Scholars who read Turgenev’s drafts say that the word is femme. However, there’s some disagreement on who says the line. The scene itself was analyzed in a number of ways, so an overview demands a certain length.
Nobuaki Kaku and Pushkin House seminar
Interesting theory was offered by Japanese scholar Nobuaki Kaku. This professor from Osaka wrote a book on First Love based on 30 years of studying and rereading. A report written by the professor was read by his translator at the Turgenev seminar by Pushkin House (Institute of Russian Literature) (video on YouTube). Zinaida is asked to leave her mother (who is not her mother!)
The report and discussions took more than 4 hours, the following is a summary.
Prof. Kaku starts with the Chapter 21 and the scene described in the question. There are several questions with this scene. We don’t know what the line means, who says it (Piotr or Zinaida?), and how to explain their reactions.
Who says the line? Turgenev gives the precise details: the narrator is about 40 meters from the scene, the father’s back towards him. Volodya can’t catch a word, but it’s clear that his father tries to persuade the girl of something. He’s nervous because Zinaida would not consent:
I seem to see her face now—mournful, serious, lovely, and with an
inexpressible impress of devotion, grief, love, and a sort of
despair — I can find no other word for it. She uttered monosyllables,
not raising her eyes, simply smiling — submissively, but without
yielding.
After the father shows signs of impatience, Volodya hears the French phrase – probably because it was said louder. It seems that from the characters’ facial expressions and gestures we can infer that this loud phrase in imperative mood is said by the father. In Turgenev’s drafts, Zinaida replies, interrupts him and then sits up stretching out her arm – so it seems she reacts to the father’s speech.
Who (or what) should Zinaida leave? Kaku turns his attention to Zasyekins family. When we first see them, the relationships between the mother and daughter seem somewhat cold. Introducing Zinaida, her mother points at her with her elbow, which seems rude. Their manners, tastes, and even furniture in their rooms are very different.
Next, we have the following discussion between Vladimir’s parents:
I think you said you had asked the daughter too; some one was telling
me she was a very charming and cultivated girl.'
'Ah! Then she can't take after her mother.'
'Nor her father either,' rejoined my father. 'He was cultivated indeed, but a fool.'
Another piece of evidence we find in Chapter 18 where Zinaida’s brother (a son of the old princess Zasyekina) is introduced. Turgenev writes “родной ее сын” (her own son), and Prof. Kaku believes this word (own) indicates that the boy, but not Zinaida, is the old princess's blood relative. In the drafts we have “her own brother” and “her own son, Zinaida’s brother”. So Zinaida and her brother are half-siblings having the same father. We also learn that the girl loves her brother.
The report argues that Piotr’s (father’s) words imply Princess Zasyekina, Zinaida’s stepmother. Checking the drafts again, we find the omitted word – “femme”, i.e. “you must part with this woman”.
But why does Piotr want her to leave her stepmother? Why did Zinaida stretch out her hand, and why did Piotr hit it? To answer these questions we need to examine how the relationships between these two have developed.
How it evolved. Zinaida falls in love first. When she first meets the father, she’s stunned:
She, too, bowed to him, with some astonishment on her face, and
dropped her book. I saw how she looked after him.
During the dinner in the Chapter 6:
My father sat beside her during dinner, and entertained his neighbour
with the finished and serene courtesy peculiar to him. He glanced at
her from time to time, and she glanced at him, but so strangely,
almost with hostility
Zinaida behaves so strangely because she finds her love inappropriate and tries to overcome it. I have to omit some details, but the report argues that ultimately she confronts her feelings and has to accept them.
However, it’s the father who figures out her feelings and makes the first move.
In the Chapter 7, Volodya visits Zinaida’s house. She’s glad to see him and treats him very well:
Zinaïda continued to show me a preference, and kept me at her side.
The next morning, his father questions him about the event:
I described my evening at the Zasyekins' minutely to my father. Half
attentively, half carelessly, he listened to me, sitting on a garden
seat, drawing in the sand with his cane. Now and then he laughed, shot
bright, droll glances at me, and spurred me on with short questions
and assents.
The father realizes that his son served as a double: Zinaida’s attention was actually directed to him, Piotr. He cancels his horse ride and goes to Zasyekins instead. Then he went “for the town, and did not return home till evening”.
What did he do in town? Probably he was handling some errands of the old Zasyekina.
