First love

Author: (Russian) Turgenev, translated by Feng Zhen, Jing Ming
Publisher:
Publishing Date: 1998-03-01
Features: The short story "Mumu" was written by Turgenev in 1852. In "Notes of a Hunter," published between 1847 and 1852, the author recorded his observations and experiences while hunting in the villages and fields of central Russia in the form of essays, sympathetically depicting the tragic fate of the peasants and protesting against serfdom. "Mumu" can be considered a sequel to "Notes of a Hunter." The novel tells a real story that happened in the mansion of a Moscow noblewoman and portrays the tragic fate of the serf Grigory throughout his life. The protagonist 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. Here, he fell deeply in love with the Tatyana. Due to the tyrannical and capricious mistress's whim, Tatyana was hastily married to a lazy drunkard, and Grigory felt deep pain. He found a small puppy on the road. He devoted all his heart to this little life, trying to find warmth and comfort that he could not obtain in the world from it. He called it "Mumu" with a mumbled voice, and the puppy was named after it. But the mistress disliked the barking of Mumu and ordered it to be killed. Grigory was forced to drown this "companion" who accompanied him day and night. And this once gentle giant finally left the mistress's mansion and returned to his hometown. Through the portrayal of the selfish, cruel mistress and the honest, kind deaf-mute, as well as their mutual relationship, the author launched an silent yet fierce critique against the dark serfdom in Russia. The author did not directly describe the economic exploitation and physical abuse of serf owners on serfs, but instead focused on exposing the spiritual oppression, harm, and abuse of this evil system on laborers. The author successfully created the character of the deaf-mute servant Grigory. "This man, who is 2 arshins and 12 inches tall, is as robust as a hero in mythology." He is upright, serious, steady, loves the people around him, loves nature, and especially cherishes the land. He is wise, has the intelligence to handle practical matters, keeps his word, and acts decisively. He is willing to pay a painful price to fulfill his promises. People fear him and admire him. On his shoulders, readers can see the inherent resilience, determination, and moral strength of the Russian people. Undoubtedly, the long rule of the dark serfdom has caused people to suffer spiritual oppression and distortion of character and soul. From Grigory's foolish loyalty to the tyrannical mistress and his passive acceptance of the oppression imposed on him, it can be clearly seen. Therefore, as the writer Akakiev said, "Grigory's image is the symbol of the Russian people, embodying their astonishing strength and incredible docility." However, this docility is not without limits. At the end of the novel, he still left the post of gardener without the mistress's permission and returned to his homeland resolutely. This ending suggests that there is a great spiritual strength hidden in this giant, and one day this strength will erupt, and once it does, it will mercilessly destroy everything. The prototype of Grigory in the novel—Andrei, a serf in real life—was originally a servile person who flattered his mistress. After the puppy was drowned, he did not leave but continued to serve his mistress. Obviously, the character of Grigory in the novel, who maintains self-respect and an independent personality, although derived from life, has been artistically processed by the author. This reflects the author's respect for the personality of the oppressed. The mistress in the novel is also different from her prototype. She is not as tyrannical and expressive as the author's mother. In the author's portrayal, this elderly landlady is not only cold and cruel but also hypocritical and cunning. If Gogol's satire of the landlord is a "tearful laugh," with his landlord characters appearing ridiculous and ugly, then Turgenev's exposure of the landlord is even more biting and sharp. His landlord characters are often portrayed as detestable and hateful. "A" was completed in 1857. In 1857, Turgenev was plagued by illness, and his personal relationship with the singer Pauline Viardot, whom he had loved all his life and who was born in Spain and later lived in France, was also in crisis. To escape his painful mood, he came to the small town of Zinzig on the east bank of the Rhine, not far from Bonn, in the summer of that year. Here, he met some Russians, including the famous painter Nikitin and the siblings Saburov from Moscow, and began to write "A." To some extent, Nikitin and the Saburov siblings became the prototypes of the main characters in "A." The heroine of the novel, A, has a background almost identical to that of Turgenev's daughter. The author seems to have poured his love for his daughter, his thoughts and worries about her future fate, into this novel. He once wrote to Leo Tolstoy, "I was very moved while writing 'A,' I wrote it almost with tears in my eyes." This novel was completed in Rome in 1857 and published in Russia in 1858. A is the illegitimate daughter of a wealthy landlord and a female 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 in Germany, A met Nikita and fell in love with him. Nikita also loved A deeply. When A proposed to meet him and confess her feelings, he was stunned and retreated fearfully. He told himself, "Happiness has come—yet I wavered, I pushed it away. The sudden arrival of happiness only made me dizzy. I admit that A herself, with her fiery personality, her background, her education—this attractive yet strange girl—really frightened me." He hurt her heart and also wounded her self-esteem. She decided to part with him. When Nikita realized that he had missed happiness, he felt guilty, regretful, and full of longing. A 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, "Otherwise, life will pass by day after day, and life will 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 on Nikita. However, Nikita was far from being the hero in the heroine's eyes. He drifted aimlessly, living a lazy and carefree life. He had no aspirations in life and believed that it was "impossible" to achieve something meaningful in a lifetime. Unlike A, who pursued idealized and lofty