First Love (Selected Short Stories of Turgenev)

Author: (Russian) Turgenev
Publisher:
Publishing Date: 2003-01-01
Features: Turgenev is renowned for his six major novels, but his short and medium-length stories, though less influential, also include world-class masterpieces that reflect his creative personality and style. The collection includes five short and medium-length stories, featuring both early and later works, as well as those familiar to readers and some less known. In terms of content, they primarily focus on Turgenev's concern with the fate of aristocratic intellectuals and the portrayal of Russian young women. Both Asha and First Love depict the fate of aristocratic intellectuals through tragic love stories. These works were created during a period when Russia's liberation movement shifted from the aristocracy to the common intellectuals. Due to their inherent limitations, aristocratic intellectuals gradually lost their role in social development. Turgenev, in his works of the 1850s, keenly captured this significant social change, portraying numerous aristocratic intellectuals—so-called "superfluous men," such as The Diary of a Superfluous Man (1850), Yakov Panenkov (1855), and the famous novels Rodya (1856) and The House of the Aristocrats (1859). Asha and First Love also fall into this category. Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev (1818–1883) was a distinguished Russian realist writer. His six major novels—Rodya, The House of the Aristocrats, The Night Before, Fathers and Sons, Smoke, and Fruitful Land—are hailed as the "artistic chronicle of social thought in Russia during the 1840s to 1870s." At the same time, he wrote dozens of short and medium-length stories. These works, from various perspectives and to varying degrees, reflected the social life of the time, creating vivid social landscapes. The collection translated by Comrade Feng Zhen includes Mumu, Asha, First Love, King Lear in the Steppe, and Spring Tide, all of which are representative works of Turgenev's short and medium-length stories. Turgenev once said, "Our novelists would do better to choose an outstanding contemporary individual and write his true biography, building their artistic edifice on this foundation rather than exhausting their brains to fabricate a batch of contemporary heroes." Like his novels, his short and medium-length stories were mostly created using this method. The themes of these stories were all drawn from real life. Most of the protagonists could be found in contemporary society. Some were close friends the author had known for years, while others were strangers he had met briefly. Some were even the author himself or his relatives. For example, the female landlord and mute servant Grigory in Mumu were based on the author's mother and a serf named Andrei in his family. In First Love, several characters were modeled after the author's parents and a young woman he had loved in his youth. The painter Nikitin and his sister Saburov, who inspired him to write Asha, were the real people behind the characters. In Spring Tide, Sinyavsky bore the shadow of the author himself. And King Lear in the Steppe was based on a real story that happened near his mother's estate. Among them, Asha, First Love, and Spring Tide, these three tragic love stories can largely be seen as quite realistic records of the author's own emotional experiences and encounters. The short story Mumu was written by Turgenev in 1852. As early as 1847–1852, in his Notes of a Hunter, the author had recorded his observations and experiences while hunting in the villages and fields of central Russia in a (sui bi) (note: "，" is retained as instructed). He portrayed the tragic fate of the peasants with sympathy and protested against serfdom. Mumu can be considered a continuation of Notes of a Hunter. The story tells a real incident that happened in the mansion of a Moscow landlord, depicting the tragic fate of the serf Grigory. Grigory is a deaf-mute. He grew up in the countryside and was an excellent farmer, capable of doing the work of four people alone. Later, he was taken to the city by his mistress and became a gardener. There, he fell deeply in love with the (laundry maid) Tatyana. Due to the tyrannical and whimsical mistress's sudden fancy, she casually married Tatyana to a shiftless drunkard, causing Grigory immense pain. He found a puppy on the road and devoted all his heart to it, hoping to find warmth and comfort he couldn't get from people. He called it "Mumu" with a mumbled voice, and the dog was named after it. However, the mistress disliked the dog's barking and ordered it to be killed. Grigory was forced to drown the "companion" he lived with day and night. This once gentle giant finally left the mistress's estate without saying goodbye and returned to the countryside. Through the portrayal of the selfish, cruel mistress and the honest, kind deaf-mute, as well as their relationship, the author silently and fiercely criticized the dark Russian serfdom. The author did not directly depict the economic exploitation and physical abuse of serfs by their masters but instead