The old princess is portrayed as someone of a dubious character. She complains about money and asks assistance in her trials. The report says she employs her step-daughter’s beauty to get help in her own affairs and even has intentionally settled near Volodya’s family to do so.
Chapter 14 marks an important point in the relationships. Zinaida and Piotr go for a ride:
I saw my father and Zinaïda. They were riding side by side. My father
was saying something to her, bending right over to her, his hand
propped on the horses' neck, he was smiling. Zinaïda listened to him
in silence, her eyes severely cast down, and her lips tightly pressed
together.
What is he saying? Piotr saw the affair only as a summer diversion. Now he wants to break it off (maybe concerned with rumors). The girl is shocked:
Byelovzorov flew after them, his sabre clattering behind him. 'He's as
red as a crab,' I reflected, 'while she… why's she so pale? out
riding the whole morning, and pale?'
For the next week Zinaida is said to be ill. The report explains how she managed to gather her strength and to win Piotr back… Also, a loan to the old Zasyekina is mentioned: she probably knows about the affair and uses it in her interests. Zinaida is supposed to care about money issues too, because it’ll help raise her brother.
Explaining the scene. Now we can return to the encounter scene.
From the girl’s reactions – “not raising her eyes, simply smiling—submissively, but without yielding” - we assume that she understands that Piotr insists on something for her own good.
Piotr asks Zinaida to leave her stepmother because she’s a very bad influence. However, Zinaida can’t agree to that: she loves her brother and wants to be near him. Piotr keeps pressing, so she stretches her arm in protest saying she’s breaking up with him. The father, who made demands only out of love, is angered. Hits her arm with the whip. But understanding his emotions and care, Zinaida kisses the welt which demonstrates her love. Realizing what he’s done, Piotr throws away the whip and dashes into the house to her.
He discards the whip, what does that mean?
Where did you drop your whip?' I asked again. My father glanced
quickly at me. 'I didn't drop it,' he replied; 'I threw it away.' He
sank into thought, and dropped his head . . . and then, for the first,
and almost for the last time, I saw how much tenderness and pity his
stern features were capable of expressing.
That can’t symbolize break-up with Zinaida, because he immediately rushes towards her. The report reminds us about Piotr’s philosophy:
'Take for yourself what you can, and don't be ruled by others; to
belong to oneself — the whole savour of life lies in that,' he said to
me one day.
'Liberty,' he repeated; 'and do you know what can give a man liberty?'
'What?'
'Will, his own will, and it gives power, which is better than liberty. Know how to will, and you will be free, and will lead.'
With the whip, he discards his own principles. For handsome Piotr women were mere entertainment. His marriage was a marriage of convenience. Before Zinaida won him back, he had never loved a woman. And that’s why it is first love for all the three characters: the father, Volodya and Zinaida.
The narrator sees his father’s compassion. With time, he understands that Piotr and Zinaida put everything on the line and chose to live according to their passion. The narrator never marries being faithful to his first love. In the same way, Turgenev was tortured by his love for Pauline Viardot. He called his passion “the beast inside me”. Having written First Love, Turgenev decides to follow his heart and love only one woman. This book itself, the report surmises, is his gift of love to Pauline.
Seminar discussion. Participants didn’t fully agree with some parts of the report (e.g., Zinaida being a stepdaughter), and some stated that it leaves some mysteries even more mysterious.
It’s correct that Turgenev puts “femme” in his drafts, but the seminar participants think that Zinaida says it, asking Piotr to leave his wife. That said, the only argument given was intuitive understanding of native speakers. Turgenev scholar Natalia Generalova checked the French translation that Turgenev supervised personally, and it stated that the line is spoken by the father. Turgenev might have missed this, though.
Another difficulty was that it’s not clear how 21-year-old 19th century girl could leave her family?
I think there are some ways to deal with this. Maybe Piotr developed some plan we don’t know of? Or she must separate herself from “this woman” not literally? Or perhaps Piotr asks her to marry one of her admirers (Piotr was in a surprisingly good mood that morning. On that reading, he might be glad not only because he is to meet Zinaida. He thinks that he’s ready to sacrifice his love and thus solve the conundrum.)
It was suggested that such complexity of the analysis is not applicable to Turgenev - but there was also praise for the report’s psychological insights.
Overall, the comments were more positive on the second day of the seminar, after hearing all the arguments and having some time to think about the methods. I would add that writing down the theses made them more convincing for me than just receiving by ear.
