The Torrents of Spring

Summary

The Torrents of Spring, published in 1872, is a short novel by Ivan Turgenev about first love and its betrayal. This text is Constance Garnett's translation of 1897; the same Gutenberg volume also contains Turgenev's story First Love. The story opens with Dmitri Pavlovitch Sanin, now fifty-two, lonely and weary of life, finding a small garnet cross among his papers, which brings back the events of thirty years before. In 1840, at twenty-two, Sanin is travelling home to Russia from Italy and stops in Frankfurt. In an Italian confectioner's shop he helps revive a boy, Emil, who has fainted, and meets his sister, the beautiful Gemma Roselli, and their mother. Sanin delays his journey and spends happy days with the family. Gemma is engaged to a correct, dull German shopkeeper, Herr Klüber. On an outing, a young German officer insults Gemma, Klüber does nothing, and Sanin challenges the officer, Baron von Dönhof, to a duel; Sanin fires and misses, and the baron fires into the air. Gemma breaks her engagement and she and Sanin declare their love. To support a marriage, Sanin needs money, and he meets by chance an old schoolfellow, the fat, idle Ippolit Polozov, whose rich wife, Maria Nikolaevna, might buy his Russian estate. He goes to Wiesbaden to arrange the sale. There Maria Nikolaevna, a clever and wilful woman, sets out to captivate him, and she succeeds; Sanin abandons Gemma and follows Maria as one of her servile admirers until she tires of him. Back in the present, the older Sanin goes to Frankfurt to find out what became of Gemma. He learns that she married and lives in New York. He writes to her, and she answers kindly, telling of her happy life and her children and sending a photograph of her daughter; she forgives him. Sanin sends the daughter the garnet cross set in a necklace, and it is said he is planning to go to America. The book is a delicate study of youth, passion and lifelong regret.

Top Lessons

• First love

  Turgenev describes young love as a sudden revolution in life.

• Weakness of will

  Sanin is generous and brave in a duel but cannot resist Maria's manipulation.

• Regret and forgiveness

  The frame shows a man looking back on what he lost.

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