Somebody else probably has written that novel, but it is not the story that Turgenev is interested in. He can manage to be concise because he is so focussed - in First Love we only learn about the narrator - and not that much about him, we don't know about the woman he loves or why there is a crowd of, rather unlikely, suitors around her. But you can enjoy it infinitely because of its artistry, Penelope Fitzgerald was a Turgenev fan and beyond his pessimism I can imagine that she was inspired by his concision, all of these stories are short and I felt the shorter they were the stronger they were, the longest story here - the King Lear retelling, was the weakest for me The song of triumphant Love was unfinished and is, I assume, only in the collection as a filler.
This collection consists of the stories Diary of a superfluous man, Mumu, Asya, First Love, King Lear of the steppes and The song of triumphant Love Asya and First Love I had read before, back when I was a teenager, the edition was a hardback bound in green - though that could have been a library binding I suppose, from a Russian publishing house.įirst Love I imagine is one of the stories that inspired Freud, it is a very nice story, but it is not the kind of the story that you can read the same way twice.
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