First Love: Free Audiobook and Listening Guide

First Love, credited to Ivan Turgenev trans. Constance Garnett, is available as a LibriVox volunteer audiobook. This guide identifies the recording, its source summary and its audio tracks.

About the work

The LibriVox catalogue summary, preserved with the recording, reads:

LibriVox recording of First Love, by Ivan Turgenev, translated by Constance Garnett. Read by Martin Geeson. The title of the novella is almost an adequate summary in itself. The "boy-meets-girl-then-loses-her" story is universal but not, I think, banal - despite a surprise ending which notoriously turns out to be very little of a surprise. First Love is given its originality and poignancy by Turgenev's mastery of the piercing turning-point (akin to Joyce's "epiphanies") that transforms the character's whole being, making a tragic outcome inevitable. Even the nature symbolism is rescued from triteness by lovely poetic similes - e.g. "but at that point my attention was arrested by the appearance of a speckled woodpecker who busily climbed up the slender stem of a birch-tree and peeped out uneasily from behind it, first to the right, then to the left, like a musician behind the bass-viol." (Summary by Martin Geeson)

Recording facts

• Recording title: First Love
• Author credits: Ivan Turgenev trans. Constance Garnett
• Language: English
• Original MP3 tracks: 5
• Listed recording duration: 3:03:20

Catalogue topics

• love
• romance
• novella

Track guide

1. 01 - Introductory, Chapters I - V — 38:11
2. 02 - Chapters VI - IX — 44:43
3. 03 - Chapter X - XIV — 29:49
4. 04 - Chapters XV - XVII — 33:35
5. 05 - Chapters XVIII - XXII — 37:03

Listen to this recording

Open the complete recording and player on Internet Archive. The player includes the full track list and available download formats.

Source and rights

This is a record from LibriVox's official Internet Archive collection, with a public-domain licence recorded in its metadata. LibriVox's policy includes its catalogue summaries as well as its recordings. Its public-domain assessment follows United States law; copyright status can differ elsewhere. The summary and track facts are reproduced and reformatted from that record. Dates attached to the archive upload are not treated as original book publication dates.