focused on exposing the spiritual oppression, harm, and abuse of the laborers under this evil system. The author successfully portrayed the character of the deaf-mute servant Grigory. "This man, standing at two sazhen and twelve inches tall, was as robust as a mythological hero." He was upright, serious, steady, loved the people around him, loved nature, and especially cherished the land. He was wise in dealing with practical matters, kept his word, and acted decisively, even at the cost of pain. People feared and admired him. In him, readers could see the stubborn, resilient spirit, strong will, and great moral strength inherent in the Russian people. Undoubtedly, the long rule of the dark serfdom had suppressed people's spirits and twisted their characters and souls. From Grigory's foolish loyalty to the tyrannical mistress and his passive acceptance of the oppression imposed upon him, it was clear that this was the case. Therefore, as the writer AKSAKOV said, "Grigory's image is the symbol of the Russian people, embodying their astonishing strength and inexplicable docility." However, this docility was not without limits. At the end of the story, he left his post as the gardener without the mistress's permission and returned to his homeland resolutely. This ending foreshadowed that this mighty man possessed great spiritual strength, which would one day erupt, and when it did, it would mercilessly destroy everything. The original of Grigory in the story—Andrei, the real-life serf—was a (chou zhi de nu pu) (note: "，" is retained as instructed) who was completely subservient to the mistress. After the dog was drowned, he did not leave but continued to serve his mistress. Obviously, the Grigory in the story, who maintained self-respect and an independent personality, though based on life, was an artistic creation of the author. This reflects the author's respect for the personality of the oppressed. The mistress in the story was also different from her original. She was not as tyrannical and expressive as the author's mother. In the author's portrayal, this elderly landlady was not only cold and cruel but also hypocritical and cunning. If Gogol's satire of the landlord was a "tearful laugh," making the landlord image seem ridiculous and ugly, then Turgenev's exposure of the landlord was even more biting and sharp, often making the landlord image seem detestable and odious. Asha was completed in 1857. In 1857, Turgenev was plagued by illness, and his relationship with the singer Pauline Viardot, whom he had loved all his life and who was born in Spain and later lived in France, had also reached a crisis. To escape his painful state of mind, he came alone to the spa town of Zinzig on the east bank of the Rhine, not far from Bonn, in the summer of that year. There, he met some Russians, including the famous painter Nikitin and the Saburov siblings from Moscow, and began writing Asha. To some extent, Nikitin and the Saburov siblings became the prototypes for the main characters in Asha. The heroine of the novel, Asha, had a background almost identical to that of the author's daughter. It seems the author poured his love for his daughter and his thoughts and worries about her future into this novel. He once wrote to Leo Tolstoy, "I was deeply moved while writing Asha, I wrote it almost with tears in my eyes." The novel was completed in Rome in 1857 and published in Russia in 1858. Asha was the illegitimate daughter of a wealthy landlord and a serf. After her mother's death, she was raised by her father; after her father's death, she was taken abroad by her half-brother. In the small town of Zinzig, Asha met Nikitin and fell in love with him. Nikitin also loved Asha deeply. When Asha took the initiative to ask him out and confess her feelings, he was stunned, retreated fearfully, and said to himself, "Now, happiness has come—yet I wavered, I actually pushed it away. The sudden arrival of happiness threw me into confusion. I admit that Asha herself, with her fiery personality, her background, her education—this attractive yet strange girl—really frightened me." He hurt her heart and her self-respect. She decided to break with him. When Nikitin realized he had missed happiness, he was full of self-blame, regret, and longing. Asha was an extraordinary girl. She had passionate feelings, a resolute and courageous character, and an extreme sense of self-respect. She wanted to "achieve something difficult," she said, "Or else, life would pass by day after day, and life would be in vain." She wanted to "leave a mark behind." For this reason, she needed a strong, extraordinary person in life. She placed her hopes in Nikitin. However, Nikitin was far from the hero she envisioned. He drifted aimlessly, lived a lazy and carefree life, had no aspirations, and believed that achieving something meaningful in life was "impossible." Unlike Asha, who pursued idealized, lofty love with passion and was willing to sacrifice everything for it, he needed only the "joy of loving each other" and was not prepared to "fulfill the promises he had made to understand a difficult task" or to break