To B. V. Annenkov ...the guests have already left.The clock struck half-past twelve.Only the master, Sergey Nikolaevich and Vladimir Petrovich, were still in the house. The master rang the bell and ordered to clean up the leftovers from dinner. "Then it's settled," he murmured, sinking deeper into the armchair and lighting up his cigar. "Each of us has to tell the story of our first love. You tell it first, Sergey Nikolaevich." Sergei Nikolayevich, a round, fat little man with full cheeks and fair hair, first glanced at his master, then raised his eyes to the ceiling.

"I never had a first love," he concluded, "I started straight from the second." "How is this going?" "Very prosaic. I was eighteen when I first courted a very lovely young lady, and I courted her in the same way I later courted any other woman, as if I had been a seasoned lover. To tell the truth." Yes, I fell in love with my nanny when I was six years old, it was my first love, dare I say my last, but it was a long time ago - I don't remember the details of our relationship, Even if I did, who would be interested in that?" "Then what is to be done?" began the host, "my first love was not very interesting either: I had never loved anyone before I met my present wife, Anna Ivanovna—our love was very Smooth: The marriage was proposed by the fathers of both parties. We fell in love quickly and got married without any delay. My love story can be finished in a few words. Gentlemen, to be honest, I published this talk about first love You are expected to answer the question, you are not old men, but you are not young bachelors either; perhaps you can tell us something interesting, Vladimir Petrovich?"

"My first love was really not ordinary," said Vladimir Petrovich, a man of about forty, with frost on his black hair, hesitantly. "Ah!" said the master and Sergey Nikolaevich in unison. "That's better... tell me, please." "Well . . . I don't want to tell it though, because I'm not a good storyteller, and I'd tell it dry, and terse, or long, cumbersome, and unnatural. If you will allow me, I will write in my notebook all that I can remember, and read it to you. " The friends disagreed at first, but Vladimir Petrovich persisted.They were together again two weeks later, and Vladimir Petrovich kept his promise.

Here is the story he wrote in his notebook: one I was sixteen at the time.It happened in the summer of 1833. I live with my parents in Moscow.They rented a villa opposite the Neskucciny Park near the Karouj Gate.I'm preparing to take the university entrance exam, but I don't work very hard, and I still live my life leisurely. Nobody cares about me.I do what I want, especially after my last French governess left, he was always sad at the thought that he should rush into Russia like a bomb, and he always had a look on his face. Lying on the bed with a look of resentment.My father was kind to me but unconcerned; my mother was almost indifferent to me, although I was the only child of hers, and she was swallowed up by so many other worries.My father was very young, and very personable and very handsome, and married my mother only for financial gain; she was ten years his senior.My mother lived a miserable life: she was often agitated, jealous, angry - but only in the absence of her father, she was afraid of him, he was strict, cold, unapproachable... I have never seen more calm than him , more confident and bossy person.

I will never forget the first few weeks I spent at the villa.The weather was excellent; we moved from the city on the 9th of May, the day of Saint Nicholas. I often take walks—sometimes in the garden of our dacha, sometimes in Neskucciny Park, sometimes in the countryside; It opens; more is reciting poems, I have learned many poems by heart; blood is churning in my body, my heart is stuffy—— It's suffocatingly sweet, it's ridiculous; I'm always expecting, and seeming dreading, amazed at everything, and ready for it; my imagination runs wild, and my imagination runs around some of the same images Like the swifts circling the belfry at dawn; I have often been lost in thought, troubled, and even wept; The joyful mood of my youth, which had begun to boil, broke through the ground like grass in spring.

I have a horse.I often saddled him myself, and rode off to some distant place alone, and galloped, thinking I was a jousting knight (how merrily the wind howled in my ears!), or looking up at the sky. , taking the bright sunshine and blue sky into the open heart. I remember that the image of a woman, and the phantasy of a woman's love, hardly ever entered my mind in a definite pattern.But a vague, shy premonition of the novel, the indescribably sweet femininity lurked in everything I thought and felt. This presentiment, this anticipation pervaded me; I breathed it, let it churn in my veins, in every drop of my blood... It was destined to come true soon.

Our villa was a columned wooden house of some noble landowner, with low lodges on either side.The small wing on the left is a small factory for making cheap wallpaper paste. I have visited there more than once.A dozen thin, disheveled boys in oil-stained long coats and withered faces jumped from time to time to the wooden levers to press the rectangular plates of a printing press, and in this way, they printed with the weight of their thin bodies. Produce various patterns on the pasted wallpaper.The small wing on the right is vacant and ready to be rented out.One day—about three weeks after May 9th—the shutters of the little wing were suddenly thrown open, and women's faces appeared in the windows—a family moved in.I remember that at lunch, my mother asked the housekeeper what kind of person our new neighbor was, and when she heard that it was a Duchess Zasekin, she began to whisper, not without some respect: "Ah! Duchess... ..." Then he added: "Probably a poor lady."

"They came in three rented carriages," said the butler as he respectfully served the dishes, "they didn't bring their own carriages, and the furniture is very simple." "Yes," replied the mother, "but it would be better to have a neighbor." Her father gave her a cold look, and she fell silent. It is true that Princess Zasekina could not have been a rich woman, for the little annexe she rented was so shabby, small and squat that no one with any money would want to live in it.But I ignored these words at the time and didn't care.The title of Duke doesn't matter to me, because I read Schiller's "The Robber" not long ago.