“That the heart cannot choose but love”
First Love“That the heart cannot choose but love” is the line Zinaïda Alexandrovna Zasyekin repeats after asking the narrator to read Pushkin’s “On the Hills of Georgia.” She treats its contradiction—love may be unwanted, yet cannot simply be refused—as poetry’s power to express a truth that ordinary reality does not make visible.
The Line and Its Meaning
The expression comes from the poem the narrator reads at Zinaïda Alexandrovna Zasyekin’s request. She repeats the line and explains that poetry tells of what is not, yet can make that imagined thing feel not only better than what is but more like the truth. Her emphasis falls on the words “cannot choose”: love is not presented as a deliberate decision, but as a feeling that may persist even against the will.
The Reading Scene
The request follows a moment of distress. The narrator is kneeling beside Zinaïda Alexandrovna Zasyekin, saddened by her words and wishing he could spare her grief; she asks him to sit and read. In this subdued exchange, the poem offers language for an emotional condition she has not directly explained. The line lets her speak about love through poetry while leaving the cause and object of her distress unstated.
What Follows
After falling silent, Zinaïda Alexandrovna Zasyekin abruptly rises and urges the narrator back inside, where Meidanov is with her mother. She explains that she had left him while he was reading his poem and that his feelings are hurt too; she says the narrator will understand someday and asks him not to be angry. Her admission that she cannot help it echoes the poem’s formulation of feeling as something beyond choice, though she does not explicitly identify her own situation with the line. The narrator, watching her, cannot attend to Meidanov’s subsequent reading. The expression thus remains suspended between a general claim about love and the private feelings the scene does not yet disclose.