free from the prejudices of the aristocratic society. He could not truly accept "her background and her education." The different attitudes of the two protagonists toward life and love were like two parallel lines that could never intersect. Given this, the tragic end of their brief love affair was inevitable. Nikitin is a character in Turgenev's gallery of "superfluous men." For the social reasons behind the emergence of such characters, Chernyshevsky, in his critical article The Russian at a Meeting for Asha, offered a profound analysis. He pointed out, "A person living in a society where the only aspirations are petty calculations will inevitably be imbued with petty and insignificant thoughts." "Whenever he encounters something that requires great determination and a spirit of noble adventure, he becomes timid and weak, and he retreats helplessly, because his life has only trained him to deal with petty matters." The male protagonist, Nikitin, was exactly such a person. Therefore, Chernyshevsky called him a "weak-willed aristocratic Romeo." Turgenev also recognized that the hero Asha needed was neither the young men of the St. Petersburg upper class nor Nikitin, the aristocratic (piao bo zhe) (note: "，" is retained as instructed) who was wandering abroad. In another novel, Correspondence, he said through a character's mouth, "In our time, there are no heroes." However, in fact, among Turgenev's "superfluous men," some (like Rodya) still possessed a certain heroic quality, though they remained "giants of speech and dwarfs of action." With the rise of common intellectuals in the 1850s, the era of aristocratic intellectuals was coming to an end. In this historical context, the "superfluous man" Nikitin no longer had the idealistic brilliance of Rodya or the desire to act for social responsibility. He became a genuine, pure inert force in social development, which was entirely in line with the logic of historical development. Asha is a very moving female image in Turgenev's gallery of "Turgenev girls." The author successfully portrayed Asha's complex, contradictory, and even somewhat mysterious personality. She was passionate, kind, innocent, and candid, yet at the same time willful, changeable, and eccentric. The author devoted much attention to explaining the social reasons behind her eccentric personality, which was her unique background. This background subjected her to humiliation in society, inflated her self-esteem to an excessive degree, and made her suspicious. "In her position, she had to either curry favor with others or be proud of herself." She chose the latter. That is to say, her unique personality needed to be explained by her unique social status and the immense spiritual pressure caused by the prejudices of the secular world toward this status. Nikitin had not truly been able to transcend these prejudices, so he could not truly understand or sympathize with Asha, and his failure to seize happiness was only to be expected. Therefore, in Asha's love tragedy, there was hidden the author's lament for the fickleness of the world and his condemnation of the hierarchical relationships of the feudal society. The medium-length story First Love, published in 1860, was written based on the author's own memories from his youth. He admitted that Volodya was himself. His father, mother, and the young woman he loved at the age of thirteen were the models for the other main characters in the story. He said, "First Love is my favorite work. Other works have some fictional elements, but First Love was written based on real events, without any embellishment. Every time I reread it, the images of the characters become vividly clear before my eyes." Indeed, in Turgenev's works, no other novel has such a clear autobiographical quality as First Love. The heroine of the story, Zinaida, came from a declining noble family. She was twenty-one years old, a slender and beautiful young woman who immediately gave the impression of being "alluring, tyrannical, intimate, teasing, and moving." A small group of admirers gathered around her. She seemed like an uneducated, unrestrained woman. She played various games with them, teasing them. But deep down, she despised their boredom and vulgarity and longed to meet a man who could dominate her spiritually, or at least rely on him, and who could give her a true, self-sacrificing love. Sixteen-year-old Volodya had a pure and sincere affection for Zinaida. The author described the excitement, shyness, and tension of Volodya's first love with great detail and authenticity. Zinaida was somewhat moved by the sincerity of the young man's love. However, in her eyes, he was still a child. Volodya's father was a self-centered person. He believed, "If one does everything themselves, that is the essence of life." According to his logic, if a person has will, they have freedom and the ability to dominate others. Zinaida thought she had found her ideal hero in Peter (Volodya's father). She bowed down before him and willingly became his slave. However, his feelings for Zinaida were not the pure love of the young Volodya but a lust. He was not