OXFORD WORLD'S CLASSICS


ALEXANDER PUSHKIN


Eugene Onegin


A Novel in Verse


Translated with an Introduction and Notes by JAMES E. FALEN


James E.Falen 1990, 1995


ISBN-13: 978-0-19-283899-5


CONTENTS


Introduction

vii


Note on the Translation

xxv


Select Bibliography

xxxi


A Chronology of Alexander Pushkin

xxxiii


EUGENE ONEGIN 1


Appendix: Excerpts from Onegin's Journey

213


Explanatory Notes

229


INTRODUCTION


Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837) is the poet and writer whom Russians regard as both the source and the summit of their literature. Not only is he revered, like Shakespeare in the English tradition or Goethe in the German, as the supreme national poet, but he has become a kind of cultural myth, an iconic figure around whom a veritable cult of idolatry has been fashioned. This exalted status that Pushkin has been accorded in his own land has been something of a disservice to the living reality of his works, and it contrasts oddly with the more modest reputation that Pushkin has secured abroad. To many non-native readers of Russian literature the panegyrics of his compatriots seem excessive, and indeed, in their eyes, Pushkin has been somewhat overshadowed by the great Russian writers who came after him. They do not comprehend why these writers themselves generally grant him the first and highest place in their pantheon of artistic geniuses. For those who do not read Pushkin in his own language, the situation remains perplexing and the questions persist: just who is he and why, almost without exception, do the most perceptive of his compatriots regard him as one of the world's greatest artists?


Within the Russian tradition the scope of Pushkin's achievement is essentially clear and well established. He is unarguably a figure of protean dimensions, the author in his own right of a formidable and enduring body of work and at the same time the seminal writer whose example has nourished, enriched, and in large part directed all subsequent literature in the language. He came of age at a historical moment when the Russian literary language, after a century or so of imitation of foreign models, had been roughly shaped and readied for the hand of an original genius. Pushkin was to fulfil that role.


He began his career in an era when both the writers and the readers of literature belonged almost exclusively to the limited


milieu of aristocratic society and at a time when poetry rather than prose was the dominant mode for high literature. Well read in both the ancient classics and in Western European literature, especially French literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Pushkin was the most dazzlingly talented member of a younger generation of writers who were attempting, under the banner of romanticism, to reform and invigorate the language and the styles of poetry. If Pushkin's early work (he began composing as a schoolboy prodigy) was facile and conventional, consisting mainly of light verse suitable for the literary salons of the day (frothy Epicurean pieces, witty epigrams, album verse), it already displayed an impressive plasticity of language that was new in Russian literature; and quite soon he exhibited a mastery of virtually all the poetic genres and styles known to the writers of his era. The eventual range of his creativity was enormous, embracing not only all the prevailing forms of lyric verse (which he reshaped into his own freer medium of expression), but including brilliant examples of narrative verse as well. He also achieved stunning success in poetry based on the idioms and themes of Russian folklore, and he experimented fascinatingly in the field of verse drama, both on a large Shakespearian scale and in intensely concentrated, minimalist studies of human passions. He is, in sum, a poet of astonishing versatility. Possessed of a uniquely supple linguistic instrument, he is the master of an apparently effortless naturalness, a seamless blend of appropriate sound, sense, and feeling. During the last decade of his life, when literary activity was being democratized and commercialized, and when a larger, more broadly based readership was emerging, Pushkin turned increasingly to prose, which was fast outdistancing poetry in popularity, though it had yet to achieve the same high level of excellence attained by Russian verse. Pushkin's prose fiction, which is characterized by an unusual terseness and precision of expression, includes several masterpieces in the short-story form, one completed historical novel (as well as the beginnings of several others), and a number of unfinished drafts of a


contemporary social novel. He also made significant contributions to Russian culture as a journalist, as a literary critic and editor, as an accomplished letter-writer, and as a gifted, if amateur, historian. He became in effect Russia's first complete man of letters.


All his creative life Pushkin suffered from the indignities and impositions of an autocratic state: exile in his youth, the frustrations of police surveillance and a grossly interfering censorship in his later years, the constant and onerous obligations of government service, and the continuing humiliation of having to rely on imperial favour. In an effort to secure his independence from such state control over his affairs he gave his political allegiance to a kind of 'aristocratic party', seeing in the old Russian landed gentry, the class to which he himself was born, the only viable check on the arbitrary power of the autocracy. This aligned him as well, in a literary sense, with the notion, prevalent among the educated members of 'lite' society, that the writer's appropriate role was that of the gentleman littrateur, a view of the artist that probably hindered Pushkin in his effort, during the last decade of his life, to transform himself into a truly free and independent professional writer. He never succeeded, finally, in escaping from either the constraints of court pressure or his own persistent allegiance to a fading aristocratic culture. His further development as an artist was abruptly terminated by his death in a duel at the age of 38.


In both his poetry and his prose Pushkin was a profound innovator. He brought to its successful conclusion the revolt against the tenets of French neoclassicism, which, with its rigid divisions and classifications of genres, had dominated the literature of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Life, in Pushkin's view, was wilder and more various than these conventions would allow, and, although he always retained a rather classical respect for balance and proportion in art, he introduced into his native literature a new sense of artistic freedom. His formal experiments encouraged a vigorous


inventiveness in the writers who followed him, and his modernization of the diction and syntax of literary texts with infusions of living contemporary speech pointed the way to a perennial renewal of the literary language. In the area of literary subject-matter as well his influence was far-reaching: he introduced a host of suggestive themes that later writers would explore more fully, and he greatly enlarged the cast of characters in serious literature. No topic or person lay beyond the reach of his interest; his poetry and prose are filled with life's essential concerns and activitieswith love, work, art, history, politics, and nature; with all the mundane trivia of everyday existence and with the more rarefied realm of dreams and thoughts. He virtually created and shaped modern Russian literature and in countless ways determined the course it would follow after him.


Those who seek labels have made numerous attempts to define and categorize this astonishing writer. He has been called variously a romantic and a realist, the poet of freedom and the bard of Russia's imperium; he has been dubbed in political terms a radical, a liberal, and a conservative, a revolutionary critic of the Czarist regime and its loyal defender. Persuasive arguments can and have been made in support of each of these characterizations, but a poet of genius always in the end evades our efforts to tame and contain him.


This brief assessment of Pushkin's place in Russian literature, although it provides a reasonably accurate recital of established critical views, ignores certain anomalies and paradoxes that are part of the Pushkin story. Rather curiously, for example, all the prolific and prodigious achievement of this 'father of Russian literature' was the work of a man whose chief public mask in his own day was that of a gadfly and wastrel. Disciplined in his art, he was often irresponsible and profligate in his social behaviour. There was about him, as the reminiscences of contemporaries observe, something of the eternal schoolboy and prankster, a bit of the renegade always at odds with the respectable adult world. For several years he played the roles of dandy or bohemian; he loved to shock with outlandish dress or


outrageous behaviour, and he enjoyed flirting recklessly with the dangers of a dissolute and dissident life. Upon leaving school he put on, briefly, the mask of political rebel and quite consciously provoked, with several courageous poems of liberal sentiment, the displeasure of the emperor, for which he was punished with removal from the centres of Russian culture and power. Even then, in banishment, he courted further punitive action from the authorities by circulating verse of blasphemous, if humorous, content.


Exile seems to have been a defining experience of Pushkin's young manhood. He deeply resented his enforced absence from the social scene, yet he gained through his distance from the centre of events a clearer vision of the society he craved to rejoin. When he was permitted, eventually, to reside once again in St Petersburg and Moscow, he quickly set about to re-establish his nonconformist credentials, indulging once more in a dissipated style of life, although it now seemed less appropriate to his advancing years. Even after his marriage (at almost 32), when he had ostensibly settled down, he continued to provoke outrage, antagonism, and even ridicule with his endless literary feuds, his increasingly touchy pride in his ancient lineage, and his utter contempt for the circles of the court. Yet another cause for the contradictory impulses of his spirit was the black African strain in his ancestry, a heritage that he saw as both a source of uniqueness and a mark of his alienation from the society whose acceptance he simultaneously rejected and craved. At times he revelled in his 'African strangeness' and spoke of his 'moorish' features as the emblem of an elemental and primordial side of his identity, while on other occasions he lamented the racial characteristics that set him apart from those around him. In any case, whatever his ambivalences, it seems clear that Pushkin relished as well as resented his estrangement from society; and certainly his marginal position in it helped him to see all the triviality and hypocrisy of the monde. If he continued to live by its codes, he also studied it keenly as an artist and depicted it matchlessly in his work.


Even by the standards of his time and circle Pushkin's appetite for dissipation was large. He was an inveterate gambler and a famous seducer of women, behaviour that he was reluctant to relinquish, not merely out of a mindless adoption of available social roles, but because of the special powers that he attributed to chance and sensuality in his creative life. His youthful anacreontic verse with its playful eroticism, several narrative poems of refined ribaldry, and his more mature love poetry all testify to a deeply sensual nature; and his passion for gambling figures prominently in some of his finest prose works. He was always fascinated, on behalf of his art, in the play of the fortuitous, in the luck of the draw, in the creative possibilities of life's contingencies. He was willing as man and artist to trust in chance, to submit to it as the mechanism that, while it might condemn him to an outwardly undefined and precarious existence, would also assure his inner artistic freedom and his poetic destiny. Chance, in Pushkin's view, was the servant of the greater thing that he called fate, and his reverence for fate as the ultimate shaper of human destinies haunts his work at almost every stage of his career. Essentially buoyant and optimistic in his youth, perceiving fate as the artist's benign and essential guide, he would never distrust it, not even when later in his life it took on an ominous and threatening aspect. Opposition to the tyranny of human institutions was an essential element in Pushkin's conception of the free artist, but resistance to fate, he believed, was a perilous course of action for any individual; for himself he was convinced it was the surest way to destruction as a poet. These elements of Pushkin's characterhis sensuality, his courting of chance, and his trust in fateare essential clues to his artistic nature and to his conception of creativity. He is an artist for whom personality means little, for whom an ordinary human nature and a mundane existence are the very attributes and signs of the poet who is fully engaged with life and at the same time receptive to the designs of Providence.


The poet for Pushkin is a mysterious being: inspired to


exalted utterance by strange gods, yet remaining at an everyday level the most insignificant of humans, a misfit and outcast. Far from being in propria persona a poetic demi-urge, the poet is the instrument and voice of powers beyond the self. This is a conception of the poet that combines elements of both a romantic and an anti-romantic sensibility. It yokes together two disparate images, that of the divinely inspired seer and that of the human misfit. It is a vision, of course, with ancient roots and, in its specifically Russian variant, with links to the native tradition of the 'jurodivy', the wandering 'holy fool' of popular veneration. For Pushkin such an image of the poet provides a justification for asserting at once an enormous arrogance for his art and a fundamental humility toward his gift. And perhaps it helps to explain the peculiar instability and elusiveness of Pushkin's artistic personality, the odd sense his reader has that the author is both palpably present in his work and yet nowhere to be found. We seldom know directly what this author thinks, even about seemingly obvious things, and we are made uneasy by this lack of a familiar and reassuring human intelligence. The point is not that Pushkin leaves a great deal to the reader's creativity and perception, though he does, but rather that his genius is to an unusual extent of a peculiarly negative kind. He is that rare artist who possesses to an extreme degree a kind of splendid receptivity, an ability to absorb and embody the very energy of his surroundings, to take into himself with an amazing sympathy all the shapes and colours of the life that he sees and hears and responds to. He may or he may not examine intellectually the life that he describes, he may or he may not admire it or approve of it, but what he must do is reveal it, recreate it in its vivacity, display his sheer perception of it, refraining from an easy human judgement.


Pushkin is something of an artistic chameleon, and this is why it is so difficult to define him or to fix on a clear and consistent image of his authorial person and stance. He seems almost to lack a coherent artistic persona; like a chameleon, he seems capable of changing his colours and of adapting to almost


any milieu. He is enormously alive to the ephemera of experience, fascinated by everything and everyone: the sublime and the ridiculous; the sacred and the profane; all the roles that people play and every style of behaviour; he is interested equally in the talented and the mediocre, in the articulate and the dumb; in Czars, peasants, soldiers, fops, rakes, society women, vulnerable girls, rascals, villains, and almost anyone else. He wants, if only fleetingly, to capture everything, to absorb it all in his appetite for lifeeven at the risk of losing himself, or perhaps out of the need to lose himself. And the vision that emerges from this fleeting race through experience is no less perceptive and suggestive than many more lengthy examinations of life. Pushkin's manner of describing phenomena is fleeting and abrupt because he is never sated, never content, never willing to stay in one place; he has to rush on to the next person or thing that catches his eye. His omnivorous curiosity lends a kind of 'lightness' as well as universality to Pushkin's worka lightness of touch, weight, and illumination. The quality is legendary in descriptions of Pushkin's art, but it can be mistaken for superficiality. Our elusive author appears to take few things seriously (not excluding himself) and often poses as a mere 'entertainer'. Entertaining he certainly is, but if we, as readers, are taken in by his ruse and allow ourselves to become inattentive, we are in danger of missing the subtle and hidden aspect of his art.


