First Love: Pervaya Lyubov

First Love is a novella by Ivan Turgenev, first published in 1860. It is one of his most popular pieces of short fiction. Like many of Turgenev’s works, this one is highly autobiographical. Indeed, the author claimed it was the most autobiographical of all his works. Here Turgenev is retelling an incident from his own life, his infatuation with a young neighbour in the country, Catherine Shakovskoy (the Zinaida of the novella), an infatuation that lasted until his discovery that Catherine was in fact his own father’s mistress.