1860

1860 is the publication date given for First Love, a work whose central story unfolds in the summer of 1833 and is presented as a recollection written by the adult Vladimir Petrovitch. The gap between the date attached to the book and the time of the remembered events helps distinguish the work’s publication history from its layered narrative chronology.

Publication Date

The book is identified as published in 1860. That date belongs to the work’s publication record; it is not the date of the youthful events at its center, which Vladimir Petrovitch places in the summer of 1833.

The Framing Present

The narrative begins after a party has broken up, when only the host, Sergei Nikolaevitch, and Vladimir Petrovitch remain. Asked to tell the story of his first love, Vladimir declines to narrate it aloud, explaining that he would rather write down what he remembers. His friends meet again a fortnight later, and he reads the manuscript he has prepared. This frame establishes the story as an act of recollection rather than a continuous account from the time of the events.

The Earlier Time of the Story

Within that manuscript, Vladimir says he was sixteen in the summer of 1833. He recalls living with his parents in a country house near Moscow while preparing, half-heartedly, for university. His account of that summer includes his first encounter with Zinaïda Alexandrovna Zasyekin and the intense, uncertain feelings of adolescence. The specific year anchors these experiences in a past distinct from the later occasion on which he writes and reads about them.

Retrospective Meaning

The adult narrator’s perspective becomes especially clear at the close. After learning that Zinaïda has died in childbirth, Vladimir looks back on the hopes and emotional intensity of youth, reflecting on how quickly its days pass and how its promise can exceed what later life fulfills. He also recalls attending the painful death of an impoverished old woman and feeling moved to pray for Zinaïda, his father, and himself. The ending gives the remembered past a meaning unavailable to the sixteen-year-old: 1833 is not only the setting of first love but a period reconsidered through loss, mortality, and the passage of time.