The Bright Book of Life by Harold Bloom

IT IS REASONABLE TO SAY that the novella First Love is Turgenev's most autobiographical work, unless that be the charmingly crazy Spring Torrents (1872). In First Love, the narrator, Vladimir, returns to his experience of an initial sorrow when he was sixteen. The princess Zinaida, then twenty-one, is a capricious and mocking beauty who is ingenious at tormenting her phalanx of frustrated suitors. Vladimir's father, Pyotr, a skilled horseman and philanderer, is younger than his hysterical and savage wife, whom he married for her money. Pyotr is cold and reserved in manner, and only rarely shows affection for his son. It is revealed to us slowly that Pyotr and Zinaida are immersed in a covert and sadistic erotic affair, and that Zinaida, a kind of moral masochist, is in love with Pyotr.

Vladimir's narrative is Turgenev at his best: apparently impersonal, withdrawn in affect, yet always intimating that love and life itself are tenuous and on the verge of vanishing: Zinaida guessed at once that I had fallen in love with her, but then I wouldn't have thought of concealing it. My passion amused her. She made fun of me, played with me, and tormented me. It is sweet to be the sole source, the arbitrary and irresponsible source of the greatest joys and profoundest miseries to someone else. I was like soft wax in the hands of Zinaida; not that I alone had fallen in love with her. All the men who visited the house were hopelessly infatuated, and she kept them all on leading-strings at her feet. She found it amusing to excite alternate hopes and fears in them; to twist them according to her whim. She called this ‘knocking people against each other'; they did not even think of resistance, but gladly submitted to her. In her whole being, vital and beautiful, there was a peculiarly fascinating mixture of cunning and insouciance, artifice and simplicity, gentleness and gaiety. Over everything she did and said, over every movement there hovered a subtle, exquisite enchantment. Everything expressed the unique, peculiar force of the life which played within her. Her face, too, was constantly changing. It, too, was always in play. It seemed at almost the same instant mocking, pensive and passionate. An infinite variety of feelings, light and swift, succeeded each other like shadows of clouds on a windy summer day, in her eyes and on her lips. Every one of her admirers was necessary to her. Byelovzorov, whom she sometimes called ‘my wild beast', or sometimes simply ‘mine', would gladly have leapt into the fire for her. With no confidence in his own brains or other qualities, he was constantly proposing marriage to her, implying that the others only talked. Maidanov was responsive to the poetic strain in her soul; somewhat cold by nature, like nearly all writers, he assured her fervently, and perhaps himself too, that he adored her. He composed endless verses in her honour, and recited them with an ardour at once affected and sincere. She sympathized with him and, at the same time, faintly mocked him. She did not really trust him, and after listening to his effusions for a while, used to make him read Pushkin, in order, as she used to say, to clear the air.