First Love
1860
(A young man is thrown into the sweet agony of unrequited love for his beautiful new neighbor).
All text except quotations is copyright 1999 by David Lahti, and represents his views alone. Please comment on this page in my guestbook. 
CONTENTS:
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A young man Woldemar of sixteen experiences the whirlwind of love descending on him for the first time, as he gets to know the beautiful and elegant Zinaida, the daughter of a princess, who has moved in next door. She has a crop of suitors, and in her charming and carefree way pits them against each other. They make fools of themselves competing for her attention and smiles, but Woldemar is different, so awed he is in her presence. She is very kind towards him, and eventually gives him more attention than any other. He is enraptured, able to think of nothing else, obsessed with thoughts and dreams of her. He is overcome with the pain of his unrequited feelings, and is blissful when with her, sent into reverie with every careless touch or soft look of hers. In this experience he realizes the power of love, and the strong-- even dangerous-- grip it can have on one. Meanwhile, although he pays little attention to it, his home life is unsettled, with his parents often arguing.
[Do not read this paragraph unless you want the ending revealed:] Zinaida lets it be known that she has chosen a lover. Woldemar is sickened by the possibility of her being lost to him, and stalks her in her garden to see who she might meet as she walked there by night. He brings a knife to kill his rival, but drops it as he notices it is his own father. Confusion settles on his mind, and he spirals into depression. One day he sees his father argue with Zinaida, and watches in agony as his father raps the young woman on her arm with his horse-cane. Shortly afterwards he enters the university. His parents move away, and his father soon dies of a stroke. In three or four years, he is offered the chance to meet Zinaida, who is now married. He delays for a couple of weeks, but when he finally attempts to see her, he discovers that she has died in childbirth just four days earlier. He is left with the scar of his love for her and a sorrow for his lost youth.
This small book is precious, a
sweet draught of literature that conveys the joy and pain of young love so
effectively that anyone who has experienced it cannot help but be tenderly
stirred. Zinaida may be familiar
to some. She represents another
welcome attempt in literature to capture that archetypal woman for which a man
would kill, or die-- that Helen, Isolde, Juliet. In fact Zinaida goes beyond these three in the degree to
which the author raises her (as young men will raise such a woman) as an
untouchable goddess. She is a
woman who drives all rationality from a man at a glance, and at whose feet the
suitors writhe obsequiously while she herself is soft but noncommittal, as if
her beauty had elevated her like a monarch to a position where pleasant
indifference were her responsibility. A male reader aware of the possibility of
such women is easily convinced that the object of Woldemar's deep affection is
worthy of it, despite Zinaida's blithe unconcern for the hearts of her victims.
How a sexless extraterrestrial would marvel at such devotion!
The story is a monument to first
love. It is the best simple work
dedicated singly to that purpose that I have read. Perhaps because of its
simplicity, the book can direct its sentiments sharply and directly. And,
perhaps most importantly, it is painfully tragic, like most first love.
"I was scarcely able to notice anything. I moved as in a dream, and felt through my entire being an intense, almost imbecile, sense of well-being."
-ch.4
"I gazed at her, and how dear she already was to me, and how near. It seemed to me that I had known her for a long time, and that before her I had known nothing and had not lived..."
-ch.4
"Oh, gentle feelings, soft sounds, the goodness and the gradual stilling of a soul that has been moved; the melting happiness of the first tender, touching joys of love-- where are you? Where are you?"
-ch.7
"In her whole being, vital and beautiful, there was a peculiarly fascinating mixture of cunning and insouciance, artifice and simplicity, gentleness and gaiety. Over everything she did and said, over every movement, there hovered a subtle, exquisite enchantment."
-ch.9
"'My son,' he wrote, 'beware the love of women; beware of that ecstasy-- that slow poison.'"
-Woldemar's father, ch.21
"I felt a sudden stab at my heart. The thought that I could have seen her, and did not, and would never see her again-- this bitter thought buried itself in me with all the force of an unanswerable reproach."
-ch.22
"O youth! youth! you go your way heedless, uncaring-- as if you owned all the treasures of the world; even grief elates you, even sorrow sits well upon your brow. You are self-confident and insolent and you say, 'I alone am alive-- behold!' even while your own days fly past and vanish without trace and without number, and everything within you melts away like wax in the sun... like snow... and perhaps the whole secret of your enchantment lies not, indeed, in your power to do whatever you may will, but in your power to think that there is nothing you will not do: it is this that you scatter to the winds-- gifts which you could never have used to any other purpose. Each of us feels most deeply convinced that he has been too prodigal of his gifts-- that he has a right to cry 'Oh, what could I not have done, if only I had not wasted my time.'"
-ch.22
...you wish to recall and re-feel the happy anguish of first love.
If you like this, you'd also like...
(for the sucker for a touching love story:)
-William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet (1595)
-Jane Austen, Persuasion (1818)
-Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847)
-Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd (1874)
(Please click on the hardcover (left) or paperback (right))