The effect of lightness, the exceptional clarity that so famously accompanies Pushkin's breadth of interests, goes hand in hand with his vaunted terseness and simplicity, his evident and easy accessibility. But his terseness can be more apparent than real, for his art has the capacity to suggest much in a few spare and simple observations, and his simplicity can be deceptive, screening from the casual reader an art of great sophistication and delicacy. To the foreign reader, especially, Pushkin's qualities of clarity and simplicity can be an impediment to the appreciation of his work; and if the reader has first come to Russian literature through the tormented and profound explorations of


Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, Pushkin's view of the passing scene, filled with a bracing humour as well as grief, may produce a rather strange impression; he is not at all what such a reader has come to expect of a Russian writer. Unlike those two later masters, Pushkin is neither philosopher nor religious thinker, neither didactic moralist nor analytical psychologist. He is both more universal in his sympathies and more modest in his artistic person.


Perhaps, in his final years, this poet of light could not fully adjust to the passing of his youth and the waning of youth's poetic energy. If he would not become a poet of the dark, perhaps he did at the last become the seer of an 'unbearable lightness of being'. In several of his later poems some spectral beast of retribution seems to haunt the poet's mind, along with premonitions of, and even yearnings for, an early death. But the ending in human life is always the same, whereas in great art, as in the plenitude of Pushkin's work, it can at least seem otherwise. Pushkin retained to the last his humility before Providence and he went to his duel and his death completely in character. We cannot, finally, answer the question: who is Pushkin? We can only say with some degree of certainty what he is: Russia's most utter artist, its closest thing to the pure poet incarnate, that being who sacrifices all the other possibilities of his human existence to the expression, through language, of life's fascinating variety. The aim of poetry, Pushkin asserted, is poetry itself; the poet emerges from the creative spirit to show us the world and speak of things beyond our normal ken; he is the voice of time's fleeting and intricate fullness.


Central to any consideration of Pushkin's art is his 'novel in verse', Eugene Onegin, a work unique in Russian literature and one with few if any parallels outside it. Although it occupies in some respects an isolated and idiosyncratic place in Pushkin's uvre, it is also his most deeply characteristic creation. It was his own favourite among his works and may well be his greatest single contribution to world literature. Despite its considerable


literary sophistication and complexity and the fact of its having been written in verse, it may be more accessible to the appreciation of non-Russian readers than most of Pushkin's other work. Almost all of us, even those who are resistant to poetry (especially in translation!), are readers of novels; and Pushkin's long poem, with its stanzas that mimic paragraphs and its verse that seems as natural as familiar prose, subtly entices us by its successful masquerade as a novel. The writer spent some eight years writing it (far longer than he devoted to any other work), and it thus accompanied him through an extended and crucial period of his life. It not only reflects the vital changes that were taking place in Pushkin himself during those years, but it also represents its author's response to a transformation in the general literary climate. By the late 1820s the rage was all for new works in prose rather than poetry, and although Russian literature had as yet produced few prose works of any lasting distinction, writers were eager to answer the demands of the time. Pushkin was among the first of the established authors to respond to the need for a serious prose literature. This change in public taste and Pushkin's effort to respond to it took place in the very years when the writer was composing Eugene Onegin. Begun when Pushkin was only 24, still ebullient in his poetic personality and still partially under the sway of his fascination with Byron, it was completed in his thirty-second year, when he was already the author of several prose works of a strongly anti-romantic cast. Onegin, as the work's hybrid nature suggests, belongs to a transitional phase in Pushkin's career and constitutes a kind of bridge linking two literary eras. It shows us its author, at the central period of his life, in the very act of crossing that bridge, attempting to transform himself from romantic poet into a novelist who would paint on a large canvas an expansive picture of social reality. Paradoxically Eugene Onegin, although written in verse, is the earliest of Pushkin's works to contain a major component of the 'prosaic' in motivation and spirit. This rather complex set of personal and historical factors informs this first great


Russian novel (and arguably the most influential) in a number of crucial ways and provides the ground for its unique flavour and a strangeness that both delights and perplexes the reader. The work is many things: a stylistic tour de force, an examination of human character and of the power in human affairs of cultural phenomena (especially social and artistic conventions), an investigation of the interconnections between literature and life, an autobiography, and an exploration of the creative process itself. It is also, of course, and above all else, incomparable poetry. Highly structured in its use of an unvarying stanzaic form and in its classically balanced design, the work nevertheless conveys an atmosphere of free-flowing spontaneity. Its verse, while observing elegantly the requirements of metre and rhyme, is able at the same time to achieve the rhythm and feel of the most natural and ordinary colloquial speech. Like a discursive prose work, the novel exhibits a wealth of genial, meandering talk and an apparently casual approach to narrative pace. The plot itself is elegantly simple. Treating of the frustrations of love, it deals, as Vladimir Nabokov puts it, 'with the emotions, meditations, acts and destinies of three men: Onegin, the bored fop; Lensky, the minor elegiast; and a stylized Pushkin, Onegin's friend'1and, in a pleasing symmetry, with the affections and fates of three heroines: Tatyana, the shy and bookish provincial maiden; Olga, her beautiful but ordinary younger sister; and Pushkin's mercurial Muse. The action, set in the imperial Russia of the 1820s, begins in a glittering St Petersburg, moves for an extended stay to the bucolic country estate, sojourns for a chapter in Moscow, and then, as if closing a circle, comes to its end in the capital once more. Along its devious narrative route, the novel treats the reader to an engaging and suspenseful story; to lively scenes of city and country life; to portraits of a socially mixed cast of characters; to evocations of nature in its various seasons; and to


1Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse by Alexander Pushkin, Translated from the Russian with a Commentary (New York, 1964), iv. 6.


a wealth of authorial digression and commentary, la Byron or Sterne, on the tale in the telling and on sundry literary, philosophical, and autobiographical mattersall in a shifting play of many moods and tones: lyrical, realistic, parodic, romantic, and ironic.


Much commentary on the work has focused, understandably enough, on its hero and heroine, Onegin and Tatyana, the ill-starred but non-tragic lovers who were to become the prototypes for a host of figures created by later Russian writers. Those critics who approach the text as a realistic novel and who accept its heroes as more or less psychologically plausible representatives of their society, have viewed the two main characters in quite varied and even conflicting ways. To some, Onegin is a victim of his environment, a potentially creative man whose personal fulfilment is frustrated by the limited opportunities available to him in his era. To others he is an anti-hero, an amoral hedonist and misanthropic egoist. Tatyana, though usually regarded in an almost hagiographic light (she is for many Russians the most beloved heroine in their literature), also has a few detractors, readers who see her as an immature woman in whom instinctual drives and vague intuition rather than active intelligence or innate spiritual nobility account for most of her actions. All those critics who attempt such analyses of the characters are confronted by certain puzzling inconsistencies in their behaviour; in different parts of the novel they seem almost to be different people. A reasonable explanation, not much noted, for the antithetical interpretations the heroes have evoked is that they are dichotomous in their very natures: over the long period of the novel's composition, Pushkin's own artistic values and aims were changing, and it seems quite likely that his characters evolved as well, that his image of them ripened and deepened over that period. There is also a fundamental, if rich, ambiguity in the author's treatment of Onegin and Tatyana as both character-studies and poetic symbols.


Other critics of the work have taken a more formalist approach, viewing the characters less as real people than as


reflections of literary stereotypes. Literary art and language itself, in their view, are always self-referential, uninvolved in any realities supposed to exist outside the work. Such readings also face difficulties and complications. Pushkin's fictional heroes are themselves avid readers of fiction, they construct their identities as much from books as from available social roles. Onegin, in resisting the constrictions of social conventions, adopts the dissident poses of dandy and cynic; but these are only further conventional masks, disguises borrowed from books. Onegin's lack of a solid identity becomes clear to the reader, and to Tatyana within the novel itself, with the realization that he is mostly a congeries of literary affectations, a parody: he has modelled himself on the currently fashionable Byronic type, while at the same time he appears, in Tatyana's vivid literary imagination, as the thrilling hero of a Gothic romance. Pushkin has great satirical fun in playing with these various literary echoes and he has his hero, more empty shell than either rebel or demon, confront his fate not in a romantically primordial wilderness, but in the homely setting of a Russian country estate. Similarly, Tatyana, though less parodied by the author (because she is capable of genuine feeling), is composed of a number of literary and cultural personae. To the narrator she contains elements of the 'savage female', a being untouched by civilization's denaturing forces (a fantasy of many male romantic writers); to Onegin, when he first encounters her, she is merely a naive provincial girl; and by the novel's end she is for both Onegin and her new aristocratic milieu the very embodiment of a successful society hostess and legislatrix. Tatyana too confronts her fate in a kind of literary parody: she discovers the true nature of her hero not by a passage into the dark recesses of a medieval castle, but by reading Onegin's books in his abandoned country house, itself a symbol of the hero's vacancy.


We may note, in order to illustrate one of Pushkin's methods for revealing the power of cultural determinants in his characters' behaviour, the various explanations the narrator gives for


Tatyana's falling in love. We are told that she does so as a 'child of nature', spontaneously and without artificial contrivance; that she falls in love in response to the neighbours' gossip, which has planted the idea in her mind; that it is due to the influence of the epistolary novels she has read; or that it was simply appropriate to her age and social expectations. Having amused his readers with this shrewd undermining of typical romantic attitudes, Pushkin then surprises them and complicates their perceptions of 'truth' by giving a beautifully poetic description of Tatyana as a girl actually in love, with all the restless pain, joy, and dreaminess of her condition. The scene occurs, furthermore, in the wonderfully effective context of Tatyana's conversation with her concerned old nurse, seen in touching and realistic counterpoint to the feverish young girl.


Lensky is yet another figure who derives from books. Creating himself out of his naive literary readings and aspirations, he becomes a gentle parody of the sentimental romantic poet. What is particularly interesting and somewhat paradoxical, however, is that most of the characters transcend their function as parodies. They are treated by their creator with a sometimes puzzling blend of ironic detachment and sympathetic concern. It is one of the charms of the novel that the author (or at least the narrator) shares at times the viewpoint and attitudes of his most nave reader.


The narrator constantly intrudes on his story, postponing with his various digressions its progress, speculating on where it might lead, and frequently frustrating his reader's expectations. By exposing the work's contrived 'literariness', the narrator continually threatens to subvert or deconstruct the novelistic 'truth' of his tale. But then again, on resuming his narrative, he will recapture our interest in his heroes' fates and reignite an acceptance of their 'reality'. In his frequent address to both 'readers' and 'friends' (the latter comprised apparently of more sophisticated sorts of reader), the author anticipates almost all the potential ways of approaching and interpreting his book and seems to be trying to fashion, out of an amalgam


of both nave and sophisticated sensibilities, his ideal reader. We, his actual readers, like the solvers of a Chinese puzzle, must work out for ourselves the answers to a number of riddles the work proposes. What is the true nature of art? Where do the boundaries between literature and life lie? Or are there no boundaries, only a tangled network of intersecting threads that connect the lives we lead with the books we read? Perhaps, as this thoroughly modern and timeless work suggests, we are unable, despite all our strivings for personal 'authenticity', to be anything but the roles we play, the products and the playthings of literary and social conventions.


Pushkin's intricate and playful exploration of the connections between art and life permeates the work. His own practice as a poet is a case in point, issuing not only from his own genius, but from his enormous reading and his extensive knowledge of literary tradition. The novel's verse, poetry of the highest order, is also at times a pastiche of all the many clichs of poetic imagery and diction, of the techniques and formal conventions of a vast existing literature; though the writer may violate or mix or parody these traditions, he cannot exist without them. In support of its author's sly yet revealing game, the novel is full of literary allusions and references to other writers; it mocks the easy conflation of literature and life in countless ways: by the device, for example, of mixing real with fictional personages. Most prominently, of course, Pushkin has inserted himself into his book, not only as its narrator, but as the ostensible friend of its hero, Onegin. Tatyana, to give another instance, encounters and captivates at a Moscow soire Prince Vyazemsky, Pushkin's actual friend and fellow-poet. When the poem momentarily turns historical novel, the Emperor Napoleon briefly appears, only to be condemned as the impostor (in Russian memory) whose heroic pretensions were consumed by a Moscow conflagration and by life's intractability. Napoleon also figures in the novel as an icon of the European romantic imagination and, ironically, as the idol of the westernized Russian Onegin, who keeps a statuette of his hero in his study.


Again and again the work demonstrates that cultural myths are deeply embedded in the modern consciousness, that we cannot disentangle ourselves from our words or extricate our 'selves' from our texts. None of this, happily, seems to make human nature in Pushkin's eyes any less real or human characters any less responsible for their actions. The disguises we wear and the poses we assume or, contrastingly, the more active and creative roles that we may elect to play in life, define us as human beings.


