Salted Heart

Ivan Turgenev’s novella First Love often graces lists of great love stories, which means it resurfaces around Valentine’s Day as a tender ode to adolescent affection. It is classic 19th century Russian fiction, full of carriages and calling cards and penniless minor royalty whining to their much richer neighbours about money problems. But behind the period drapery is an exquisite demonstration of storytelling craft. Turgenev builds an elegant shrine to the young love between Vladimir Petrovich and the Princess Zinaida, only to smash it apart. The pleasure of unravelling that twist and recognizing the timelessness of its construction is a great reason to read the book. It’s also why I’d recommend you, bloated with discount chocolate and sick of roses, consider pulling First Love from the shelf.

Before we begin: I am going to discuss and spoil the twist of “First Love.” If you feel strongly about reading a book unspoiled, consider this the moment to excuse yourself, read the book, then return.

Turgenev warns the reader early and often that First Love can only end in heartbreak. Vladimir secures an introduction to Princess Zinaida, newly arrived to the country, but he’s just one of a crowd of young men competing for her affection. No matter! He draws the lucky lot that entitles him to a kiss from the blushing princess! Only, the kiss is one of sibling affection: the princess is a mature 21 years old to his scant 16. While Vladimir dreams of romance Zinaida responds with teasing: “She made fun of me, played with me, and tormented me… I was like soft wax in the hands of Zinaida,” confesses Vladimir. Zinaida’s tests of affection escalate from teasing to violence when she rips out a lock of Vladimir’s hair. The boy is shocked but undaunted. He will take violence over rejection, even if it’s obvious to Vladimir and the reader that this is going poorly.

Then it gets worse.

Turgenev tips Vladimir and the audience that Zinaida is in love with someone else. He lets Vladimir thrash around for a few chapters with false leads and wrong guesses before revealing the truth: Zinaida is indeed attached to a young Mr. V…Vladimir’s father.

”Father and son are attracted to the same person” is a pretty audacious plot twist, regardless of the year (First Love was published in 1860 and set in 1833). Quasi-incestuous love triangles don’t appear often in fiction, and for good reason: it’s fucking creepy. So: how did we get here? Why this twist?

Let’s start with the question of how, because the lead-up to this revelation is meticulously constructed and enormously satisfying once you piece it together. Everything the reader must know to anticipate and understand the destruction of Vladimir and Zinaida’s romance is contained in the first eight pages of First Love.

Vladimir starts his story with a description of his father and his parents’ marriage:

My father, who was still young and very handsome, had not married her for love. He was ten years younger than my mother; she led a gloomy life, was in a constant state of irritation and always anxious and jealous - though never in my father’s presence. She was very frightened of him - his manner was severely cold and aloof…I have never seen anyone more exquisitely calm, more self-assured or more imperious.

Vladimir spends the better part of a page describing his parents and their relationship before he starts talking about himself. The reader also learns that their relationship isn’t happy, either from a mis-match in temperament (“irritation” conflicting with “exquisitely calm”) or age. These are odd, specific details, and given the compression and precision a novella requires, can’t be accidental. The reader is tipped off very early that Vladimir’s parents will be important to this story because they’re front-loaded into the narrative.

The next odd thing: Vladimir’s positioning and characterization of himself. Vladimir describes his younger self as a passionate teenager:

My blood was in a ferment within me, my heart was full of longing, sweetly and foolishly. I was all expectancy and wonder; I was tremulous and waiting; my fancy fluttered and circled about the same images like martins round a bell-tower at dawn; I dreamed and was sad and sometimes cried.

Here we have a young man with a touch of Galahad about him, but he’s far from heroic. Vladimir comes across as a bit of a dope: moody, flighty, prone to wandering horse rides where he imagines himself, “a knight in a tournament.” This description sets up that he’s a bit oblivious, looking for fantasy rather than appreciative of reality. After all, the reality is his unhappy parents. The fantasy is the girl next door.

And oh, what a girl next door! It doesn’t matter that the Zasyekins have more titles than assets, their circumstances so diminished that the butler warns Vladimir “the furniture isn’t worth mentioning.” Our young idiot is undaunted by matters of petty cash. He’s looking for love:

A few paces from me - on a lawn flanked by green raspberry canes - stood a tall, slender girl in a striped pink dress with a white kerchief on her head. Four young men clustered round her, and she was tapping them one by one on the forehead with those small grey flowers - I do not know their name, but they are well known to children: these flowers form little bags and burst loudly if you strike them against anything hard. The young men offered their foreheads so eagerly, and there was in the girl’s movements (I saw her in profile) something so enchanting, imperious and caressing, so mocking and charming, that I nearly cried out with wonder and delight, and should, I suppose, at that moment, have given everything in the world to have those lovely fingers tap my forehead too.

