when suddenly I heard the sound of voices.