
The narration is autobiographical, with Petrovich discovering his first desires of adult love at the age of 16, immediately after which he finds his new impoverished neighbor, Princesses Zinaida, age 21, to be the object of his adoration and endless affections. With themes mirroring his own life, especially his distant father and less desirable mother, Turgenev tells the tale of Vladimir Petrovich’s first love, in the countryside of Moscow, in the summer of 1833. This is a damn good little novel providing rolling emotions of joy, giddiness, loathing, sorrow, and more.
