SOURCE: Costlow, Jane. “Abusing the Erotic: Women in Turgenev's ‘First Love.’” In Engendering Slavic Literatures, edited by Pamela Chester and Sibelan Forrester, pp. 3-12. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1996.

In the following essay, Costlow examines gender and power relations in Turgenev's novella First Love.

At the midpoint of his novella of doomed infatuation—a work acclaimed as its author's most “enchanting and brilliant story”¹—Turgenev dramatizes the initiation into sexual knowledge that is the story's central concern. Vladimir, the story's hero, clambers onto a garden wall only to leap down at the command of his beloved Zinaida. “You keep insisting that you love me,” she says. “Jump down to me on the road, if you truly love me.”² Zinaida's word is Vladimir's command, and in the next instant the boy lies stunned and briefly unconscious on the ground. Vladimir's leap enacts the identification of sexual coming-to-knowledge with a...