How the secret of Turgenev's first love was revealed… 100 years later!

By the 1860s, Turgenev was a famous writer. His ‘A Sportsman's Sketches’ had already made a splash, offering notes on estate life through the eyes of masters and the poor. He wrote extensively for the theater; and he had published his major novels ‘A Nest of the Gentry’, ‘On the Eve’ and ‘Fathers and Sons’. In 1852, his story ‘Mumu’ was published, after which he almost stopped working with short literary forms. With the novella ‘First Love’ in 1860, Turgenev returned to shorter texts.

A youthful drama

The writer claimed the plot of ‘First Love’ was autobiographical. French Slavist André Mazon believed Turgenev must have made the first drafts for the story around 1858. A sheet from his Paris archive with notes for new works dates to this time. Turgenev indicated in them:

“Characters of the story 'First Love':
Me, a 15-year-old boy,
My father – 38 years old,
My mother – 40 years old.”

In the plot, the main character, a 16-year-old boy named Vladimir, spends the summer at a countryside house with his parents. He falls in love with the daughter of impoverished neighboring nobles – Zinaida. He visits them, but only sees the girl playing around with numerous suitors and, in the end, learns the terrible secret of her affair with his own father…

How literary scholars uncovered who Turgenev's beloved was

The events that formed the basis of the work occurred in the 1830s, when the future writer was just 15 years old. He lived in a Moscow country house near the Donskoy Monastery, next to the Shakhovskoy dukes. There, Turgenev fell in love with a young neighbor, a 19-year-old poetess named Ekaterina Shakhovskaya.

However, as it turned out, Sergei Turgenev, the writer's father, was also involved in a romantic relationship with a young duchess. He was on the verge of a breakup with his wife Varvara, the mother of the future writer, at the time. 

Ivan Turgenev's relationship with his beloved, of course, did not work out. And, later, the poetess became the prototype for the heroine in ‘First Love’ – Zinaida. The story was published long after the writer's parents had died.

The name of the girl who inspired the writer to create the story remained unknown for a long time. Literary scholars only discovered who his beloved was in 1964.

Researcher André Mazon published Turgenev's autobiographical notes titled ‘Memorial’, which were originally not intended for the public. In it, there is an entry from 1833: “New Year in Moscow. First love. Duchess Shakhovskaya… Living at the dacha opposite Neskuchny [Garden].”

Literary scholars did not immediately decipher the note. Later, they correlated it with a letter from Varvara Turgeneva, in which she wrote about her son's infatuation: “And these poetesses… They… Oh!... Shakhovskaya will turn up. They will torment and die – and leave their own and others' children orphaned.”

In another source, she mentioned that her husband also had a beloved – and she also wrote poetry to him.

Researchers compared this country house, matched it with the text of the story and proved: The prototype for Zinaida Zasekina had to have been Ekaterina Shakhovskaya. In the text itself, Ivan Turgenev left only hints about the identity of his beloved.

The full version of this article can be found (in Russian) on the Culture.ru website.