First Love by Ivan Turgenev ~ Full Audiobook

First Love by Ivan Turgenev audiobook.

The title of the novella is almost an adequate summary in itself. The 'boy-meets-girl-then-loses-her' story is universal but not, I think, banal - despite a surprise ending which notoriously turns out to be very little of a surprise. First Love is given its originality and poignancy by Turgenev's mastery of the piercing turning-point (akin to Joyce's 'epiphanies') that transforms the character's whole being, making a tragic outcome inevitable. Even the nature symbolism is rescued from triteness by lovely poetic similes - e.g. 'but at that point my attention was arrested by the appearance of a speckled woodpecker who busily climbed up the slender stem of a birch-tree and peeped out uneasily from behind it, first to the right, then to the left, like a musician behind the bass-viol.'

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