The early-nineteenth-century critic Belinsky remarked famously that Pushkin's novel is 'an encyclopedia of Russian life'. Although it is currently fashionable to disparage Belinsky's 'crudely sociological' approach to literature, there is much to be said (especially if we remove the word 'Russian') for his observation. For all this work's literary self-consciousness (it is an encyclopedia of literature, too), what a richly woven and glittering tapestry of life it contains, much of it supplied in apparently casual passing fashion, as was Pushkin's way. He shows us the theatre, where on a public stage writers, actors, and audience all perform and where the wings become a setting for erotic adventure; he gives us dance in its many shapes and styles: the ballet, the society ball, the country shindig, the peasant stomp; other music and song: in opera, in a regimental band, in the singing of serf-girls; food and dining, in fashionable restaurants and at rustic feasts; the architectural environment in churches, palaces, city mansions, apartments, urban hovels, and country manors; the varying styles of clothing; the books; the protocols of duelling; the customs of matchmaking, courtship, and marriage; life as played out in passionate youth and in resigned middle-age; the relationships of parents and children; the ways of the contemporary city and the ancient traditions of the countryside; the horses and conveyances that people use (which are also metaphors for the Pushkinian rush to experience life's variety, or at least to observe it from the window of a moving carriage)all the activities, codes, customs, and conventions through which we live and which


determine, whether we observe or defy them, who we are. And note as well the lively capsule biographies of some of the novel's minor characters: Tatyana's parents, Onegin's father and uncle, the rake Zaretsky, and even the two alternative futures imagined for Lensky beyond the novel's time-frame. Once again, in these mini-biographies, the author's touch is light and fleeting, his method the sparing use of a few trivial and prosaic details, the more insignificant the more telling.


Let me close these brief introductory remarks on Pushkin's masterwork with a few observations on some of its autobiographical implications. It presents, among its other texts, the writer's report to himself at mid-career, recording his discoveries about life and art and his concerns for his creative future. Not only the novel's narrator, it should be noted, but also the three other major characters are quite clearly expressions of Pushkin's personality. Onegin, despite the author's disclaimer to the contrary, bears some of Pushkin's own human traits, and the two share a number of social masks; the essential and decisive difference between them, of course, is that Onegin has none of the poet in him. Lensky, on the other hand, who does possess a genuine if immature poetic sensibility, is not unlike the younger Pushkin, a persona the writer has outgrown and now regards with affectionate irony. The conflict in the novel between Onegin and Lensky, so perplexingly motivated in terms of the characters' psychology, represents much more plausibly a conflict in the soul of the author, a struggle between his 'prosaic' and 'poetic' selves (recall the description when the two characters first meet: Lensky all poetry, Onegin all prose). If it seems that Pushkin takes the cynical Onegin rather seriously and merely mocks the naive Lensky, this is something of a subterfuge, a device to conceal his own passionate commitment, even as he questions it, to poetry. Onegin, Pushkin's 'friend', is at once his baser alter ego and a symbol of his new allegiance to the truths of prose. Tatyana, whom the narrator calls his 'ideal' and who by the novel's end is identified with Pushkin's Muse, seems on a symbolic plane to stand as the


artist's emblem for the native sources of his poetry, or as an avatar of his art itself. She is a figure who, though unhappy and unfree (like Pushkin himself), remains steadfast in her adherence to values beyond the gratifications of the self. There is an undeniable sadness in this sparkling novel, especially at its end. If it opened to the tune of a sprightly scherzo, it closes to the strains of a somewhat mournful adagio. Pain and disappointment have a prominent place in the world of Onegin, but so too does the celebration of life in all its enticing minutiae; and thus the novel gives us neither a conventionally happy nor a conventionally unhappy ending. It avoids, to be sure, any overt statement of tragedy, for the hero and heroine still live, are indeed still relatively young. Their stories, abruptly abandoned in typically Pushkinian fashion, remain incomplete, their ultimate fates still unresolved. In his final chapter does Pushkin even try to rescue his hapless hero from the shallowness of his egoism? Does he seek to make him worthy through his suffering of someone's, if not Tatyana's, love? Could the tale that unwinds beyond the pages of the book be resumed, could it take unexpected turns and move in new directions, are other outcomes possible? One suspects, despite the aesthetically pleasing roundedness of the poem, that the answers are yes, that other roads lie ahead for the heroes, that life still beckons. In his generosity of spirit the author gives to his characters, and thereby to himself, the possibility of renewal. The concluding chapters of Eugene Onegin are Pushkin's farewell to his poetic youth. Henceforth, in his effort to reinvent himself, and as a sign of his commitment to become yet more fully engaged in the life of literature, he would devote his energies mainly to prose. For Pushkin, however, to cease completely to be a poet was to die, and in his 'novel in verse' he announces a continuing will to live. Life's chalice, he tells us in its final stanza, never runs dry, life's novel (which the artist both reads and writes) never comes to an end for the taker of risks.


NOTE ON THE TRANSLATION


If art holds a mirror up to nature, it frequently does soas in this masterpiece of Pushkin'sby first directing that mirror at other works of art. The world of Eugene Onegin derives perhaps as much from Western European literary antecedents and traditions as it does from its author's Russia, and in doing so it provides a paradoxical picture of life mimicking art. The literary translator, in seeking to participate in this international colloquy, holds, as it were, yet another mirror up to these already doubled or tripled mirrors. It is a devilish and tricky business, this game in a house of mirrors, this effort to catch and reflect elusive reflections. There are occasions when the translator, however carefully he tries to grip his own mirror by its edges so as not to smudge the glass, will inadvertently allow his hands to enter the picture and thus obscure the view.


In attempting to reproduce poetry, the verbal art most closely tied to its native language and the most susceptible to distortion in the transfer to another, the translator faces particularly vexing difficulties. Verse, perhaps, can be translated; great poetry is something else. Russian and English poetry do not look, sound, or behave very much alike; and by choosing to work on Pushkin's poem, in which the sheer beauty of sound is so vital a part of its effect and in which all the expressive resources of the Russian language are on masterful display, the translator may find himself casting an uneasy eye at Robert Frost's cautionary definition of poetry as 'what gets lost in translation'. All he can do, having begun, is keep to his task, reassuring himself that both Russian and English, after all, assemble consonants and vowels into sounds and words, into beauty and sense.


Pushkin's long poem has had some seven English translations prior to this one (the more thorough Germans seem to have produced about twelve), and yet it has continued to be regarded


by many as a classic instance of the untranslatable work. Vladimir Nabokov has argued that a literal rendering of Pushkin's sentences is about the best that can be achieved or even honestly attempted; that any translation that retains the original's metre and rhyme, since it cannot be faithful to the work's exact meaning, will necessarily result in a mere paraphrase. In his own translation of the novel, which he proudly labelled #62056; 'pony', he shunned, accordingly, both metre and rhyme and gave us a version at once marvellously accurate and rather peculiar, most of its poetry resident in the accompanying commentary rather than in the translation itself. Pushkin, one has to say, loses where Nabokov gains. And of course a 'literal' version is, in the end, no less unfaithful to its model than a rhymed and metred one: in place of a work whose austere and harmonious shape is an essential part of its effect, it gives us something ill-proportioned and flaccid, a kind of 'formal paraphrase' that seems bland and inert where the original is expressive and alive. But the translator's dilemma doesn't lie, really, in choosing between faithfulness to form and faithfulness to meaning, for in fact neither of these goals, even separately, is attainable. In the transfer of a work from one language to another there are no exact correspondences to be found neither in the meanings and histories of words nor in the intricacies and effects of forms. This very tendency of ours to divide a work of art into separate categories of form and content not only gives a false view of a work's complex nature but also poses the problem of literary translation in a false light.


Confronted with an evident inability to render a work faithfully in either its absolute form or its total sense, the translator, it would seem, faces an impossible task and is condemned by the very nature of his enterprise to an act of compromise and betrayal. The only solution, it seems to me, is for the translator to try to view the work not as a hopeless dichotomy but as a unified whole and to try to be faithful, in some mysterious spirit, to this vision of wholeness. In the result, perhaps we can honour, if nothing else, the poor


translator's quixotic quest, a quest in some respects not unlike that of the artist he seeks to emulate.


The other translators who have put Pushkin's novel into English have chosen, unlike Nabokov, to honour in most respects the 'Onegin stanza' and to retain the original's metrical scheme and rhyme. Two of them in particular, Walter Arndt and Charles Johnston, have done so with some success and have demonstrated thereby that the task may be slightly less impossible than it seems. My own attempt to pursue the elusive Pushkin yet again has profited much by their example, following them in their virtues and avoiding, as far as possible, their defects. If the results presented here are no less provisional than their efforts or the efforts of others that have gone before, I have none the less greatly enjoyed my pursuit of Pushkin and have found the view, even from the lower altitudes, well worth the climb.


I, too, have elected, in my version, to preserve what I could of Pushkin's form, taking the Onegin stanza as one of the novel's most essential and characteristic features, the building-block with which the entire edifice is constructed. By retaining the stanza form that Pushkin uses as his poetic paragraph, the translator positions himself, in a sense, on the work's home ground and imposes upon himself a useful discipline for his journey. Furthermore, he is thereby constrained, as was the poet himself, to seek solutions without self-indulgence, to find variety within oneness, and to earn freedom within the bondage of the form. The very rigidity of the stanzaic structure can bring at times a fruitful tension to the words with which the form is made manifest, and the economy of expression it enforces upon the translator will sometimes reward him with an unexpected gift.


In working, over quite a few years, on several visions and revisions of this translation, I have found myself searching for an ever more natural and unforced flow of language, for a more fluid and straightforward syntax, a lighter and more readily comprehensible style; I have tried to avoid as much as possible


the sorts of inversions and verbal contortions that have marred in my view the earlier translationsall in an effort to capture what seemed to me the poem's spontaneous and unlaboured effect in Pushkin's Russian. I have also tried to adapt the rhythms of the poem to the rhythms of English speecha speech that in my rendition sounds somewhat more American than British in its accent and somewhat more contemporary than period in its idiom. Ultimately, I have attempted to provide the English-speaking reader of today with a more accessible version of one of the great works of the Russian literary imagination, one that would speak in a familiar, not-too-distant English voice and that would convey not only something of the novel's sense and shape, but some hints of its characteristic flavour as well: its verve and sparkle, its lyricism and wit, its succinctness and variety: the play of lights and shadows in an imperfect mirror.


A few words on the Onegin stanza. The main body of the novel consists in its final form (some stanzas having been discarded by Pushkin for a variety of reasons) of some 366 stanzas of a common design. The fourteen lines of this stanzaic form suggest, of course, the sonnet, but the rhyming pattern is unique (ababccddeffegg), as is the adherence to a fixed sequence of masculine and feminine rhymes (that is, rhymes in which the stresses fall on the final or the penultimate syllables, respectively): fmfmffmmfmmfmm. The metre, iambic tetrameter, though it may seem somewhat terse for a long narrative poem in English, is hardly in itself alien to our tradition. Composi-tionally, the stanzas are organized in a variety of ways: as a single unit, as octave and sestet, or as three quatrains and a couplet. The second quatrain may function as two couplets (ccdd), and the sestet as two linked tercets (eff egg). The three quatrains, it will be noted, employ in sequence the three possible patterns for a binary rhyme scheme: alternating (abab), balanced (ccdd), and enclosed (effe). Pushkin uses his sonnet-paragraph with great virtuosity and flexibility. The opening quatrain and the closing couplet are usually the


most clearly marked, while the middle sections are treated with great variety. The final masculine couplet, especially, tends to stand out as a tersely pointed and often ironic coda.


There are considerably more than 5,000 lines of verse in this work, and the sheer quantity of its rhyme, it must be admitted, sorely tests the translator's inventiveness. I am also well aware that rhyme today is somewhat less common in serious English verse than it used to be and that its pervasiveness here may seem uncongenial to the modern ear. I rely, therefore, on the reader's tolerance for traditions beyond the borders of current taste and on the hope that something archaic may have grown so unfamiliar as to offer, perhaps, the pleasure of novelty. On some of the Russian names in the text and on a few other words I have placed an accent mark on the syllable that bears the stress; in general, however, the iambic metre should be a sufficient guide to the pronunciation of unfamiliar words. The Russian text used for this translation is essentially that used by Nabokov, the so-called 'third' edition, the last to be published during Pushkin's lifetime.


Finally, let me express once again my indebtedness to the previous translators of Pushkin's poem. Vladimir Nabokov's work, in particular, was a constant challenge to strive for greater accuracy, and his extensive commentary on the novel was an endless source of both instruction and pleasure. I want also to express my gratitude to Oxford University Press for giving me, in this second edition of my translation, the opportunity to revise the text and to add to it the verse fragments on 'Onegin's Journey' that Pushkin appended to his novel. I should like also to repeat my thanks to Professor Lauren Leighton of the University of Illinois at Chicago for his considerable support and encouragement and to my colleague John Osborne for patiently reading all those early drafts and for urging me, when my energy waned, to continue with a restless ingenuity. My wife, Eve, has been a sharp but always partial critic. To all those, including those unnamed, who have helped to improve


this translation and to eliminate, at least in part, its lapses from sense and grace, many thanks.


SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY


Barta, P., and Goebel, U. (eds.), The Contexts of Aleksandr Sergee-


vich Pushkin (Lewiston, NY, 1988). Bayley, J., Pushkin: A Comparative Commentary (Cambridge, 1971). Bethea, D. (d.), Pushkin Today (Bloomington, Ind., 1993). Bloom, H., Alexander Pushkin (New York, 1987). Briggs, A., Alexander Pushkin: A Critical Study (Totowa, NJ, 1983).


------Alexander Pushkin: Eugene Onegin (Cambridge, 1992).