It seems reasonable to examine approaches to other problems mentioned in the question: possible pregnancy and the blow of the whip.
Was the heroine pregnant?
Yes, she was.
Professor Aleksei Vdovin in his lecture Семейная драма Тургеневых: повесть «Первая любовь» (Turgenevs’ Family Drama: The Novella First Love) argues that we can be 90% sure that Zinaida was pregnant, given the money sent to Moscow and Meidanov’s phrase in the Chapter 22 “there were consequences”. At that time, an illegitimate baby would be sent to a foster house, which cost money.
Vdovin doesn’t mean that pregnancy was necessarily discussed during the encounter. He says that the father possibly learns about her pregnancy from the letter, gets tearful, and dies of a stroke. If that’s correct, then love leads to death here in the manner of the opera Tristan and Isolde, another work of 1860. Later we learn that Zinaida dies in childbirth - supposedly her second.
Why does the father raise the whip?
Turgenev and psychology. In another lecture, Vdovin explains that Turgenev’s fiction is characterized by ambiguities and understatement. (Because of the copyright policy of that site, I’ll be unable to give direct quotations.)
While Turgenev was a realist who examines the workings of his characters’ consciousness, he was unhappy with psychological analysis by Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. In his own works, he revealed human psyche only to an extent. For example, the last lines of A House of Gentlefolk:
What were they both thinking, what were they feeling? Who can know?
who can say? There are such moments in life, there are such
feelings... One can but point to them—and pass them by.
There is vagueness, a line that cannot be crossed. This effect is even more pronounced in his later Mysterious tales (often categorized as supernatural horror). Strange phenomena we encounter there can be interpreted in certain ways, but not fully explained.
Vdovin groups First Love and the whip scene with the aforementioned examples: the narrator tries to discern his father’s affair and why this love displays (as later researcher will put it) such a masochistic character, but leaves us only with hints and conjectures.
Political subtext? Initially, to many contemporaries First Love appeared immoral and scandalous. So, from moral considerations, Turgenev added to a French edition a different ending in which older Vladimir and his friends discuss his story, conditions of life in Russia, and shared culpability of the people.
Vdovin connects this to the discussions on the abolition of serfdom. Serfdom and ugliness of everyday life stain all relationships. That’s why love turns so slavish here.
However, this is guilt before the people, not shared guilt of the people. Vdovin doesn’t explain that clearer. In the Kaku's report discussion, this “French” ending was mentioned only in passing, as the participants didn’t seem to put much weight on it.
Vdovin goes as far as to say that the father uses the word “воля” (“will”) in the way peasants used it (meaning a state of freedom). This seems a stretch: Piotr is not a peasant, and it’s not clear why a state of freedom necessarily brings power.
Anyway, Vdovin insists that this allegorical interpretation is just one way to read the complex text. One layer of meaning under others.
Set-up and pay-off. Let’s examine Volodya’s love closer.
Volodya first sees her:
A few paces from me on the grass between the green raspberry bushes
stood a tall slender girl in a striped pink dress, with a white
kerchief on her head; four young men were close round her, and she was
slapping them by turns on the forehead with those small grey flowers
[…]The young men presented their foreheads so eagerly
His first time alone with her:
‘…you see I'm a great deal older than you, and so you ought always to
tell me the truth . . . and to do what I tell you,’ she added. […]
She tapped me lightly on the fingers. 'Hold your hands straight!'
At Zinaida’s party:
we began to play a game with a string. My God! what were my transports
when, for not paying attention, I got a sharp and vigorous slap on my
fingers from her, and how I tried afterwards to pretend that I was
absent-minded, and she teased me, and would not touch the hands I held
out to her!
Here he wants her to hit him, and she knows what he wants, and he knows that she knows that.
'Ah, you!' she said with a cruel smile. 'Come here.'
I went up to her. She put her hand on my head, and suddenly catching hold of my hair, began pulling it.
'It hurts me,' I said at last.
'Ah! does it? And do you suppose nothing hurts me?' she replied.
He suspects that his passion is biological in nature: “Zinaïda continued to play cat and mouse with me” and he’s like “a beetle tied by the leg” – but this knowledge doesn’t help him a bit. Love is the plan, the plan is death.