love with passion and was willing to sacrifice everything for it, he only needed the "joy of loving each other." He was not prepared to "fulfill the promises he made and understand a difficult task"; he was even more unable to break free from the prejudices of the aristocratic society and truly accept "her background and her education." The different attitudes of the male and female protagonists toward life and love are like two parallel lines that can never intersect. Since the, their brief love affair ended in tragedy, it became inevitable. Nikita is one of the many "superfluous men" in Turgenev's gallery of characters. For the social reasons that gave rise to such characters, Chernyshevsky made a profound analysis in his critical article "The Russian at a Meeting" for "A." He pointed out, "A person living in a society where the only aspiration is petty calculations, cannot but be permeated with petty and humble thoughts." "Whenever he encounters something that requires great determination and a spirit of noble adventure, he becomes timid and weak, and he retreats weakly, because his life has only trained him to deal with petty matters in all aspects." The male protagonist, Nikita, is exactly such a person. For this reason, Chernyshevsky called Nikita a "weak-willed aristocratic Romeo." Turgenev also realized that the hero A needed was neither the young men of the St. Petersburg upper class nor Nikita, a nobleman who drifted in a foreign land. In another novel, "Letters to a Friend," he said through the character's mouth, "In our time, there are no heroes." However, in fact, some of the "superfluous men" in Turgenev's works (such as Lotin) also had a certain heroic quality, although they were still "giants of words and dwarfs of action." Only from the 1850s onwards did the commoner intellectuals begin to step onto the historical stage, and the era of aristocratic intellectuals was coming to an end. The "superfluous man" Nikita, appearing in such a historical context, no longer had the idealistic brilliance of Lotin or the noble desire to act for social responsibility. He became a genuine, real "superfluous man," a pure inert force in social development, which was entirely in line with the logic of historical development. A is a very moving female image in Turgenev's gallery of "Turgenev girls." The author successfully portrayed A's complex, contradictory, and even somewhat mysterious personality. She is passionate, kind, innocent, and candid, yet at the same time willful, changeable, and eccentric. The author devoted much effort to explaining the social reasons for her eccentric personality, that is, her special background. This background made her suffer humiliation in society, caused her self-esteem to swell excessively, and made her suspicious. "In her position, she either had to learn to please others or become self-satisfied." And she chose the latter. That is to say, her unique personality needs to be explained by her unique social status and the immense spiritual pressure caused by the prejudices of the world toward this status. In fact, Nikita did not truly overcome these prejudices, so he could not truly understand or sympathize with A, and it was only natural that he missed happiness. Therefore, it can be seen that in A's love tragedy, there is hidden the author's lament for the fickleness of the world and his condemnation of the hierarchical relationships of the feudal society. The short story "First Love," published in 1860, was written based on the author's own impressions from his youth. He admitted that Volodya was himself. His father, mother, and the girl he loved at the age of thirteen were the prototypes of the other main characters in the novel. He said, "First Love is my favorite work. Other works have more or less been invented, but First Love was written based on real events, without any embellishment. Every time I reread it, the characters come to life vividly before my eyes." Indeed, in Turgenev's works, no other work has the same degree of autobiography as "First Love." The heroine of the novel, Zinaida, comes from a declining noble family. She is twenty-one years old, a slender and beautiful young woman, who immediately gives the impression of being "alluring, tyrannical, intimate, teasing, and moving." Around her, a small group of admirers gathers. She seems to be an uneducated, unrestrained woman. She plays various games with them and teases them. But deep down, she despises their boredom and vulgarity and longs to meet a man who can dominate her spiritually, or at least rely on him, and to receive from him a true love that she is willing to sacrifice for. Sixteen-year-old Volodya has a pure and sincere feeling for Zinaida. The author describes the excitement, shyness, and tension of Volodya's first love, his fresh and heart-stirring emotions, in a very delicate and true manner. Zinaida is somewhat moved by the sincerity of this young man. But in her eyes, he was still a child. Volodya's father is a self-centered person. He believes, "One's own affairs are one's own business—the mystery of life lies in this." According to his logic: if a person has will, they have freedom, and they have the ability to dominate others. Zinaida thinks she has found her ideal hero in Peter (Volodya's father). She kneels at his feet and willingly becomes his slave. However, his feelings for Zinaida are not the pure love of the young Volodya but a lust. He is not prepared to take responsibility for his actions. When his affair 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 to kiss the whipped wounds. The love relationship between Zinaida and "Father" is unequal. "Father" talks about "will" as a "power to dominate others." The scene of Volodya witnessing his father whipping Zinaida clearly shows this unequal relationship between them. Turgenev believed that in love, such an unequal relationship is almost unavoidable. In "Letters to a Friend," he said through the character's mouth, "There is no equality in love, no so-called free union of hearts and minds, and the ideal in love that German professors have thought about in their idle hours." "Love is a chain,a heavy chain." He attributes this unequal relationship, which permeates the most beautiful emotions of humanity, to the "habit of enslaving others" in the aristocratic society of that time.