First Love and Other Stories: Introduction by V. S. Pritchett

Ivan Turgenev's three classic tales of youthful passion and folly open up vistas of tragic complexity and psychological insight into the secrets of the heart.

"First Love" is one of the finest of Turgenev's creations. The story of an adolescent boy and his father who are entranced by the same woman, it weaves together twin mysteries: the secret romantic entanglement that propels its plot and the drama of a young mind awakening to the bittersweet experience of love and loss.

"Spring Torrents," one of Turgenev's most beloved stories, features an impulsive Russian youth traveling abroad who is spurred by his infatuation with a baker's sweet young daughter to sell his estates back home and start a new life with her, only to fall instead under the sway of a seductive married woman.

"A Fire at Sea" was inspired by an incident very early in the author's life when his courage failed during a harrowing disaster aboard a ship. Haunted by his own reaction and that of his fellow passengers, Turgenev was inspired to write this raw and honest exploration of human weakness in the face of catastrophe.

Turgenev's work as a whole is crucial to understanding the social currents of nineteenth-century Russia, but it is in his stories—fluid, lyrical, evocative, and timeless—that he most fully demonstrates his universality as a writer.