First Love (Penguin Great Loves) - Softcover

At the end of a dinner party, the remaining guests drink wine and tell stories of their first love. For one of them, it will be a dark journey into his past, reawakening unbearable memories of his obsession with the beautiful Zinaida; and the cruelty and betrayal that followed ...

United by the theme of love, the writings in the Great Loves series span over two thousand years and vastly different worlds. Readers will be introduced to love’s endlessly fascinating possibilities and extremities: romantic love, platonic love, erotic love, gay love, virginal love, adulterous love, parental love, filial love, nostalgic love, unrequited love, illicit love, not to mention lost love, twisted and obsessional love....

Ivan Turgenev (1818-1883) was born in the province of Oryol, Russia. In 1843 he fell in love with Pauline Garcia-Vardot, a young Spanish singer, who influenced the rest of his life. After 1856 he lived mostly abroad and became the first Russian writer to gain a reputation in Europe.

His series of six novels, which reflects a period of Russian life from the 1830s to the 1870s, are Rudin (1856), Home of the Gentry (1859), On the Eve (1860), Fathers and Sons (1862), Smoke (1867) and Virgin Soil (1877). He also wrote plays, short stories and novellas, of which First Love (1860) is the most famous.