First Love - Hardcover

Roshchin, Mikhail

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 071452932X ISBN 13: 9780714529325

Publisher: Marion Boyars, 1991

Synopsis

After World War II, a Russian boy returns to Moscow from a summer on a collective farm, and falls in love with one of the teachers at his school

About this title

Reviews

This straightforward account of innocent love between a 16-year-old student and a young fifth-grade teacher draws on Roshkin's reflections of life in post-WW II Moscow. The unnamed narrator, a high school senior, is drawn to vulnerable Anna Nikolayevna (nicknamed Blondie by his classmates), whose past is similar to his own: his father never returned from WW II and was listed as missing in action, while Anna's fiance was killed during the war's last days. Assigned as Pioneer troop leader for Anna's class, he is thrown in constant contact with her; their attraction is immediate, though their affair is limited mainly to stolen kisses and impassioned conversations. They are quickly found out, with consequences much more severe for Anna than for her "paramour." Roshkin evokes the gleeful excitability of adolescents, convincingly expresses his narrator's giddiness and heartbreak, and intimately describes the claustrophobic, small-town atmosphere of the Soviet capitol 40 years ago, with its beer-halls and bathhouses.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A slender tale of an ``impossible'' first love predictably doomed and moving, yet refreshingly unsentimental, by Russian playwright Roshchin. Set in the grim postwar years in Moscow, where fuel and clothing are in short supply, high-school senior Ivan falls in love with the pretty and young fifth-grade teacher, Anna. Anna, like many Russian women, lost her fianc‚ during the war, and Ivan's father is missing, presumed killed, a situation that is politically threatening to his family--those missing were thought to be defectors. This sense of loss, of threat, of hopelessness intensifies an already fraught situation. It is a love affair fueled by sudden unsuspected glimpses, surprise meetings, handholdings, and eventually a kiss in an isolated park. Ivan neglects his friends and his work in his obsession with Anna, and she, too, though more circumspect, is as much in love. Then, however, the school finds out what's going on, and Anna is fired. Torn between guilt for what he's done and the growing realization that he should let her be free, Ivan comes to call on New Year's Eve--but Anna, all dressed up, is different: ``I couldn't kiss her in the way I used to. Not in this room, in this house, I didn't dare. Not a woman like that. In a dress like that.'' He is ready then for Darya, his own age, whom he meets on a family trip to the country to trade ``city rags for potatoes, butter, or meat.'' Wonderfully controlled writing that vividly evokes all the turmoil of first love, as well as the way it was at school and home in a particular time and place. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Marion Boyars
• Publication date: 1991
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 071452932X
• ISBN 13: 9780714529325
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 139