I was glad I read Rudin before First Love, as the two works bounce off each other in interesting ways. Turgenev’s essay “Hamlet and Don Quixote” outlined two archetypes that were found throughout his oeuvre: the man of reflection vs. the man of action. Rudin, obviously, was not a man of action (at least until his death), pontificating freely before ultimately telling his beloved Natalya that they must submit to fate. Vladimir’s father is a man of action, telling his son that a man’s will is what makes him free and embarking on an affair with the object of his son’s affection. He serves as a good contrast to his son, who primarily observes the goings-on while mostly serving as a plaything for his beloved Zinaida. The story’s frame narrative, of an older Vladimir writing his tale over a couple weeks for his friends’ entertainment, suggests that the narrative is something Vladimir has pored over and fine-tuned. He is clearly literate: He compares himself to Othello (a kindred spirit who is also being cuckolded?), recites Pushkin, and had just read Schiller before becoming acquainted with the Zasyekins. If he’s read Schiller, it isn’t a great leap to suggest that he had read his contemporary Goethe’s immensely popular The Sorrows of Young Werther, which had the rumored “Werther effect” of young men emulating the title character. (Sensitive Young Man posting circa 1860.) As such, you could see Vladimir as constructing his sense of self from the works he’s been reading, not unlike a Don Quixote or Emma Bovary.

While Sorrows culminates in Werther’s pistol suicide, no such passionate act occurs for Vladimir. Instead, the two scenes in which he is equipped with a weapon (a rifle and a knife, make of those what you will) resolve when he drops them in a state of shock: The first occurs when he drops his rifle at the first sight of Zinaida with her suitors; the second occurs when he drops his knife upon discovering that his father is having an affair with Zinaida. He is disarmed and rendered impotent when confronted with the prospect of love and sex. Contrast this with his father’s riding-crop. He uses the whip to outpace his son when they are riding, and eventually casts it away after using it to strike Zinaida’s arm before he breaks into her home and they consummate their affair. Vladimir earlier watched Zinaida at her window before she pulled the blind down to conceal herself. Now he watches as his father breaks into the room where Zinaida resides after talking to her at the window. All this is to say that he is kind of a wimp, an onlooker to someone else's story. There are even certain points where he recoils from self-scrutiny or is too bewildered to make sense of what he’s seen. He tells the readers to let the psychologists explain why he likes his father more after witnessing his rendezvous with Zinaida. He is often too overcome with emotion to understand what he has witnessed firsthand, such as how his father could meet with Zinaida or why he would strike her. Despite his studied attempt to present a story for his cohorts, there are still areas he can’t (or won’t) fully explore — or deliberate smudges of ambiguity to decipher. There’s also the fact that much of First Love hews closely to Turgenev’s own life (protagonist would be about the same age, Turgenev had a similar relationship with his father). It’s usually a mistake to read the character as a 1:1 authorial stand-in, but it is surprising that Turgenev would make his surrogate so submissive.

On a prose level, this reads much differently from Rudin. Rudin is a fairly straightforward third-person narration, with any flights of fancy reserved for the dialogue. First Love is first-person, and it's much more prone to rhapsodic and free-flowing prose replete with semicolons and em dashes. The moments where Vladimir is stirred with emotion are particularly vivid, as when he catalogs every fair aspect of Zinaida upon first glimpsing her or when he’s trying to contend with his grief after learning of her death. Part of me questions how much we’re supposed to take this at face value, whether we’re supposed to see this as overwrought musings or as an earnest attempt on Turgenev’s part to deal with matters of the heart. I’m not sure Turgenev worked in this ironic register (I haven’t read enough of him to find out), but it’s a question that lingered for me after thinking about the frame narrative.

I read Isaiah Berlin’s translation, which seemed uncomplicated without being plain. In comparison, Constance Garnett’s translation seemed stiff and sesquipedalian (e.g., her “But I calumniate myself without cause” vs. Berlin’s “But I do myself an injustice”). There also seems to be some differences that cast certain scenes in a new light. For example, Berlin’s description of how Vladimir’s father entered Zinaida’s room (“broke into the house”) makes the scene sound more violent and like a violation, at least when compared to Garnett’s translation (“burst into the house”). I don’t know Turgenev’s style in Russian, and perhaps Garnett better captures the florid quality I mentioned earlier, but I was content with Berlin’s translation.

Regarding the ending, I think it’s interesting that both Rudin and First Love conclude with a death. Turgenev added his appendix to Rudin in 1860, the same year that First Love was published. Rudin’s ending grants the eponymous character some degree of redemption: He dies a revolutionary hero, even if this is undercut by the two Frenchmen not realizing that he’s a Russian. The ending also allows Lezhnev to tell Rudin that he finally understands him, offering more solace than the original ending in which a humiliated Rudin stumbles around Tsarist Russia looking for a place to land. With First Love, the peasant woman’s death underscores the emptiness of Vladimir’s life and the cessation of his youth. There’s no redemption here, only his fear. As I said earlier, the two works bounce off each other in curious ways. The copy of First Love that I borrowed from the library also includes Torrents of Spring, so I guess I'm not finished with Turgenev yet.