This young narrator doesn’t understand his experiences. He’s shocked by the violence he sees, forgetting that that’s what he himself craved for. Compare with one of the final passages in A Correspondence (1855):
[…] it turns out that real love is a feeling not at all resembling
that which we imagined it to be. […] It lays hold upon him, the dear
creature, as a hawk does upon a chicken; and it will bear him off
whithersoever it wishes, struggle and resist as he may.... In love
there is no equality, no so-called free union of souls and other ideal
things, invented at their leisure by German professors.... No; in love
one person is the slave, the other is the sovereign, and not without
cause do the poets prate of the chains imposed by love. Yes, love is a
chain, and the heaviest of chains at that. At all events, I have
arrived at that conviction, and have reached it by the path of
experience. I have purchased that conviction at the price of my life,
because I am dying a slave.
In the author’s life, love seemed to connect with trauma. At the seminar discussion, Natalia Generalova considered Turgenev a victim of Viardot’s love for him (leading to an awkward ménage à trois). And in his autobiographical notes, his first love is literally linked to physical trauma: “1833. New Year in Moscow (First love.) Pr[incess] Shakhovskaya. I break my arm.” Philosophically, Turgenev is often associated with pessimism. From Britannica:
…treatment of personal relations, particularly of love, demonstrates
Turgenev’s profound pessimism toward such matters
Also, Vladimir and his father see the world very differently. As we’ve seen, the father says the most important thing is will. Vladimir spends time daydreaming: "фантазия играла и носилась быстро вокруг одних и тех же представлений”, which literally means “fantasy was playing and swiftly hovering around the same representations”.
The world as will and representation
Turgenev was influenced by Arthur Schopenhauer.
For Schopenhauer, the world exists under two aspects: as it appears (that’s representation) and as it is in itself (what he calls “Will”, that is “a mindless, aimless, non-rational impulse at the foundation of our instinctual drives, and at the foundational being of everything”). One example from popular culture would be a nihilistic cop Rust Cohle from True Detective who believes that all men are marionettes and just sums of their urges. Note that the notion of the unconscious has been already popularized by Schopenhauer before Freud (and by Schelling before that).
As Christopher Janaway’s Schopenhauer: A Very Short Introduction states, romantic or erotic love for Schopenhauer is a delusion that masks an instinct of a species, i. e. need for procreation, life’s desire to generate more life. Desire leads to suffering in general, so no wonder that romantic love doesn’t tend to bring happiness either:
…requited love more frequently leads to unhappiness than to happiness.
This is because its demands often so severely clash with the personal
welfare of the lover concerned as to undermine it, since the demands
are incompatible with the lover’s other circumstances, and in
consequence destroy the plans of life built upon them.
According to a textbook История русской литературы XIX века (ed. by V. I. Korovin), Turgenev’s “love stories” are influenced by the pessimistic atmosphere of Schopenhauer's views.
It goes on to claim that all features of the depiction of love – violent passions, inequality of lovers, tragic endings – are explained by Schopenhauer's relevance:
The will forces each person to center on his "I" and satisfy his
insatiable desires; one of the most powerful desires in man is the
desire for sensual satisfaction dictated by sexual instinct, […]
therefore love based on the sensual attraction, or love-passion,
always leads to death, is always tragic. Schopenhauer also emphasized
that it is impossible to regulate the sensual element based on reason,
no matter how enlightened it may be: the all-powerful irrational Will,
both in history and in private life, inevitably breaks down all
rational structures. For the same reason, as an illusion of naive
rationalists, Schopenhauer also denied the idea of equality in love:
two sensual "I"s, the same instruments of the Universal Will, cannot
form a harmonious union, they are, by nature, rivals, and therefore
each of them seeks to dominate the other.
The textbook adds that, despite all that, Turgenev’s sympathies side with his open-hearted heroes, giving these stories an elegiac tone.
Both Kaku and Vdovin read First Love as a mystery story (or proto-mystery). It’s also possible to read it as horror.
First Love as Lovecraftian Horror. It was noted that Schopenhauer’s philosophy has some similar elements with Lovecraftian horror: the control of unknowable forces, ordinary life seen as a thin veil over bleak reality. The young protagonist has some vague preconceptions of love, but then he encounters a dark incomprehensible force that sends most of the characters to death. Vladimir himself plans to kill his mysterious rival with a knife.
On that reading, the father raises the whip because that’s an unconscious irrational force that takes control of him and which he, as we see from his reaction, can’t fully deal with
