Folio Society Published Works Number 2441
Turgenev, Ivan - First Love
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Turgenev, Ivan - First Love (Published in by The Folio Society in 2011. Translated by Isaiah Berlin. Introduced by Robert Dessaix. Illustrated by Anna and Elena Balbusso Bound in cloth, Set in Goudy. Blocked with a design by Anna and Elena Balbusso. Frontispiece with 5 colour illustrations. Approx. 96 pages, Book size: 11" × 7.25". A group of middle-aged men sit together after dinner and the conversation turns to first love. One of them, Vladimir Petrovich, tells his story ... As a 16-year-old, spending the summer at his parents' country house, he glimpses 'a tall, slender girl in a striped pink dress': the young princess Zinaida. She is five years older, impoverished and not particularly respectable, but he falls desperately in love with her. As she plays each of her suitors off against the other, Vladimir sinks ever deeper under her spell – until the discovery of his true rival comes as a terrible awakening. Turgenev claimed that his coming-of-age story was completely autobiographical. He was 16 in 1833, when the story is set, and spent that summer in a dacha near Moscow. Most importantly, he too had a difficult relationship with his charismatic, philandering father. As novelist Robert Dessaix says in his introduction, one of the pleasures of First Love comes from 'our awareness of the way that the boy, the older Vladimir and Turgenev himself see the theatre of romance quite differently'. Dreamlike illustrations by Anna and Elena Balbusso capture the haunting, melancholic beauty of the story. )
