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.

To speak accurately, the first and last time I was in love was with my nurse when I was six years old but that’s in the remote past.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? I was eighteen when I had my first flirtation with a charming young lady, but I courted her just as though it were nothing new to me just as I courted others later on. “I had no first love,” he said at last “I began with the second.”

Sergei Nikolaevitch, a round little man with a plump, light-complexioned face, gazed first at the master of the house, then raised his eyes to the ceiling. “And so it’s settled,” he observed, sitting back farther in his easy-chair and lighting a cigar “each of us is to tell the story of his first love. The master of the house rang and ordered the remains of the supper to be cleared away. There was left in the room only the master of the house and Sergei Nikolaevitch and Vladimir Petrovitch.

First love ivan