I’ve quoted at length here because while all of these passages confidently zip along they’re also ever so slightly wrong. Why do we hear about Vladimir’s parents first? Why does Turgenev pull a butler into the fray to comment that the new neighbours are poor? Why is Zinaida smacking her suitors in the face with flowers? Why is Vladimir somehow in the middle of this? His big moment is literally sandwiched in between his parents and Zinaida, buffering the two apart. These oddities are invitations to notice that something is happening. It just takes hindsight to recognize what that something is.

When Mr. V and Zinaida’s affair is revealed these passages transform from descriptions to warnings. Vladimir’s passage is in the middle because, unbeknownst to him, he’s the third point of a love triangle. Describing Mr. V as “still young and very handsome” while also emphasizing Zinaida’s beauty and poverty establishes the grounds for their relationship: part illicit attraction, part economics. Mrs. V’s irritation and jealousy suddenly has an explanation, too: she knows her husband is embroiled in an affair with a woman nearly young enough to be his daughter. Affairs leave a trace: “you have to hire a carriage or something like that,” observes the footman who breaks the news to Vladimir, “and you can’t do it without servants, either.” So there’s the butler’s opening appearance explained, too.

And poor, sweet, dumb Vladimir, too oblivious to notice any of it until it’s much too late. It was always about Zinaida and Mr. V, the only two characters to share a description: “imperious,” a word choice that endures translation. “Imperious,” the word that drops the final shovelful of dirt on the grave of Vladimir’s fantasy. The unhappiness of his parents’ marriage kills his own love story. Of course he remembers his parents first.

The revelation that Zinaida is embroiled in an affair with Vladimir’s father is the moment you realize First Love is not a meet-cute, but a story about how love and power intertwine. It is a complex twist, and I feel I’ve only done half-justice to it in my unravelling.

I return to the twist over and over again because it knits together so many things, good and bad, that bring people together: affection, attraction, revenge, violence, money, and aspiration. Zinaida and Mr. V’s affair is founded on a fundamental power imbalance. Zinaida has a title, but Mr. V has gender and money on his side, an extra finger on the scale before the relationship even forms. It’s an advantage he exploits: when Mr. V visits Zinaida one last time, years after their affair, he whips her with his riding crop. “Zinaida quivered,” recalls Vladimir, “looked silently at my father — and raising her arm slowly to her lips, kissed the scar which glowed crimson upon it.” Zinaida gently whipping her suitors with her bundle of flowers and the lock of hair she harvested from Vladimir looks even darker through the filter of this scene. Zinaida returns the violence visited upon her with cruel affection. Is this, Turgenev asks the reader, love?

The twist also knots together notions of love and family in a remarkable and unusual way. While I would hope anyone reading this hasn’t suffered the particular cruelty Vladimir endures in First Love, I would hazard that all of us have, at some point, considered our romantic choices in the context of our families. Does the family approve? Did you accidentally recreate the romantic dynamic of your parents or improve on it? Vladimir never resolves his situation, with either Zinaida or his father: both of them die before he gathers the courage to confront them. Vladimir does not marry or start his own family. He becomes the grey bachelor we meet at the very beginning of First Love, sadly narrating this prickly affair. If romantic partners are the family we chose and build for ourselves, Vladimir rejects that chance at redemption, his heart salted by betrayal.

What Vladimir embraces, oddly is prayer. He thinks of praying for Zinaida and his father when confronted with death in the closing lines of the story. This is an enormously complex gesture, one that conjures absolution and release. Only, he doesn’t actually pray for them, or himself. He only thinks about it. Forgiveness and love are choices we make and promises we weigh against the cost of of our dignity and ego. Vladimir chooses to withhold both. But perhaps you can choose differently.

All quotations are from Isiah Berlin’s 1950 translation of Ivan Turgenev’s First Love, republished in 2007 as part of Penguin’s “Great Loves” series—an irony I’m sure you appreciate if you’ve made it this far down the page.