Tessa Hadley on Ivan Turgenev’s First Love

Tessa Hadley (winner of a 2016 Windham Campbell Prize for Fiction) joins Michael Kelleher for the final episode of this winter mini-season to talk about Ivan Turgenev’s First Love, translated by Isaiah Berlin.

For a full episode transcript, click here.

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Reading list: 

First Love by Ivan Turgenev, tr. by Isaiah Berlin • The Odyssey by Homer • “A Nest of Gentlefolk” by Ivan Turgenev • Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

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From the episode:

Tessa Hadley: I had a feeling of such freshness when I was reading this. I thought, this is somebody handling a form in Russian which is so new, actually, that he can do anything with it. And the sense of daring, as you say, in that crucial final encounter between the father and Zinaida—What happens? What’s going on? What does he even say to her? It’s mysterious and in French and enigmatic and uninterpreted for us!

And I looked online to see whether anybody knows better. And no, I don’t think they do.

The sense something incredibly open ended and fresh and finding out what can be done with this prose fiction form that is hyper realist and yet at the same time I feel as if we’re, being told something mythic and fundamental and primal here in this story.

Michael Kelleher: This seems like it’s a version of the banquet scene from The Odyssey, doesn’t it? The father is Odysseus and the son is Telemachus and Zinaida is Penelope,and you’ve got all the suitors, and the father, like, finally kind of swoops in seemingly out of nowhere and destroys everybody’s life. [laughs.]

TH: And there are probably other parallels also in the Greek stories, the mythic family combination: father, son, the desirable woman—

MK: Oedipal.

TH: Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. You’d better tell the story, Mike, so people know what we’re talking about.