История любовная

by Ivan Shmelyov, Иван Шмелёв

Story of a youth's first lessons in the school of love. His armour with the little peasant girl, Pasha, awakens him to the stubborn facts of life, and leaves him mature.

Genres: Russia

148 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1927

About the author

Иван Сергеевич Шмелёв

Russian émigré writer, member of the Moscow literary group Sreda.
Shmelev was born into a merchant family. He graduated from the law faculty of Moscow University in 1898. His works first appeared in print in 1895. Shmelev’s best prerevolutionary prose works showed a profound knowledge of city life and popular language; they employed the narrative technique of oral folktales. The novellas Collapse (1907), Citizen Ukleikin (1908), and The Man From the Restaurant (1911), which was the most significant of the three, were written in the traditional style of critical realism.
Shmelev emigrated in 1922 and later published anti-Soviet stories and books filled with nostalgia for the prerevolutionary past, for example, The Lord’s Summer (1933).

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s the springtime… And the main character is an adolescent boy… And the blossoms of spring joined with the naivety of youth are capable to beget a real tempest of passions…

It was spring, the sixteenth of my life, but to me it was the first. Its predecessors seemed misty and blurred now. The blue, bright sky over the still leafless poplars in the garden, the sparkle of the dripping thaw, the low gurgle in the partly frozen ruts, the golden pools in the yard with their floundering ducks, the first young grass near the fence – the grass one never tires looking at, the earth, already black with the thaw and crisscross marked with the prints of chickens’ feet; the blinding glare of the windowpanes and the sunlight dancing on them, the merry Easter chimes, the red and blue toy balloons flopping one against the other in the wind and showing many red and blue trees and a number of flaming suns through their thin, elastic surfaces – all blended in a marvellous brightness full of sounds.

Ivan Shmelyov builds his novel as a symbolistic counterpoint to First Love by Ivan Turgenev.
An innocent and pretty servant girl is a young peasant orphan, she hopelessly falls in love with the boy and she presents him with her tenderness and his first innocuous kiss…

She bent down and I stretched up to her. She drew me towards her; I sensed the fragrance of her perfumes and met her lips. They were moist and hot.
“Oh, you will throttle me…” she whispered. “How heavenly to love my dear one… Now I may love you... since I know you love me, I mind nothing else. I am your first, am I not? Say the truth!”

But the boy has high romantic ideals… He read Don Quixote so, similar to that valiant knight-errant, he wants to have courtly love and he chooses a twenty-five-year-old midwife living next to him as a lady of his heart… Blinded by infatuation he can’t see all the vulgarity that surrounds her… And writing a lot of poetic and passionate messages he at last gets her consent for a secret tryst.

“Kiss me, kiss me better…” she whispered. “Wait a bit – I’ll take off my hat.” And she tore it off.
“You are my first… and we have met by a pure accident…” she whispered again brokenly. “I must tell you all about how unhappy I am. I have never known a real, pure love. Everyone thinks of me as of a… do you understand now? My pure, innocent boy! I have had a love affair! I wrote you what a sinful woman I am. But every woman also has her dreams of an ideal and fancies she sees a mystery in men. And now I have found one in your purity, in these innocent eyes…” she whispered passionately and fanning my face with her hot breath.

When the illusions of one’s youth break it is a very painful process but without losing one’s illusions one can’t grow up.