First Love and The Torrents of Spring

Two novellas, written twelve years apart, about the same wound. In First Love (1860) a boy of sixteen worships a girl of twenty-one and discovers who her lover is; in The Torrents of Spring (1872) a young man in Frankfurt is engaged by noon, and by the end of the week has been taken from his fiancée by a woman who wants him only because he is spoken for. Turgenev said the first was the only story he had not invented. Four shorter pieces follow First Love here, among them A Correspondence, told in letters, and The Dog; Mumu, the story of a deaf-mute serf and his dog that Turgenev wrote under arrest in 1852, closes the book. Ninety-eight plates of landscape and travel painting, from Lake Tahoe to the Wetterhorn, set beside Turgenev's restless young men.