First Love - Turgeniev Ivan sergeyevich

story of first love

In the early summer of 1833, sixteen-year-old Vladimir Petrovich prepared his university entrance exams without excessive zeal on the property of his parents, not far from Moscow. He falls madly in love with Zénaïde, a young woman of twenty-one with a singular beauty, whom he observes from behind the palisade separating her garden from the park. It is actually his neighbor freshly installed in the adjoining house and living there with her mother, Princess Zassin, a penniless person reduced to a miserable existence.

The girl often meets at her house a number of worshipers whom she likes to make jealous or that she pushes by play to commit a lot of nonsense. She meets one day Vladimir's father, a seductive and authoritarian man. She succumbs to her charm and they end up a few days later by meeting in the garden, on the occasion of one night.

Vladimir, who spied on them, becomes mad with rage as he notices the terrible truth. It is only after having resumed his studies that he will be able to heal from this wound and to free himself from the bewitchment of this devastating passion. As for Zénaïde and her father, they are both struck by a tragic fate: the first who has meanwhile married dies in layers and the second succumbs to a heart attack, not without leaving his son a last letter in which he exhorts him to guard against love.