First Love - Turgenev
Turgenev captures the fever-dream of first love with breathtaking clarity: its ecstasies, longings, and despair. Yet beneath its romance lies an elegy for lost innocence, revealing adulthood and love to be more tragic and complex than idealization allows.
The Death of Ivan Ilyich and other stories - Tolstoy
In this collection Tolstoy explores the fading light of romantic idealism, the violent impulses of suppressed desire, and the terminal abyss where social triviality finally meets its end.