prepared to take responsibility for his actions. When his private life with Zinaida was discovered by Volodya's mother, he left the village where Zinaida was staying. At their last meeting, he even whipped her, and she submitted and kissed the whipped wound. The relationship between Zinaida and "Father" was unequal. "Father's" talk of "will" was merely a "power to dominate others." Volodya saw the scene of Father whipping Zinaida, which made the unequal relationship between them even clearer. Turgenev believed that such unequal relationships were almost unavoidable in love. In Correspondence, he said through a character's mouth, "There is no equality in love, no so-called free union of souls and the idealistic fantasies that German professors have painstakingly concocted. In love, one is a slave, and the other is a master." "Love is a chain, a heavy chain." He attributed this unequal relationship, which permeated humanity's most beautiful emotions, to the "habit of enslaving others" of the aristocratic society at that time. King Lear in the Steppe, published in 1870, was based on a real story Turgenev heard about in his youth. Near his mother's estate of Spasskoye-Lutovinovo, there was a small estate of the nobleman Stepan Ivanovich Yarechev called Melukhovo. Yarechev divided his property between his two daughters; later, he was driven out of his estate by his son-in-law and lived in Spasskoye, Turgenev's house. On a Sunday, he returned to Melukhovo, and in a fit of anger, he destroyed his own house and accidentally fell from the roof, dying from his injuries. He was buried in Spasskoye-Lutovinovo. The protagonist of the novel, "King Lear in the Steppe," Kharlov, was based on Yarechev. Kharlov's experience in the novel was almost identical to that of the real-life Yarechev. Due to the similarity between this story and the experience of King Lear in Shakespeare's tragedy King Lear, which Turgenev translated in the 1830s, he titled the novel King Lear in the Steppe. In the feudal era, in aristocratic families, phenomena like the daughters of Kharlov seeing profit and abandoning their parents were not uncommon. In this novel, the author told this common story in a thrilling way. He not only mercilessly exposed and condemned this phenomenon but also attempted to explore the reasons behind the tragedy. He wrote in the book, "Everything in the world, whether good or bad, is not rewarded according to a person's actions but is determined by certain laws that are yet unknown but logical. As for what these laws are—I still cannot say. Even when I sometimes seem to vaguely sense their existence." In the novel, Turgenev did not focus on moral instruction. As a distinguished realist writer, he powerfully revealed a harsh fact to people through a true description of Kharlov's miserable fate in his later years: in a society based on private ownership, relationships between people were completely maintained by personal material interests and were based on private property relations. Kharlov had absolute authority in his family and the entire estate. He said, "My word is law." He could do this because he was the owner of the estate. This private ownership was not only the foundation for his survival and material enjoyment but also the basis for his power to dominate others. Once he gave up all his property, he immediately became a different person. His authority also disappeared, and he tasted the bitterness of the world to the core. When Kharlov fell into the dire straits of hunger and cold, the kind-hearted poor people once showed him sympathy. And when Kharlov personally experienced the unbearable torment of poverty, he began to look back on his experiences from the perspective of the poor and felt remorse. He said, "I was also plagued by a conscience." He thought, "You have done nothing good for others in your life! You could have helped the poor, given freedom to the peasants, and so on. Because you have tormented them for their entire lives! Before God, you are their accuser! Look, you bullied them, and now you are getting a bad reward!" "When I was in charge, they had already fallen into the abyss—I do not hide my sins," he said. These words made one think of the scene in Shakespeare's King Lear, where Lear, after being driven out by his daughters, runs through the wilderness in a storm, calling out to the naked and starving people. Spring Tide, published in 1872, was also rich in autobiographical elements. The young Turgenev once passed through the banks of the Main River in Frankfurt and saved a comatose boy in a confectionery shop and fell in love with his sister at first sight. Spring Tide depicts his past life, that is, a fragment of his life in the 1840s. The characters Polozhova and Panteleone also had real-life originals. The author also wrote into the novel his emotional experience of being deeply infatuated with the singer Pauline Viardot, who was born in Spain and later lived in France, to the point where it became an endless, solitary wandering. The novel is set in the German city of Frankfurt and tells the love tragedy between the Russian aristocratic youth