Chizhevsky, D., Evgenij Onegin (Cambridge, Mass., 1953). Clayton, J., Ice and Flame: A. Pushkin's Eugene Onegin (Toronto,


1985)-Debreczeny, P., The Other Pushkin: A Study of Pushkin's Prose Fiction


(Stanford, Ca., 1983). Driver, S., Pushkin: Literature and Social Ideas (New York, 1989). Fennell, J., Pushkin (Harmondsworth, 1964).


Hoisington, S., Russian Views of Pushkin's 'Eugene Onegin ' (Blooming-ton, Ind., 1988). Jakobson, R., Pushkin and his Sculptural Myth, tr. J. Burbank (The


Hague, 1975). Kodjak, A., and Taranovsky, K. (eds.), Alexander Pushkin: A


Symposium on the 175th Anniversary of his Birth (New York, 1976).


------------Alexander Pushkin Symposium II (Columbus, Oh. 1980).


Lavrin, J., Pushkin and Russian Literature (London, 1947).


Levitt, M., Russian Literary Politics and the Pushkin Celebration of


1880 (Ithaca, NY, 1989). Magarshack, D., Pushkin: A Biography (London, 1967). Mirsky, D., Pushkin (London, 1926; repr. New York, 1963). Nabokov, V., Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse by Alexander Pushkin,


Translated from the Russian with a Commentary, 4 vols. (New York,


1964; rev. edn. Princeton, 1975). Proffer, C. (ed. and tr.), The Critical Prose of Alexander Pushkin


(Bloomington, Ind. 1969). Richards, D., and Cockrell, C. (eds.), Russian Views of Pushkin


(Oxford, 1976). Sandler, S., Distant Pleasures: Alexander Pushkin and the Writing of


Exile (Stanford, Ca., 1989). Shaw, J. (d.), The Letters of Alexander Pushkin (Bloomington, Ind. 1963). ------Pushkin's Rhymes (Madison, Wis., 1974).


Shaw, J. Pushkin: A Concordance to the Poetry (Columbus, Oh., 1985).


Simmons, E., Pushkin (New York, 1964).


Tertz, A. (Sinyavsky), Strolls with Pushkin, tr. C. Nepomnyashchy


and S. Yastremski (New Haven, Conn., 1993). Todd, W., Fiction and Society in the Age of Pushkin (Cambridge,


Mass., 1986). Troyat, H., Pushkin, tr. N. Amphoux (London, 1974). Vickery, W., Pushkin: Death of a Poet (Bloomington, Ind., 1968).


------Alexander Pushkin (New York, 1970; rev. edn. New York, 1992).


Wolff, t., Pushkin on Literature (London, 1971).


A CHRONOLOGY OF ALEXANDER SERGEEVICH PUSHKIN


(all dates are old style)


1799 Born 26 May in Moscow. On his father's side Pushkin was descended from a somewhat impoverished but ancient aristocratic family. The poet's maternal greatgrandfather, Abram Hannibal, was an African princeling (perhaps Abyssinian) who had been taken hostage as a boy by the Turkish sultan. Brought eventually to Russia and adopted by Peter the Great, he became a favourite of the emperor and under subsequent rulers enjoyed a distinguished career in the Russian military service. All his life Pushkin retained great pride in his lineage on both sides of the family.


1800-11 Entrusted in childhood to the care of governesses and French tutors, Pushkin was largely ignored by his parents. He did, however, avail himself of his father's extensive library and read widely in French literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. His mastery of contemporary Russian speech owes much to his early contact with household serfs, especially with his nurse, Arina Rodionovna.


1811-17 Attends Lyce at Tsarskoe Selo near St Petersburg, an academy newly established by Emperor Alexander I for the education of young noblemen and their preparation for government service. During these school years he writes his earliest surviving verse. Pushkin's poetic talent was recognized early and admired by prominent Russian writers, including the poets Derzhavin and Zhukovsky and the historian Karamzin.


1817-20 Appointed to a sinecure in the Department of Foreign Affairs, he leads a dissipated life in St Petersburg.


Writes satirical epigrams and circulates in manuscript form mildly seditious verse that incurs the displeasure of Emperor Alexander I. His first narrative poem, the mock epic Ruslan and Lyudmila, is published in 1820 and enjoys great success. 18204 Arrested for his liberal writings and exiled to service in the south of Russia (Ekaterinoslav, Kishinev, Odessa), he travels in the Caucasus, Crimea, Bessarabia. During this 'Byronic period' he composes his 'southern poems', including The Prisoner of the Caucasus and The Fountain of Bakhchisarai.


1823 Begins Eugene Onegin on 9 May (first chapter published in 1825).


1824 Writes narrative poem The Gypsies. After further conflict with the authorities he is dismissed from the service.


1824-6 Lives in exile for two more years at family estate of Mikhailovskoe.


1825 Writes verse drama Boris Godunov. Decembrist Revolt, in which several of the poet's friends participated, takes place while Pushkin is still absent from the capital.


1826-31 Pardoned by new Czar Nicholas I (September 1826) and allowed to return to Moscow, he resumes dissipated living. Continuing problems with censorship and growing dissatisfaction with the court and autocracy.


1827 Begins prose novel The Moor of Peter the Great (never completed), an account of the life and career of his ancestor Abram Hannibal.


1828 Writes narrative poem Poltava celebrating the victory of Peter the Great over Charles XII of Sweden.


1830 While stranded by a cholera epidemic at his country estate of Boldino he enjoys an especially productive autumn: effectively completes Eugene Onegin; writes The Tales of Belkin (prose stories); finishes 'Little


Tragedies': The Covetous Knight, Mozart and Salieri, The Stone Guest, Feast in Time of Plague.


1831 Marries Natalya Goncharova on 18 February; settles in St Petersburg; appointed official historiographer. Finally abandons work on Eugene Onegin, which has occupied him for more than eight years.


1831-7 Increasing personal and professional difficulties: financial troubles, unhappy married life, dismissal as a literary force by younger generation.


1833 Second 'Boldino autumn'. Writes short story The Queen of Spades, narrative poem The Bronze Horseman; works on A History of the Pugachev Rebellion


1836 Completes historical romance The Captain's Daughter.


1837 Incensed by the attentions paid to his wife by Baron Georges d'Ants, a French adventurer in the Russian service, Pushkin challenges him to a duel and on 27 February is mortally wounded; he dies two days later and his coffin is taken at night to Svyatogorsky Monastery near Mikhailovskoe for burial.


EUGENE ONEGIN


Ptri de vanit il avait encore plus de cette espce d'orgueil qui fait avouer avec la mme indiffrence les bonnes comme les mauvaises actions, suite d'un sentiment de supriorit, peut-tre imaginaire.


Tir d'une lettre particulire*


Dedication*


Not thinking of the proud world's pleasure,


But cherishing your friendship's claim,


I would have wished a finer treasure


To pledge my token to your name


One worthy of your soul's perfection,


The sacred dreams that fill your gaze,


Your verse's limpid, live complexion,


Your noble thoughts and simple ways.


But let it be. Take this collection


Of sundry chapters as my suit:


Half humorous, half pessimistic,


Blending the plain and idealistic


Amusement's yield, the careless fruit


Of sleepless nights, light inspirations,


Born of my green and withered years . . .


The intellect's cold observations,


The heart's reflections, writ in tears.


Chapter 1


To live he hurries and to feel makes haste. Prince Vjazemsky


1


'My uncle, man of firm convictions* . . .


By falling gravely ill, he's won


A due respect for his afflictions


The only clever thing he's done.


May his example profit others;


But God, what deadly boredom, brothers,


To tend a sick man night and day,


Not daring once to steal away!


And, oh, how base to pamper grossly


And entertain the nearly dead,


To fluff the pillows for his head,


And pass him medicines morosely


While thinking under every sigh:


The devil take you, Uncle. Die!'


2


Just so a youthful rake reflected,


As through the dust by post he flew,


By mighty Zeus's will elected


Sole heir to all the kin he knew.


Ludmila's and Rusln's adherents!*


Without a foreword's interference,


May I present, as we set sail,


The hero of my current tale:


Ongin, my good friend and brother,


Was born beside the Neva's span,


Where maybe, reader, you began,


Or sparkled in one way or other.


I too there used to saunter forth,


But found it noxious in the north.*


3


An honest man who'd served sincerely,


His father ran up debts galore;


He gave a ball some three times yearly,


Until he had no means for more.


Fate watched Eugene in his dependence;


At first Madame was in attendance;


And then Monsieur took on the child,


A charming lad, though somewhat wild.


Monsieur l'Abb, a needy fellow,


To spare his charge excessive pain,


Kept lessons light and rather plain;


His views on morals ever mellow,


He seldom punished any lark,


And walked the boy in Letny Park.*


4


But when the age of restless turnings


Became in time our young man's fate,


The age of hopes and tender yearnings,


Monsieur l'Abb was shown the gate.


And here's Oneginliberated,


To fad and fashion newly mated:


A London dandy, hair all curled,


At last he's ready for the world!


In French he could and did acutely


Express himself and even write;


In dancing too his step was light,


And bows he'd mastered absolutely.


Who'd ask for more? The world could tell


That he had wit and charm as well.


5


We've all received an education


In something somehow, have we not?


So thank the Lord that in this nation


A little learning means a lot.


Onegin was, so some decided


(Strict judges, not to be derided),


A learned, if pedantic, sort.


He did possess the happy forte


Of free and easy conversation,


Or in a grave dispute he'd wear


The solemn expert's learned air


And keep to silent meditation;


And how the ladies' eyes he lit


With flashes of his sudden wit!


6


The Latin vogue today is waning,


And yet I'll say on his behalf,


He had sufficient Latin training


To gloss a common epigraph,


Cite Juvenal in conversation, P


ut vale in a salutation;


And he recalled, at least in part,


A line or two of Virgil's art.


He lacked, it's true, all predilection


For rooting in the ancient dust


Of history's annals full of must,


But knew by heart a fine collection


Of anecdotes of ages past:


F


rom Romulus to Tuesday last.


7


Lacking the fervent dedication


That sees in sounds life's highest quest,


He never knew, to our frustration,


A dactyl from an anapest.


Theocritus and Homer bored him,


But reading Adam Smith restored him,


And economics he knew well;


Which is to say that he could tell


The ways in which a state progresses


The actual things that make it thrive,


And why for gold it need not strive,


When basic products it possesses.


His father never understood


And mortgaged all the land he could.


8


I have no leisure for retailing


The sum of all our hero's parts,


But where his genius proved unfailing,


The thing he'd learned above all arts,


What from his prime had been his pleasure,


His only torment, toil, and treasure,


What occupied, the livelong day,


His languid spirit's fretful play


Was love itself, the art of ardour,


Which Ovid sang in ages past,


And for which song he paid at last


By ending his proud days a martyr


In dim Moldavia's vacant waste,


Far from the Rome his heart embraced.


(9)* 10


How early on he could dissemble,


Conceal his hopes, play jealous swain,


Compel belief, or make her tremble, S


eem cast in gloom or mute with pain,


Appear so proud or so forbearing,


At times attentive, then uncaring!


What languor when his lips were sealed,


What fiery art his speech revealed!


What casual letters he would send her!


He lived, he breathed one single dream,


How self-oblivious he could seem!


How keen his glance, how bold and tender;


And when he wished, he'd make appear


The quickly summoned, glistening tear!


11


How shrewdly he could be inventive


And playfully astound the young,


Use flattery as warm incentive,


Or frighten with despairing tongue.


And how he'd seize a moment's weakness


To conquer youthful virtue's meekness


Through force of passion and of sense,


And then await sweet recompense.


At first he'd beg a declaration,


And listen for the heart's first beat,


Then stalk love fasterand entreat


A lover's secret assignation . . .


And then in private he'd prepare


In silence to instruct the fair!


12


How early he could stir or worry


The hearts of even skilled coquettes!


And when he found it necessary


To crush a rivaloh, what nets,


What clever traps he'd set before him!


And how his wicked tongue would gore him!


But you, you men in wedded bliss,


You stayed his friends despite all this:


The crafty husband fawned and chuckled


(Faublas'* disciple and his tool),


As did the skeptical old fool,


And the majestic, antlered cuckold


So pleased with all he had in life:


Himself, his dinner, and his wife.


(13-14) 15


Some mornings still abed he drowses,


Until his valet brings his tray.


What? Invitations? Yes, three houses


Have asked him to a grand soire.


There'll be a ball, a children's party;


Where will he dash to, my good hearty?


Where will he make the night's first call?


Oh, never mindhe'll make them all.


But meanwhile, dressed for morning pleasure,


Bedecked in broad-brimmed Bolivar,*


He drives to Nevsky Boulevard,


To stroll about at total leisure,


Until Brguet's* unsleeping chime


Reminds him that it's dinner time.


16


He calls a sleigh as daylight's dimming;


The cry resounds: 'Make way! Let's go!'


His collar with its beaver trimming


Is silver bright with frosted snow.


He's off to Talon's,* late, and racing,


Quite sure he'll find Kavrin* pacing;


He enterscork and bottle spout!


The comet wine* comes gushing out,


A bloody roastbeef's on the table,


And truffles, youth's delight so keen,


The very flower of French cuisine,


And Strasbourg pie,* that deathless fable;


While next to Limburg's lively mould


Sits ananas in splendid gold.


