„Erste Liebe“ und vierfacher Schriftsinn: Isaak Babel’ und Ivan Turgenev research-article Urs Heftrich Wiener Slavistisches Jahrbuch. Neue Folge, Jahrgang 7 (2019), Ausgabe 1, Seite 91 - 105 “First Love” and the Four Senses of Scripture: Isaac Babel and Ivan Turgenev. - Among the Russian writers who influenced Isaac Babel, Ivan Turgenev stands out in two particular ways. Firstly, he is emphatically mentioned in one of Babel's earliest texts, “Childhood. At Grandmother's” from 1915. In this autobiographical piece of prose, Turgenev's story “First Love” from 1860 plays a pivotal role by prompting an erotic initiation in the juvenile narrator's consciousness. Secondly, in his prose collection “The Story of My Dovecot” from 1925, Babel paid tribute to Turgenev by explicitly naming the second story of this cycle after Turgenev's novella. In my paper, I give a close comparative reading of both texts based on the medieval hermeneutics of the four senses of scripture (quatuor sensus scripturae) that has recently been revived by the Heidelberg scholar Horst-Jürgen Gerigk.