Sinyavsky and the Italian girl Gema. The heroine, Gema, was a commoner. After her father's death, her mother had to rely on the local manager of a (ne ro xiu chou duan) (note: "，" is retained as instructed) for financial support and chose him as her daughter's fiancé. Gema was a strong-willed and decisive girl who liked to think independently. She could not tolerate the hypocrisy, selfishness, and petty bourgeoisie of her fiancé and decided to refuse the marriage. When she met Sinyavsky, she became even more determined. Since the foundation of this marriage was not based on love but on a calculation of interests, the author took a negative attitude toward it. Sinyavsky was attracted by Gema's kindness, intelligence, purity, and indescribable beauty. Gema was moved by Sinyavsky's spirit of justice. They fell deeply in love with each other. The author's。，Sinyavsky was not a strong-willed character. Although kind-hearted, he did not have lofty social ideals or pursuits. He was close to the type of "superfluous man." And "weak people never take the initiative to end things; they always wait for the result." That is to say, such people cannot take the initiative to grasp life but are merely carried along by the waves of life. Sinyavsky was just like this. He got acquainted with an old classmate's young and beautiful wife, Maria Nikolaevna Polozhova, in order to sell his estate and raise money for his wedding. He realized that he did not love this bored and charming noblewoman, but he could not resist the temptation and finally fell under her spell, abandoning his beloved fiancée to follow this woman to Paris and becoming her slave until he was abandoned. From then on, he lived a long period of life filled with endless regret. What made him leave the kind and caring Gema for the arms of that (fang lang nv ren) (note: "，" is retained as instructed) was what? The author believed it was a instinct, that is, a strong impulse of lust. The author was equally critical of the relationship between Sinyavsky and this woman, which was based on lust. In Turgenev's view, love was a sublime and selfless emotion. He said, "Love is that passion that can crush our 'I,' compelling us to forget ourselves and our interests." He was convinced that only such love could bring people true happiness. Therefore, he believed that both relationships driven by lust impulses and relationships based purely on considerations of interest were unacceptable. If in the first part of Spring Tide, he condemned the marriage between Gema and Klyubel through negation; then, in the latter part of the book, he portrayed the impulse of lust as an inscrutable mysterious force and depicted the conflict between the impulse to pursue personal happiness and satisfy lust and the deep moral consciousness in the soul as the main content of the tragic character of the male protagonist. Turgenev's short and medium-length stories are concise and concentrated in content, with highly concentrated plots. They often focus on a memorable experience in the life of the protagonist, though not long, they have a large capacity. Some stories have a delicate structure, with layers of complexity, like Chinese-style ancient garden architecture, giving a sense of a winding path leading to a secluded spot, such as First Love and Asha; others have plots that rise and fall dramatically, with the protagonist's fate fluctuating greatly, showing the tragedy of life to the extreme, leaving readers moved and breathless, such as King Lear in the Steppe. These novels, though not as direct as the major novels Rodya, The Night Before, Fathers and Sons, and so on, in commenting on the major issues facing Russia at that time, the careful reader can still sense from the author's description of events in Russian society in the 19th century that the hierarchical relationships of the feudal society had harmed people's beautiful emotions and caused countless misfortunes in the world. The author was skilled at psychological description, but the protagonists in his novels rarely had long inner monologues. In most cases, the author mainly expressed the inner life of the characters through dialogue, their external actions, and facial expressions. For example, in Mumu, the inner life of the deaf-mute servant Grigory was mainly expressed through external actions. In some novels, the author also adopted a direct and unadorned style. For example, Spring Tide is interspersed with direct self-revelations throughout, showing the emotional world of the protagonist Sinyavsky; Asha and First Love are narrated in the first person throughout the tragic story to directly express the deep-seated and hidden emotions of the protagonists, creating a poetic and lyrical atmosphere for the readers. The two translators have a deep understanding of the Russian language and literature and have conducted systematic research on Turgenev's works. In the translation process, the translators strove to faithfully express the ideas and style of the original work, with their translation being faithful, clear, and fluent. I think this is a forceful work in the translation of Turgenev's works.