17


Another round would hardly hurt them,


To wash those sizzling cutlets down;


But now the chime and watch alert them:


The brand new ballet's on in town!


He's off!this critic most exacting


Of all that touches art or acting,


This fickel swain of every star,


And honoured patron of the barre


To join the crowd, where each is ready


To greet an entrechat with cheers,


Or Cleopatra with his jeers,


To hiss at Phdreso unsteady,


Recall Moi'na* . . . and rejoice


That everyone has heard his voice.


18


Enchanted land! There for a season,


That friend of freedom ruled the scene,


The daring satirist Fonvizin,


As did derivative Knyazhnin;


There Ozerov received the nation's


Unbidden tears and its ovations,


Which young Semynova did share;


And our Katnin gave us there


Corneille's full genius resurrected;


And there the caustic Shakhovsky


Refreshed the stage with comic joy,


Didelot his crown of fame perfected.*


There too, beneath the theatre's tent,


My fleeting, youthful days were spent.


19


My goddesses! You vanished faces!


Oh, hearken to my woeful call:


Have other maidens gained your places,


Yet not replaced you after all?


Shall once again I hear your chants?


Or see the Russian muse of dance


Perform her soaring, soulful flight?


Or shall my mournful gaze alight


On unknown faces on the stages?


And when across this world I pass


A disenchanted opera glass,


Shall I grow bored with mirth and rages,


And shall I then in silence yawn


And recollect a time that's gone?


20


The theatre's full, the boxes glitter;


The restless gallery claps and roars;


The stalls and pit are all ajitter;


The curtain rustles as it soars.


And there . .. ethereal. .. resplendent,


Poised to the magic bow attendant,


A throng of nymphs her guardian band,


Istmina* takes up her stand.


One foot upon the ground she places,


And then the other slowly twirls,


And now she leaps! And now she whirls!


Like down from Eol's lips she races;


Then spins and twists and stops to beat


Her rapid, dazzling, dancing feet.


21


As all applaud, Onegin enters


And treads on toes to reach his seat;


His double glass he calmly centres


On ladies he has yet to meet.


He takes a single glance to measure


These clothes and faces with displeasure;


Then trading bows on every side


With men he knew or friends he spied,


He turned at last and vaguely fluttered


His eyes toward the stage and play


Then yawned and turned his head away:


'It's time for something new,' he muttered,


'I've suffered ballets long enough,


But now Didelot is boring stuff.'


22


While all those cupids, devils, serpents


Upon the stage still romp and roar,


And while the weary band of servants


Still sleeps on furs at carriage door;


And while the people still are tapping,


Still sniffling, coughing, hissing, clapping;


And while the lamps both in and out


Still glitter grandly all about;


And while the horses, bored at tether,


Still fidget, freezing, in the snow,


And coachmen by the fire's glow


Curse masters and beat palms together;


Onegin now has left the scene


And driven home to change and preen.


23


Shall I abandon every scruple


And picture truly with my pen


The room where fashion's model pupil


Is dressed, undressed, and dressed again?


Whatever clever London offers


To those with lavish whims and coffers,


And ships to us by Baltic seas


In trade for tallow and for trees;


Whatever Paris, seeking treasure,


Devises to attract the sight,


Or manufactures for delight,


For luxury, for modish pleasure


All this adorned his dressing room,


Our sage of eighteen summers' bloom.


24


Imported pipes of Turkish amber,


Fine china, bronzesall displayed;


And purely to delight and pamper,


Perfumes in crystal jars arrayed;


Steel files and combs in many guises,


Straight scissors, curved ones, thirty sizes


Of brushes for the modern male


For hair and teeth and fingernail.


Rousseau (permit me this digression)


Could not conceive how solemn Grimm*


Dared clean his nails in front of him,


The brilliant madcap of confession.


In this case, though, one has to say


That Freedom's Champion went astray.


25


For one may be a man of reason


And mind the beauty of his nails.


Why argue vainly with the season?


For custom's rule o'er man prevails.


Now my Eugene, Chadyev's* double,


From jealous critics fearing trouble,


Was quite the pedant in his dress


And what we called a fop, no less.


At least three hours he peruses


His figure in the looking-glass;


Then through his dressing room he'll pass


Like flighty Venus when she chooses


In man's attire to pay a call


At masquerade or midnight ball.


26


Your interest piqued and doubtless growing


In current fashions of toilette,


I might describe in terms more knowing


His clothing for the learned set.


This might well seem an indiscretion,


Description, though, is my profession;


But pantaloons, gilet, and frock


These words are hardly Russian stock;


And I confess (in public sorrow)


That as it is my diction groans


With far too many foreign loans;


But if indeed I overborrow,


I have of old relied upon


Our Academic Lexicon.


27


But let's abandon idle chatter


And hasten rather to forestall


Our hero's headlong, dashing clatter


In hired coach towards the ball.


Before the fronts of darkened houses,


Along a street that gently drowses,


The double carriage lamps in rows


Pour forth their warm and cheerful glows


And on the snow make rainbows glitter.


One splendid house is all alight,


Its countless lampions burning bright;


While past its glassed-in windows flitter


In quick succession silhouettes


Of ladies and their modish pets.


28


But look, Onegin's at the gateway;


He's past the porter, up the stair,


Through marble entry rushes straightway,


Then runs his fingers through his hair,


And steps inside. The crush increases,


The droning music never ceases;


A bold mazurka grips the crowd,


The press intense, the hubbub loud;


The guardsman clinks his spurs and dances,


The charming ladies twirl their feet


Enchanting creatures that entreat


A hot pursuit of flaming glances;


While muffled by the violin


The wives their jealous gossip spin.


29


In days of dreams and dissipations


On balls I madly used to dote:


No surer place for declarations,


Or for the passing of a note.


And so I offer, worthy spouses,


My services to save your houses:


I pray you, heed my sound advice,


A word of warning should suffice.


You too, you mamas, I commend you


To keep your daughters well in sight;


Don't lower your lorgnettes at night!


Or else ... or else . . . may God defend you!


All this I now can let you know,


Since I dropped sinning long ago.


30


So much of life have I neglected


In following where pleasure calls!


Yet were not morals ill affected


I even now would worship balls.


I love youth's wanton, fevered madness,


The crush, the glitter, and the gladness,


The ladies' gowns so well designed;


I love their feetalthough you'll find


That all of Russia scarcely numbers


Three pairs of shapely feet. .. And yet,


How long it took me to forget


Two special feet. And in my slumbers


They still assail a soul grown cold


And on my heart retain their hold.


31


In what grim desert, madman, banished,


Will you at last cut memory's thread?


Ah, dearest feet, where have you vanished?


What vernal flowers do you tread?


Brought up in Oriental splendour,


You left no prints, no pressings tender,


Upon our mournful northern snow.


You loved instead to come and go


On yielding rugs in rich profusion;


While Iso long ago it seems!


For your sake smothered all my dreams


Of glory, country, proud seclusion.


All gone are youth's bright years of grace,


As from the meadow your light trace.


32


Diana's breast is charming, brothers,


And Flora's cheek, I quite agree;


But I prefer above these others


The foot of sweet Terpsichore.


It hints to probing, ardent glances


Of rich rewards and peerless trances;


Its token beauty stokes the fires,


The wilful swarm of hot desires.


My dear Elvina, I adore it


Beneath the table barely seen,


In springtime on the meadow's green,


In winter with the hearth before it,


Upon the ballroom's mirrored floor,


Or perched on granite by the shore.


33


I recollect the ocean rumbling:


O how I envied then the waves


Those rushing tides in tumult tumbling


To fall about her feet like slaves!


I longed to join the waves in pressing


Upon those feet these lips . . . caressing.


No, never midst the fiercest blaze


Of wildest youth's most fervent days


Was I so racked with yearning's anguish:


No maiden's lips were equal bliss,


No rosy cheek that I might kiss,


Or sultry breast on which to languish.


No, never once did passion's flood


So rend my soul, so flame my blood.


34


Another memory finds me ready:


In cherished dreams I sometimes stand


And hold the lucky stirrup steady,


Then feel her foot within my hand!


Once more imagination surges,


Once more that touch ignites and urges


The blood within this withered heart:


Once more the love . . . once more the dart!


But stop .. . Enough! My babbling lyre


Has overpraised these haughty things:


They're hardly worth the songs one sings


Or all the passions they inspire;


Their charming words and glances sweet


Are quite as faithless as their feet.


35


But what of my Eugene?


Half drowsing,


He drives to bed from last night's ball,


While Petersburg, already rousing,


Answers the drumbeat's duty call.


The merchant's up, the pedlar scurries,


With jug in hand the milkmaid hurries,


Crackling the freshly fallen snow;


The cabby plods to hackney row.


In pleasant hubbub morn's awaking!


The shutters open, smoke ascends


In pale blue shafts from chimney ends.


The German baker's up and baking,


And more than once, in cotton cap,


Has opened up his window-trap.


36


But wearied by the ballroom's clamour,


He sleeps in blissful, sheer delight


This child of comfort and of glamour,


Who turns each morning into night.


By afternoon he'll finally waken,


The day ahead all planned and taken:


The endless round, the varied game;


Tomorrow too will be the same.


But was he happy in the flower


The very springtime of his days,


Amid his pleasures and their blaze,


Amid his conquests of the hour?


Or was he profligate and hale


Amid his feasts to no avail?


37


Yes, soon he lost all warmth of feeling:


The social buzz became a bore,


And all those beauties, once appealing,


Were objects of his thought no more.


Inconstancy grew too fatiguing;


And friends and friendship less intriguing;


For after all he couldn't drain


An endless bottle of champagne


To help those pies and beefsteaks settle,


Or go on dropping words of wit


With throbbing head about to split:


And so, for all his fiery mettle,


He did at last give up his love


Of pistol, sword, and ready glove.


38


We still, alas, cannot forestall it


This dreadful ailment's heavy toll;


The spleen is what the English call it,


We call it simply Russian soul.


'Twas this our hero had contracted;


And though, thank God, he never acted


To put a bullet through his head,


His former love of life was dead.


Like Byron's Harold, lost in trances,


Through drawing rooms he'd pass and stare;


But neither whist, nor gossip there,


Nor wanton sighs, nor tender glances


No, nothing touched his sombre heart,


He noticed nothing, took no part.


(39-41) 42


Capricious belles of lofty station!


You were the first that he forswore;


For nowadays in our great nation,


The manner grand can only bore.


I wouldn't say that ladies never


Discuss a Say or Bentham*ever;


But generally, you'll have to grant,


Their talk's absurd, if harmless, cant.


On top of which, they're so unerring,


So dignified, so awfully smart,


So pious and so chaste of heart,


So circumspect, so strict in bearing,


So inaccessibly serene,


Mere sight of them brings on the spleen.*


43


You too, young mistresses of leisure,


Who late at night are whisked away


In racing droshkies bound for pleasure


Along the Petersburg chausse


He dropped you too in sudden fashion.


Apostate from the storms of passion,


He locked himself within his den


And, with a yawn, took up his pen


And tried to write. But art's exaction


Of steady labour made him ill,


And nothing issued from his quill;


So thus he failed to join the faction


Of writerswhom I won't condemn


Since, after all, I'm one of them.


44


Once more an idler, now he smothers


The emptiness that plagues his soul


By making his the thoughts of others


A laudable and worthy goal.


He crammed his bookshelf overflowing,


Then read and readfrustration growing:


Some raved or lied, and some were dense;


Some lacked all conscience; some, all sense;


Each with a different dogma girded;


The old was dated through and through,


While nothing new was in the new;


So books, like women, he deserted,


And over all that dusty crowd


He draped a linen mourning shroud.


45


I too had parted with convention,


With vain pursuit of worldly ends;


And when Eugene drew my attention,


I liked his ways and we made friends.


I liked his natural bent for dreaming,


His strangeness that was more than seeming,


The cold sharp mind that he possessed;


I was embittered, he depressed;


With passion's game we both were sated;


The fire in both our hearts was pale;


Our lives were weary, flat, and stale;


And for us both, ahead there waited


While life was still but in its morn


Blind fortune's malice and men's scorn.


46


He who has lived as thinking being


Within his soul must hold men small;


He who can feel is always fleeing


The ghost of days beyond recall;


For him enchantment's deep infection


Is gone; the snake of recollection


And grim repentance gnaws his heart.


All this, of course, can help impart


Great charm to private conversation;


And though the language of my friend


At first disturbed me, in the end


I liked his caustic disputation


His blend of banter and of bile,


His sombre wit and biting style.


47


How often in the summer quarter,


When midnight sky is limpid-light


Above the Neva's placid water


The river gay and sparkling bright,


Yet in its mirror not reflecting


Diana's visagerecollecting


The loves and intrigues of the past,


Alive once more and free at last,


We drank in silent contemplation


The balmy fragrance of the night!


Like convicts sent in dreaming flight


To forest green and liberation,


So we in fancy then were borne


Back to our springtime's golden morn.


48


Filled with his heart's regrets, and leaning


Against the rampart's granite shelf,


Eugene stood lost in pensive dreaming


(As once some poet drew himselP).


The night grew still. . . with silence falling;


Only the sound of sentries calling,


Or suddenly from Million Street


Some distant droshky's rumbling beat;


Or floating on the drowsy river,


A lonely boat would sail along,


While far away some rousing song


Or plaintive horn would make us shiver.


