Sometimes a title seduces, sometimes it keeps me from reading a book. A friend writes about Turgenev’s style that it is softer, more subtle than the style of some of his fellow 19th century Russian writers and he, I feel, is spot on – Turgenev’s prose is of a sensitivity, beauty and subtlety which I think was wasted on my hapless teen self. A few years ago I read his Home of the Gentry, which mesmerised me and for the first time it dawned on me that reading Turgenev for me might equate the relish of drinking wine, which I also only later in life got to appreciate. Nonetheless, by various ways Turgenev reminded me of his existence more than any other Russian writer did: I encountered him when reading Flaubert’s letters, when reading on Eugène Delacroix, on Franz Liszt, Frédéric Chopin and George Sand – or on Dostoyevsky’s peregrinations (on their feud and quarrel/near fight in Baden-Baden). Subsequently, I disregarded him for about the next thirty years. Reading Fathers and Sons at sixteen, having high expectations of that classic novel (curious I was about the ‘nihilism’) Turgenev’s tale didn’t enthral me like Anton Chekhov’s stories ( The Lady With the Little Dog and Other Stories, 1896-1904), Tolstoy’s War and Peace, or Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot and Crime and Punishment did. Unlike my experiences with other Russian 19th century writers in my teens, my first acquaintance with Ivan Turgenev’s writing wasn’t exactly a coup de foudre. Even taking into account a slight tinge of sadness is an intrinsic part of nostalgia, the tale of the narrator can hardly be seen as the wish to turn back time reminiscing on feelings of pleasure in the past.

If nostalgia is rather ‘a wistful desire to return in thought or in fact to a former time in one’s life, to one’s home or homeland, or to one’s family and friends a sentimental yearning for the happiness of a former place or time’ – I would think of this story as of a profound melancholy, rather than a nostalgic one. Is the nostalgic feeling negative or positive? Is First love, the 1860 novella of which Turgenev by the end of his life thought of fondly as ‘the only thing that still gives me pleasure, because it is life itself, it was not made up….First Love is part of my experience’ - a tale of nostalgia? If nostalgia means ‘the pain from an old wound’, a feeling in which bitter-sweetness is preponderant, the novella certainly is a nostalgic one. Reading First love made me wonder on the nature of nostalgia. O sweet feelings, soft sounds, goodness and peace of a moved spirit, the melting joy of the first tender emotions of love - where are you, where are you?

First love by ivan sergeyevich turgenev