Ryan Dempsey’s Reviews > First Love and Other Stories > Status Update

nahhh the horse that got injured at the battle of Borodino goes hard 🐴🇷🇺

First Love was interesting, even more so after I learned that Turgenev had weird relationships with women. I didn’t feel too invested though, Zinaida really annoyed me and Vladimir too, but he can be excused since I think it’s intentional that he is confused as a 16 year old. Can’t wait to drop this line on Kieran “beware a woman’s love, beware that happiness, that poison” 😂

Read Asya today. The writing was really nice, lots of descriptions of the Rhine at night and things like that. I was surprised because the writing felt very different to the first two stories. Creasing at this on the wiki:

Leo Tolstoy had a very unfavourable opinion of the novel, dismissing it as "rubbish" and "the weakest thing he [Turgenev] ever wrote”

Just read Mumu, feel very bad for serfs 😢

I’m half way thorough The Diary of a Superfluous Man, it’s quite good. It reminds me a bit of the Death of Ivan Illych but maybe less depressing… we’ll see. I liked the opening section “well, if one must die, one might as well die in the spring”, it reminded me of “spring is a time of plans and projects” or however that quote goes from Anna Karenina only this time the plan is death lmao very Russian