But sweeter still, amid such nights,


Are Tasso's octaves' soaring flights.


49


#62038; Adriatic! Grand Creation!


O Brenta!* I shall yet rejoice,


When, filled once more with inspiration,


I hear at last your magic voice!


It's sacred to Apollo's choir;


Through Albion's great and haughty lyre*


It speaks to me in words I know.


On soft Italian nights I'll go


In search of pleasure's sweet profusion;


A fair Venetian at my side,


Now chatting, now a silent guide,


I'll float in gondola's seclusion;


And she my willing lips will teach


Both love's and Petrarch's ardent speech.


50


Will freedom comeand cut my tether?


It's time, it's time! I bid her hail;


I roam the shore,* await fair weather,


And beckon to each passing sail.


#62038; when, my soul, with waves contesting,


And caped in storms, shall I go questing


Upon the crossroads of the sea?


It's time to quit this dreary lee


And land of harsh, forbidding places;


And there, where southern waves break high,


Beneath my Africa's warm sky,*


To sigh for sombre Russia's spaces,


Where first I loved, where first I wept,


And where my buried heart is kept.


51


Eugene and I had both decided


To make the foreign tour we'd planned;


But all too soon our paths divided,


For fate took matters into hand.


His father diedquite unexpected,


And round Eugene there soon collected


The greedy horde demanding pay.


Each to his own, or so they say.


Eugene, detesting litigation


And quite contented with his fate,


Released to them the whole estate . . .


With no great sense of deprivation;


Perhaps he also dimly knew


His aged uncle's time was due.


52


And sure enough a note came flying;


The bailiff wrote as if on cue:


Onegin's uncle, sick and dying,


Would like to bid his heir adieu.


He gave the message one quick reading,


And then by post Eugene was speeding,


Already bored, to uncle's bed,


While thoughts of money filled his head.


He was preparedlike any craven


To sigh, deceive, and play his part


(With which my novel took its start);


But when he reached his uncle's haven,


A laid-out corpse was what he found,


Prepared as tribute for the ground.


53


He found the manor fairly bustling


With those who'd known the now deceased;


Both friends and foes had come ahustling,


True lovers of a funeral feast.


They laid to rest the dear departed;


Then, wined and dined and heavy-hearted,


But pleased to have their duty done,


The priests and guests left one by one.


And here's Oneginlord and master


Of woods and mills and streams and lands;


A country squire, there he stands,


That former wastrel and disaster;


And rather glad he was, it's true,


That he'd found something else to do.


54


For two full days he was enchanted


By lonely fields and burbling brook,


By sylvan shade that lay implanted


Within a cool and leafy nook.


But by the third he couldn't stick it:


The grove, the hill, the field, the thicket


Quite ceased to tempt him any more


And, presently, induced a snore;


And then he saw that country byways


With no great palaces, no streets,


No cards, no balls, no poets' feats


Were just as dull as city highways;


And spleen, he saw, would dog his life,


Like shadow or a faithful wife.


55


But I was born for peaceful roaming,


For country calm and lack of strife;


My lyre sings! And in the gloaming


My fertile fancies spring to life.


I give myself to harmless pleasures


And far niente rules my leisures:


Each morning early I'm awake


To wander by the lonely lake


Or seek some other sweet employment:


I read a little, often sleep,


For fleeting fame I do not weep.


And was it not in past enjoyment


Of shaded, idle times like this,


I spent my days of deepest bliss?


56


The country, love, green fields and flowers,


Sweet idleness! You have my heart.


With what delight I praise those hours


That set Eugene and me apart.


For otherwise some mocking reader


Or, God forbid, some wretched breeder


Of twisted slanders might combine


My hero's features here with mine


And then maintain the shameless fiction


That, like proud Byron, I have penned


A mere self-portrait in the end;


As if today, through some restriction,


We're now no longer fit to write


On any theme but our own plight.


57


All poets, I need hardly mention,


Have drawn from love abundant themes;


I too have gazed in rapt attention


When cherished beings filled my dreams.


My soul preserved their secret features;


The Muse then made them living creatures:


Just so in carefree song I paid


My tribute to the mountain maid,


And sang the Salghir captives' praises.*


And now, my friends, I hear once more


That question you have put before:


'For whom these sighs your lyre raises?


To whom amid the jealous throng


Do you today devote your song?


58


'Whose gaze, evoking inspiration,


Rewards you with a soft caress?


Whose form, in pensive adoration,


Do you now clothe in sacred dress?'


Why no one, friends, as God's my witness,


For I have known too well the witless


And maddened pangs of love's refrain.


Oh, blest is he who joins his pain


To fevered rhyme: for thus he doubles


The sacred ecstasy of art;


Like Petrarch then, he calms the heart,


Subduing passion's host of troubles,


And captures worldly fame to boot!


But I, in love, was dense and mute.


59


The Muse appeared as love was ending


And cleared the darkened mind she found.


Once free, I seek again the blending


Of feeling, thought, and magic sound.


I write .. . and want no more embraces;


My straying pen no longer traces,


Beneath a verse left incomplete,


The shapes of ladies' heads and feet.


Extinguished ashes won't rekindle,


And though I grieve, I weep no more;


And soon, quite soon, the tempest's core


Within my soul will fade and dwindle:


And then I'll write this world a song


That's five and twenty cantos long!


60


I've drawn a plan and know what's needed,


The hero's named, the plotting's done;


And meantime I've just now completed


My present novel's Chapter One.


I've looked it over most severely;


It has its contradictions, clearly,


But I've no wish to change a line;


I'll grant the censor's right to shine


And send these fruits of inspiration


To feed the critics' hungry pen.


Fly to the Neva's water then,


My spirit's own newborn creation!


And earn me tribute paid to fame:


Distorted readings, noise, and blame!


Chapter 2


#62038; rus!


Horace


#62038; Rus'!*


1


The place Eugene found so confining


Was quite a lovely country nest,


Where one who favoured soft reclining


Would thank his stars to be so blest.


The manor house, in proud seclusion,


Screened by a hill from wind's intrusion,


Stood by a river. Far away


Green meads and golden cornfields lay,


Lit by the sun as it paraded;


Small hamlets too the eye could see


And cattle wand'ring o'er the lea;


While near at hand, all dense and shaded,


A vast neglected garden made


A nook where pensive dryads played.


2


The ancient manse had been erected


For placid comfortand to last;


And all its solid form reflected


The sense and taste of ages past.


Throughout the house the ceilings towered,


From walls ancestral portraits glowered;


The drawing room had rich brocades


And stoves of tile in many shades.


All this today seems antiquated


I don't know why; but in the end


It hardly mattered to my friend,


For he'd become so fully jaded,


He yawned alike where'er he sat,


In ancient hall or modern flat.


3


He settled where the former squire


For forty years had heaved his sighs,


Had cursed the cook in useless ire,


Stared out the window, and squashed flies.


The furnishings were plain but stable:


A couch, two cupboards, and a table,


No spot of ink on oaken floors. O


negin opened cupboard doors


And found in one a list of wages,


Some fruit liqueurs and applejack,


And in the next an almanac


From eighteen-eight with tattered pages;


The busy master never took


A glance in any other book.


4


Alone amid his new possessions,


And merely as an idle scheme,


Eugene devised a few concessions


And introduced a new regime.


A backwoods genius, he commuted


The old corve and substituted


A quittent at a modest rate;


* His peasants thanked their lucky fate,


But thrifty neighbours waxed indignant


And in their dens bewailed as one


The dreadful harm of what he'd done.


Still others sneered or turned malignant,


And everyone who chose to speak


Called him a menace and a freak.


5


At first the neighbours' calls were steady;


But when they learned that in the rear


Onegin kept his stallion ready


So he could quickly disappear


The moment one of them was sighted


Or heard approaching uninvited,


They took offence and, one and all,


They dropped him cold and ceased to call.


'The man's a boor, he's off his rocker.'


'Must be a Mason;* drinks, they say . . .


Red wine, by tumbler, night and day!' '


Won't kiss a lady's hand, the mocker.'


'Won't call me "sir" the way he should.


' The general verdict wasn't good.


6


Another squire chose this season


To reappear at his estate


And gave the neighbours equal reason


For scrutiny no less irate.


Vladimir Lnsky, just returning


From Gottingen with soulful yearning,


Was in his primea handsome youth


And poet filled with Kantian truth.


From misty Germany our squire


Had carried back the fruits of art:


A freedom-loving, noble heart,


A spirit strange but full of fire,


An always bold, impassioned speech,


And raven locks of shoulder reach.


7


As yet unmarked by disillusion


Or chill corruption's deadly grasp,


His soul still knew the warm effusion


Of maiden's touch and friendship's clasp.


A charming fool at love's vocation,


He fed on hope's eternal ration;


The world's fresh glitter and its call


Still held his youthful mind in thrall;


He entertained with fond illusions


The doubts that plagued his heart and will;


The goal of life, he found, was still


A tempting riddle of confusions;


He racked his brains and rather thought


That miracles could still be wrought.


8


He knew a kindred soul was fated


To join her life to his career,


That even now she pined and waited,


Expecting he would soon appear.


And he believed that men would tender


Their freedom for his honour's splendour;


That friendly hands would surely rise


To shatter slander's cup of lies;


That there exists a holy cluster


Of chosen ones whom men should heed,


A happy and immortal breed,


Whose potent light in all its lustre


Would one day shine upon our race


And grant the world redeeming grace.*


9


Compassion, noble indignation,


A perfect love of righteous ways,


And fame's delicious agitation


Had stirred his soul since early days.


He roamed the world with singing lyre


And found the source of lyric fire


Beneath the skies of distant lands,


From Goethe's and from Schiller's hands.


He never shamed, the happy creature,


The lofty Muses of his art;


He proudly sang with open heart


Sublime emotion's every feature,


The charm of gravely simple things,


And youthful hopes on youthful wings.


10


He sang of love, by love commanded,


A simple and affecting tune,


As clear as maiden thoughts, as candid


As infant slumber, as the moon


In heaven's peaceful desert flying,


That queen of secrets and of sighing.


He sang of parting and of pain,


Of something vague, of mists and rain;


He sang the rose, romantic flower,


And distant lands where once he'd shed


His living tears upon the bed


Of silence at a lonely hour;


He sang life's bloom gone pale and sere


He'd almost reached his eighteenth year.


11


Throughout that barren, dim dominion


Eugene alone could see his worth;


And Lensky formed a low opinion


Of neighbours' feasts and rounds of mirth;


He fled their noisy congregations


And found their solemn conversations


Of liquor, and of hay brought in,


Of kennels, and of distant kin,


Devoid of any spark of feeling


Or hint of inner lyric grace;


Both wit and brains were out of place,


As were the arts of social dealing;


But then their charming wives he found


At talk were even less profound.


12


Well-off. . . and handsome in addition,


Young Lensky seemed the perfect catch;


And so, by countryside tradition,


They asked him round and sought to match


Their daughters with this semi-Russian.


He'd calland right away discussion


Would touch obliquely on the point


That bachelors' lives were out of joint;


And then the guest would be invited


To take some tea while Dunya poured;


They whisper: 'Dunya, don't look bored!'


Then bring in her guitar, excited . . .


And then, good God, she starts to bawl:


'Come to my golden chamberhall!'


13


But Lensky, having no desire


For marriage bonds or wedding bell,


Had cordial hopes that he'd acquire


The chance to know Onegin well.


And so they metlike wave with mountain,


Like verse with prose, like flame with fountain:


Their natures distant and apart.


At first their differences of heart


Made meetings dull at one another's;


But then their friendship grew, and soon


They'd meet on horse each afternoon,


And in the end were close as brothers.


Thus peopleso it seems to me


Become good friends from sheer ennui.


14


But even friendships like our heroes


' Exist no more; for we've outgrown


All sentiments and deem men zeros


Except of course ourselves alone.


We all take on Napoleon's features,


And millions of our fellow creatures


Are nothing more to us than tools . . . Since feelings are for freaks and fools.


Eugene, of course, had keen perceptions


And on the whole despised mankind,


Yet wasn't, like so many, blind;


And since each rule permits exceptions,


He did respect a noble few,


And, cold himself, gave warmth its due.


15


He smiled at Lensky's conversation.


Indeed the poet's fervent speech,


His gaze of constant inspiration,


His mind, still vacillant in reach


All these were new and unexpected,


And so, for once, Eugene elected


To keep his wicked tongue in check,


And thought: What foolishness to wreck


The young man's blissful, brief infection;


Its time will pass without my knife,


So let him meanwhile live his life Believing in the world's perfection;


Let's grant to fevered youthful days


Their youthful ravings and their blaze.


16


The two found everything a basis


For argument or food for thought:


The covenants of bygone races,


The fruits that learned science brought,


The prejudice that haunts all history,


The grave's eternal, fateful mystery,


And Good and Evil, Life and Fate


On each in turn they'd ruminate.


The poet, lost in hot contention,


Would oft recite, his eyes ablaze,


Brief passages from Nordic lays;


Eugene, with friendly condescension,


Would listen with a look intense,


Although he seldom saw their sense.


17


More often, though, my two recluses


Would muse on passions* and their flights.


Eugene, who'd fled their wild abuses,


Regretted still his past delights


And sighed, recalling their interment.


