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Novella (short novel) written by Ivan Turgenev

First Love (Первая любовь, Pervaya lyubov) is a novella by Ivan Turgenev, first published in 1860. It is one of his most popular pieces of short fiction. It tells the love story between a 21 year old girl and a 16 year old boy.

First Love was published in March 1860 in the Reader's Library. 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 neighbor in the country, Princess Catherine Shakhovskoy (the Zinaida of the novella), an infatuation that lasted until his discovery that Catherine was in fact his own father's mistress. Critics were divided. Some criticized its light subject matter that did not touch upon any of the pressing social and political issues of the day. Others condemned the impropriety of that subject matter, namely a father and son in love with the same woman and a young woman who was the mistress of a married man. But it had its many admirers, including the French novelist Gustave Flaubert, who gushed in a letter to Turgenev, "What an exciting girl that Zinochka [Zinaida] is!" The Countess Lambert, a close acquaintance of Turgenev, told the author that the Russian emperor himself had read the novella to the empress and been delighted by it.

Turgenev, Ivan. Turgenev's Novels, v. 11 ("The Torrents of Spring." "First Love." "Mumu."). Trans. Constance Garnett. London: Heinemann, 1897. Out of print. Turgenev, Ivan. First Love. Trans. Isaiah Berlin. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1950. Out of print. Now available in Penguin Classics, 1978. Penguin edition includes an introduction by V. S. Pritchett. Turgenev, Ivan. First Love and Other Stories, Oxford World's Classics. Trans. Richard Freeborn. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. The translation is based on the text from I. S. Turgenev, Polnoye sobraniye sochineniy i pisem. Moskva Leningrad, Vol. IX, 1965, pp. 7–76. This edition also contains The Diary of a Superfluous Man, Mumu, Asya, King Lear of the Steppes, and The Song of Triumpant Love. Turgenev, Ivan. First Love. New York: Penguin Books, 2007.

The story was featured at number four on Rosa Rankin Gee's top 10 novellas about love via The Guardian and featured in a similar roundup by The New York Times in 2013. In 2020, an adaptation of the novella titled About Love was presented off Broadway at the Sheen Center for Thought & Culture.