4 ideas
Sixteen-year-old Vladimir falls for Zinaida, the princess's twenty-one-year-old daughter, who toys with a circle of suitors at the neighbouring dacha. The father dies of a stroke soon after, and Zinaida dies in childbirth four years later, before the grown Vladimir gets round to visiting her.
The novella separates two kinds of love: Zinaida's teasing power over her suitors, which she enjoys because she is in control, and the love she gives the one man who masters her, which she accepts even when it humiliates her. She tells Vladimir she could never love anyone she has to look down on, only someone who could break her. Real passion, in this account, begins where the lover gives up control.
The boy sees every clue, like the father's visits, the gossip and Zinaida's sudden sadness, but cannot read them, because he assumes he is the main character in his own love story. His naivety works as a filter that hides the adult story going on right beside him. The truth comes all at once, and it changes the meaning of everything he has already lived through.
Because the story is told by a middle-aged man looking back, the boy's heartbreak is filtered through the older narrator's view that the best part of youth was the feeling that anything was possible, not anything that actually happened. The narrator ends up grieving the lost intensity of feeling more than he grieves Zinaida. Memory turns a painful episode into something he values, and even envies.