Oh, happy he who's known the ferment


Of passions and escaped their lot;


More happy he who knew them not,


Who cooled off love with separation


And enmity with harsh contempt;


Who yawned with wife and friends, exempt


From pangs of jealous agitation;


Who never risked his sound estate


Upon a deuce, that cunning bait.


18


When we at last turn into sages


And flock to tranquil wisdom's crest;


When passion's flame no longer rages,


And all the yearnings in our breast,


The wayward fits, the final surges,


Have all become mere comic urges,


And pain has made us humble men


We sometimes like to listen then


As others tell of passions swelling;


They stir our hearts and fan the flame.


Just so a soldier, old and lame,


Forgotten in his wretched dwelling,


Will strain to hear with bated breath


The youngbloods' yarns of courting death.


19


But flaming youth in all its madness


Keeps nothing of its heart concealed:


Its loves and hates, its joy and sadness,


Are babbled out and soon revealed.


Onegin, who was widely taken


As one whom love had left forsaken,


Would listen gravely to the end


When self-expression gripped his friend;


The poet, feasting on confession,


Naively poured his secrets out;


And so Eugene learned all about


The course of youthful love's progression


A story rich in feelings too,


Although to us they're hardly new.


20


Ah yes, he loved in such a fashion


As men today no longer do;


As only poets, mad with passion,


Still love . . . because they're fated to.


He knew one constant source of dreaming,


One constant wish forever gleaming,


One ever-present cause for pain!


And neither distance, nor the chain


Of endless years of separation,


Nor pleasure's rounds, nor learning's well,


Nor foreign beauties' magic spell,


Nor yet the Muse, his true vocation,


Could alter Lensky's deep desire,


His soul aflame with virgin fire.


21


When scarce a boy and not yet knowing


The torment of a heart in flames,


He'd been entranced by Olga growing


And fondly watched her girlhood games;


Beneath a shady park's protection


He'd shared her frolics with affection.


Their fathers, who were friends, had plans


To read one day their marriage banns.


And deep within her rustic bower,


Beneath her parents' loving gaze,


She blossomed in a maiden's ways


A valley-lily come to flower


Off where the grass grows dense and high,


Unseen by bee or butterfly.


22


She gave the poet intimations


Of youthful ecstasies unknown,


And, filling all his meditations,


Drew forth his flute's first ardent moan.


Farewell, #62038; golden games' illusion!


He fell in love with dark seclusion,


With stillness, stars, the lonely night,


And with the moon's celestial light


That lamp to which we've consecrated


A thousand walks in evening's calm


And countless tearsthe gentle balm


Of secret torments unabated .... T


oday, though, all we see in her


Is just another lantern's blur.


23


Forever modest, meek in bearing,


As gay as morning's rosy dress,


Like any poetopen, caring,


As sweet as love's own soft caress;


Her sky-blue eyes, devoid of guile,


Her flaxen curls, her lovely smile,


Her voice, her form, her graceful stance,


Oh, Olga's every trait.... But glance


In any novelyou'll discover


Her portrait there; it's charming, true;


I liked it once no less than you,


But round it boredom seems to hover;


And so, dear reader, grant me pause


To plead her elder sister's cause.


24


Her sister bore the name Tatyana.


And we now press our wilful claim


To be the first who thus shall honour


A tender novel with that name.*


Why not? I like its intonation;


It has, I know, association


With olden days beyond recall,


With humble roots and servants' hall;


But we must grant, though it offend us:


Our taste in names is less than weak


(Of verses I won't even speak);


Enlightenment has failed to mend us,


And all we've learned from its great store


Is affectationnothing more.


25


So she was called Tatyana, reader.


She lacked that fresh and rosy tone


That made her sister's beauty sweeter


A


nd drew all eyes to her alone.


A wild creature, sad and pensive,


Shy as a doe and apprehensive,


Tatyana seemed among her kin


A stranger who had wandered in.


She never learned to show affection,


To hug her parentseither one;


A child herself, for children's fun


She lacked the slightest predilection,


And oftentimes she'd sit all day


In silence at the window bay.


26


But pensiveness, her friend and treasure


Through all her years since cradle days,


Adorned the course of rural leisure


By bringing dreams before her gaze.


She never touched a fragile finger


To thread a needle, wouldn't linger


Above a tambour to enrich


A linen cloth with silken stitch.


Mark how the world compels submission:


The little girl with docile doll


Prepares in play for protocol,


For every social admonition;


And to her doll, without demur,


Repeats what mama taught to her.


27


But dolls were never Tanya's passion,


When she was small she didn't choose


To talk to them of clothes or fashion


Or tell them all the city news.


And she was not the sort who glories


In girlish pranks; but grisly stories


Quite charmed her heart when they were told


On winter nights all dark and cold.


Whenever nanny brought together


Young Olga's friends to spend the day,


Tatyana never joined their play


Or games of tag upon the heather;


For she was bored by all their noise,


Their laughing shouts and giddy joys.


28


Upon her balcony appearing,


She loved to greet Aurora's show,


When dancing stars are disappearing


Against the heavens' pallid glow,


When earth's horizon softly blushes,


And wind, the morning's herald, rushes,


And slowly day begins its flight.


In winter, when the shade of night


Still longer half the globe encumbers,


And 'neath the misty moon on high


An idle stillness rules the sky,


And late the lazy East still slumbers


Awakened early none the less,


By candlelight she'd rise and dress.


29


From early youth she read romances,


And novels set her heart aglow;


She loved the fictions and the fancies


Of Richardson and of Rousseau.


Her father was a kindly fellow


Lost in a past he found more mellow;


But still, in books he saw no harm,


And, though immune to reading's charm,


Deemed it a minor peccadillo;


Nor did he care what secret tome


His daughter read or kept at home


Asleep till morn beneath her pillow;


His wife herself, we ought to add,


For Richardson was simply mad.


30


It wasn't that she'd read him, really,


Nor was it that she much preferred


To Lovelace Grandison, but merely


That long ago she'd often heard


Her Moscow cousin, Princess Laura,


Go on about their special aura.


Her husband at the time was still


Her fiancagainst her will!


For she, in spite of family feeling,


Had someone else for whom she pined


A man whose heart and soul and mind


She found a great deal more appealing;


This Grandison was fashion's pet,


A gambler and a guards cadet.


31


About her clothes one couldn't fault her;


Like him, she dressed as taste decreed.


But then they led her to the altar


And never asked if she agreed.


The clever husband chose correctly


To take his grieving bride directly


To his estate, where first she cried


(With God knows whom on every side),


Then tossed about and seemed demented;


And almost even left her spouse;


But then she took to keeping house


And settled down and grew contented.


Thus heaven's gift to us is this:


That habit takes the place of bliss.


32


'Twas only habit then that taught her


The way to master rampant grief;


And soon a great discovery brought her


A final and complete relief.


Betwixt her chores and idle hours


She learned to use her woman's powers


To rule the house as autocrat,


And life went smoothly after that.


She'd drive around to check the workers,


She pickled mushrooms for the fall,


She made her weekly bathhouse call,


She kept the books, she shaved the shirkers,*


She beat the maids when she was cross


And left her husband at a loss.


33


She used to write, with blood, quotations


In maidens' albums, thought it keen


To speak in singsong intonations,


Would call Praskvya 'chre Pauline'.


She laced her corset very tightly,


Pronounced a Russian n as slightly


As n in French .. . and through the nose;


But soon she dropped her city pose:


The corset, albums, chic relations,


The sentimental verses too,


Were quite forgot; she bid adieu


To all her foreign affectations,


And took at last to coming down


In just her cap and quilted gown.


34


And yet her husband loved her dearly;


In all her schemes he'd never probe;


He trusted all she did sincerely


And ate and drank in just his robe.


His life flowed onquite calm and pleasant


With kindly neighbours sometimes present


For hearty talk at evenfall,


Just casual friends who'd often call


To shake their heads, to prate and prattle,


To laugh a bit at something new;


And time would pass, till Olga'd brew


Some tea to whet their tittle-tattle;


Then supper came, then time for bed,


And off the guests would drive, well fed.


35


Amid this peaceful life they cherished,


They held all ancient customs dear;


At Shrovetide feasts their table flourished


With Russian pancakes, Russian cheer;


Twice yearly too they did their fasting;


Were fond of songs for fortune-casting,


Of choral dances, garden swings.


At Trinity, when service brings


The people, yawning, in for prayer,


They'd shed a tender tear or two


Upon their buttercups of rue.


They needed kvas no less than air,


And at their table guests were served


By rank in turn as each deserved.*


36


And thus they aged, as do all mortals.


Until at last the husband found


That death had opened wide its portals,


Through which he entered, newly crowned.


He died at midday's break from labour,


Lamented much by friend and neighbour,


By children and by faithful wife


Far more than some who part this life.


He was a kind and simple barin,


And there where now his ashes lie


A tombstone tells the passer-by:


The humble sinner Dmitry Larin


A slave of God and Brigadier


Beneath this stone now resteth here.


37


Restored to home and its safekeeping,


Young Lensky came to cast an eye


Upon his neighbour's place of sleeping,


And mourned his ashes with a sigh.


And long he stood in sorrow aching;


'Poor Yorick!' then he murmured, shaking,


'How oft within his arms I lay,


How oft in childhood days


I'd play


With his Ochkov decoration!*


He destined Olga for my wife


And used to say: "Oh grant me, life,


To see the day!" ' ... In lamentation,


Right then and there Vladimir penned


A funeral verse for his old friend.


38


And then with verse of quickened sadness


He honoured too, in tears and pain,


His parents' dust. . . their memory's gladness . . .


Alas! Upon life's furrowed plain


A harvest brief, each generation,


By fate's mysterious dispensation,


Arises, ripens, and must fall;


Then others too must heed the call.


For thus our giddy race gains power:


It waxes, stirs, turns seething wave,


Then crowds its forebears toward the grave.


And we as well shall face that hour


When one fine day our grandsons true


Straight out of life will crowd us too!


39


So meanwhile, friends, enjoy your blessing:


This fragile life that hurries so!


Its worthlessness needs no professing,


And I'm not loathe to let it go;


I've closed my eyes to phantoms gleaming,


Yet distant hopes within me dreaming


Still stir my heart at times to flight:


I'd grieve to quit this world's dim light


And leave no trace, however slender.


I live, I writenot seeking fame;


And yet, I think, I'd wish to claim


For my sad lot its share of splendour


At least one note to linger long,


Recalling, like some friend, my song.


40


And it may touch some heart with fire;


And thus preserved by fate's decree,


The stanza fashioned by my lyre


May yet not drown in Lethe's sea;


Perhaps (a flattering hope's illusion!)


Some future dunce with warm effusion


Will point my portrait out and plead:


'This was a poet, yes indeed!'


Accept my thanks and admiration,


You lover of the Muse's art, #62038;


you whose mind shall know by heart


The fleeting works of my creation,


Whose cordial hand shall then be led


To pat the old man's laurelled head!


Chapter 3


Elle tait fille, elle tait amoureuse.*


Malfiltre


1


'Ah me, these poets . . . such a hurry!'


'Goodbye, Onegin . . . time I went.'


'Well, I won't keep you, have no worry,


But where are all your evenings spent?'


'The Larin place.''What reckless daring!


Good God, man, don't you find it wearing


Just killing time that way each night?'


'Why not at all.''Well, serves you right;


I've got the scene in mind so clearly:


For starters (tell me if I'm wrong),


A simple Russian family throng;


The guests all treated so sincerely;


With lots of jam and talk to spare.


On rain and flax and cattle care. . . .'


2


'Well, where's the harm ... the evening passes.'


'The boredom, brother, there's the harm.'


'Well, I despise your upper classes


And like the family circle's charm;


It's where I find . . .''More pastoral singing!


Enough, old boy, my ears are ringing!


And so you're off. . . forgive me then.


But tell me Lensky, how and when


I'll see this Phyllis so provoking


Who haunts your thoughts and writer's quill,


Your tears and rhymes and what-you-will?


Present me, do.''You must be joking!'


'I'm not.''Well then, why not tonight?


They'll welcome us with great delight.'


3


'Let's go.'


And so the friends departed


And on arrival duly meet


That sometimes heavy, but good-hearted,


Old-fashioned Russian welcome treat.


The social ritual never changes:


The hostess artfully arranges


On little dishes her preserves,


And on her covered table serves


A drink of lingonberry flavour.


With folded arms, along the hall,


The maids have gathered, one and all,


To glimpse the Larins' brand new neighbour;


While in the yard their men reproach


Onegin's taste in horse and coach.*


4


Now home's our heroes' destination,


As down the shortest road they fly;


Let's listen to their conversation


And use a furtive ear to spy.


'Why all these yawns, Onegin? Really!'


'Mere habit, Lensky.''But you're clearly


More bored than usual.''No, the same.


The fields are dark now, what a shame.


Come on, Andryushka, faster, matey!


These stupid woods and fields and streams!


Oh, by the way, Dame Larin seems


A simple but a nice old lady;


I fear that lingonberry brew


May do me in before it's through.'


5


'But tell me, which one was Tatyana?'


'Why, she who with a wistful air


All sad and silent like Svetlana*


Came in and took the window chair.'


'And really you prefer the other?'


