Further, Turgenev, like Thackery in “Vanity Fair,” explores with an unblinking scrutiny the importance of class and wealth and ambition, and its hold over humans. His detail-laden realism and attention to social class are out of literary favor moreover, his work is deemed too spare emotionally by some modern critics. Turgenev isn’t given his due in today’s literary circles. Who has better captured that heady universal experience–and the dismay and despair when it doesn’t work out–than the great Russian short story writer Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev, in his elegant novella, “First Love”? The iPod-Facebook generation rides the same emotional roller-coaster as did their mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers, when it comes to l’amour. Trust me, with two sons in college, and a third in high school, I can testify that this primal experience hasn’t changed. That crazy, intoxicating feeling of being infatuated by another–totally lost, drawn magnetically to the object of your desire–for the first time.
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