'Why not?''Were I the poet, brother,


I'd choose the elder one instead


Your Olga's look is cold and dead,


As in some dull, Van Dyck madonna;


So round and fair of face is she,


She's like that stupid moon you see,


Up in that stupid sky you honour.'


Vladimir gave a curt reply


And let the conversation die.


6


Meanwhile . . . Onegin's presentation


At Madame Larin's country seat


Produced at large a great sensation


And gave the neighbours quite a treat.


They all began to gossip slyly,


To joke and comment (rather wryly);


And soon the general verdict ran,


That Tanya'd finally found a man;


Some even knowingly conceded


That wedding plans had long been set,


And then postponed till they could get


The stylish rings the couple needed.


As far as Lensky's wedding stood,


They knew they'd settled that for good.


7


Tatyana listened with vexation


To all this gossip; but it's true


That with a secret exultation,


Despite herself she wondered too;


And in her heart the thought was planted . . .


Until at last her fate was granted:


She fell in love. For thus indeed


Does spring awake the buried seed.


Long since her keen imagination,


With tenderness and pain imbued,


Had hungered for the fatal food;


Long since her heart's sweet agitation


Had choked her maiden breast too much:


Her soul awaited . .. someone's touch.


8


And now at last the wait has ended;


Her eyes have opened . . . seen his face!


And now, alas! . . . she lives attended


All day, all night, in sleep's embrace


By dreams of him; each passing hour


The world itself with magic power


But speaks of him. She cannot bear


The way the watchful servants stare,


Or stand the sound of friendly chatter.


Immersed in gloom beyond recall,


She pays no heed to guests at all,


And damns their idle ways and patter,


Their tendency to just drop in


And talk all day once they begin.


9


And now with what great concentration


To tender novels she retreats,


With what a vivid fascination


Takes in their ravishing deceits!


Those figures fancy has created


Her happy dreams have animated:


The lover of Julie Wolmr,*


Malk-Adhl* and de Linr,*


And Werther, that rebellious martyr,


And Grandison, the noble lord


(With whom today we're rather bored)


All these our dreamy maiden's ardour


Has pictured with a single grace,


And seen in all. . . Onegin's face.


10


And then her warm imagination


Perceives herself as heroine


Some favourite author's fond creation:


Clarissa,* Julia,* or Delphine.*


She wanders with her borrowed lovers


Through silent woods and so discovers


Within a book her heart's extremes,


Her secret passions, and her dreams.


She sighs . . . and in her soul possessing


Another's joy, another's pain,


She whispers in a soft refrain


The letter she would send caressing


Her hero . . . who was none the less


No Grandison in Russian dress.


11


Time was, with grave and measured diction,


A fervent author used to show


The hero in his work of fiction


Endowed with bright perfection's glow.


He'd furnish his beloved child


Forever hounded and reviled


With tender soul and manly grace,


Intelligence and handsome face.


And nursing noble passion's rages,


The ever dauntless hero stood


Prepared to die for love of good;


And in the novel's final pages,


Deceitful vice was made to pay


And honest virtue won the day.


12


But now our minds have grown inactive,


We're put to sleep by talk of 'sin';


Our novels too make vice attractive,


And even there it seems to win.


It's now the British Muse's fables


That lie on maidens' bedside tables


And haunt their dreams. They worship now


The Vampire with his pensive brow,


Or gloomy Melmoth, lost and pleading,


The Corsair, or the Wandering Jew,


And enigmatic Sbogar* too.


Lord Byron, his caprice succeeding,


Cloaked even hopeless egotism


In saturnine romanticism.


13


But what's the point? I'd like to know it.


Perhaps, my friends, by fate's decree,


I'll cease one day to be a poet


When some new demon seizes me;


And scorning then Apollo's ire


To humble prose I'll bend my lyre:


A novel in the older vein


Will claim what happy days remain.


No secret crimes or passions gory


Shall I in grim detail portray,


But simply tell as best I may


A Russian family's age-old story,


A tale of lovers and their lot,


Of ancient customs unforgot.


14


I'll give a father's simple greetings,


An aged uncle'sin my book;


I'll show the children's secret meetings


By ancient lindens near the brook,


Their jealous torments, separation,


Their tears of reconciliation;


I'll make them quarrel yet again,


But lead them to the altar then.


I'll think up speeches tenderhearted,


Recall the words of passion's heat,


Those words with whichbefore the feet


Of some fair mistress long departed


My heart and tongue once used to soar,


But which today I use no more.


15


Tatyana, O my dear Tatyana!


I shed with you sweet tears too late;


Relying on a tyrant's honour,


You've now resigned to him your fate.


My dear one, you are doomed to perish;


But first in dazzling hope you nourish


And summon forth a sombre bliss,


You learn life's sweetness . . . feel its kiss,


And drink the draught of love's temptations,


As phantom daydreams haunt your mind:


On every side you seem to find


Retreats for happy assignations;


While everywhere before your eyes


Your fateful tempter's figure lies.


16


The ache of love pursues Tatyana; .


She takes a garden path and sighs,


A sudden faintness comes upon her,


She can't go on, she shuts her eyes;


Her bosom heaves, her cheeks are burning,


Scarce-breathing lips grow still with yearning,


Her ears resound with ringing cries,


And sparkles dance before her eyes.


Night falls; the moon begins parading


The distant vault of heaven's hood;


The nightingale in darkest wood


Breaks out in mournful serenading.


Tatyana tosses through the night


And wakes her nurse to share her plight.


17


'I couldn't sleep ... #62038; nurse, it's stifling!


Put up the window ... sit by me.'


'What ails you, Tanya?''Life's so trifling,


Come tell me how it used to be.'


'Well, what about it? Lord, it's ages. . .


I must have known a thousand pages


Of ancient facts and fables too


'Bout evil ghosts and girls like you;


But nowadays I'm not so canny,


I can't remember much of late.


Oh, Tanya, it's a sorry state;


I get confused . . .' 'But tell me, nanny,


About the olden days . . . you know,


Were you in love then, long ago?'


18


'Oh, come! Our world was quite another!


We'd never heard of love, you see.


Why, my good husband's sainted mother


Would just have been the death of me!'


'Then how'd you come to marry, nanny?'


'The will of God, I guess .... My Danny


Was younger still than me, my dear,


And I was just thirteen that year.


The marriage maker kept on calling


For two whole weeks to see my kin,


Till father blessed me and gave in.


I got so scared . . . my tears kept falling;


And weeping, they undid my plait,


Then sang me to the churchyard gate.


19


'And so they took me off to strangers ...


But you're not even listening, pet.'


'Oh, nanny, life's so full of dangers,


I'm sick at heart and all upset,


I'm on the verge of tears and wailing!'


'My goodness, girl, you must be ailing;


Dear Lord have mercy. God, I plead!


Just tell me, dearest, what you need.


I'll sprinkle you with holy water,


You're burning up!''Oh, do be still,


I'm . . . you know, nurse ... in love, not ill.'


'The Lord be with you now, my daughter!'


And with her wrinkled hand the nurse


Then crossed the girl and mumbled verse.


20


'Oh, I'm in love,' again she pleaded


With her old friend. 'My little dove,


You're just not well, you're overheated.'


'Oh, let me be now . . . I'm in love.'


And all the while the moon was shining


And with its murky light defining


Tatyana's charms and pallid air,


Her long, unloosened braids of hair,


And drops of tears . . . while on a hassock,


Beside the tender maiden's bed,


A kerchief on her grizzled head,


Sat nanny in her quilted cassock;


And all the world in silence lay


Beneath the moon's seductive ray.


21


Far off Tatyana ranged in dreaming,


Bewitched by moonlight's magic curse. . .


And then a sudden thought came gleaming:


'I'd be alone now . . . leave me, nurse.


But give me first a pen and paper;


I won't be long . . . just leave the taper.


Good night.' She's now alone. All's still.


The moonlight shines upon her sill.


And propped upon an elbow, writing,


Tatyana pictures her Eugene,


And in a letter, rash and green,


Pours forth a maiden's blameless plighting.


The letter's readyall but sent. . .


For whom, Tatyana, is it meant?


22


I've known great beauties proudly distant,


As cold and chaste as winter snow;


Implacable, to all resistant,


Impossible for mind to know;


I've marvelled at their haughty manner,


Their natural virtue's flaunted banner;


And I confess, from them I fled,


As if in terror I had read


Above their brows the sign of Hades:


Abandon Hope, Who Enter Here!


Their joy is striking men with fear,


For love offends these charming ladies.


Perhaps along the Neva's shore


You too have known such belles before.


23


Why I've seen ladies so complacent


Before their loyal subjects' gaze,


That they would even grow impatient


With sighs of passion and with praise.


But what did I, amazed, discover?


On scaring off some timid lover


With stern behaviour's grim attack,


These creatures then would lure him back!


By joining him at least in grieving,


By seeming in their words at least


More tender to the wounded beast;


And blind as ever, still believing,


The youthful lover with his yen


Would chase sweet vanity again.


24


So why is Tanya, then, more tainted?


Is it because her simple heart


Believes the chosen dream she's painted


And in deceit will take no part?


Because she heeds the call of passion


In such an honest, artless fashion?


Because she's trusting more than proud,


And by the Heavens was endowed


With such a rashness in surrender,


With such a lively mind and will,


And with a spirit never still,


And with a heart that's warm and tender?


But can't you, friends, forgive her, pray,


The giddiness of passion's sway?


25


The flirt will always reason coldly;


Tatyana's love is deep and true:


She yields without conditions, boldly


As sweet and trusting children do.


She does not say: 'Let's wait till later


To make love's value all the greater


And bind him tighter with our rope;


Let's prick vainglory first with hope,


And then with doubt in fullest measure


We'll whip his heart, and when it's tame . . .


Revive it with a jealous flame;


For otherwise, grown bored with pleasure,


The cunning captive any day


Might break his chains and slip away.'


26


I face another complication:


My country's honour will demand


Without a doubt a full translation


Of Tanya's letter from my hand.


She knew the Russian language badly,


Ignored our journals all too gladly,


And in her native tongue, I fear,


Could barely make her meaning clear;


And so she turned for love's discussion


To French. . . . There's nothing I can do!


A lady's love, I say to you,


Has never been expressed in Russian;


Our mighty tongue, God only knows,


Has still not mastered postal prose.


27


Some would that ladies be required


To read in Russian. Dread command!


Why, I can picture theminspired,


T


he Good Samaritan* in hand!


I ask you now to tell me truly,


You poets who have sinned unduly:


Have not those creatures you adore,


Those objects of your verse . . . and more,


Been weak at Russian conversation?


And have they not, the charming fools,


Distorted sweetly all the rules


Of usage and pronunciation;


While yet a foreign language slips


With native glibness from their lips?


28


God spare me from the apparition,


On leaving some delightful ball,


Of bonneted Academician


Or scholar in a yellow shawl!


I find a faultless Russian style


Like crimson lips without a smile,


Mistakes in grammar charm the mind.


Perhaps (if fate should prove unkind!)


This generation's younger beauties,


Responding to our journals' call,


With grammar may delight us all,


And verses will be common duties.


But what care I for all they do?


To former ways I'll still be true.


29


A careless drawl, a tiny stutter,


Some imprecision of the tongue


Can still produce a lovely flutter


Within this breast no longer young;


I lack the strength for true repentance,


And Gallicisms in a sentence


Seem sweet as youthful sins remote,


Or verse that Bogdanvich* wrote.


But that will do. My beauty's letter


Must occupy my pen for now;


I gave my word, but, Lord,


I vow, Retracting it would suit me better.


I know that gentle Parny's* lays


Are out of fashion nowadays.


30


Bard of The Feasts* and languid sorrow,


If you were with me still, my friend,


Immodestly I'd seek to borrow


Your genius for a worthy end:


I'd have you with your art refashion


A maiden's foreign words of passion


And make them magic songs anew.


Where are you? Come! I bow to you


And yield my rights to love's translation. . . .


But there beneath the Finnish sky,


Amid those mournful crags on high,


His heart grown deaf to commendation


Alone upon his way he goes


And does not heed my present woes.


31


Tatyana's letter lies beside me,


And reverently I guard it still;


I read it with an ache inside me


And cannot ever read my fill.


Who taught her then this soft surrender,


This careless gift for waxing tender,


This touching whimsy free of art,


This raving discourse of the heart


Enchanting, yet so fraught with trouble?


I'll never know. But none the less,


I give it here in feeble dress:


A living picture's pallid double,


Or Freischutz* played with timid skill


By fingers that are learning still.


Tatyana's Letter to Onegin


I'm writing you this declaration


What more can I in candour say?


It may be now your inclination T


o scorn me and to turn away;


But if my hapless situation


Evokes some pity for my woe,


You won't abandon me, I know.


I first tried silence and evasion;


Believe me, you 'd have never learned


My secret shame, had I discerned


The slightest hope that on occasion


But once a weekI'd see your face,


Behold you at our country place,


Might hear you speak a friendly greeting,


Could say a word to you; and then,


Could dream both day and night again


Of but one thing, till our next meeting.


They say you like to be alone


And find the country unappealing;


We lack, I know, a worldly tone,


But still, we welcome you with feeling.


Why did you ever come to call?


In this forgotten country dwelling


I'd not have known you then at all,


Nor known this bitter heartache's swelling.


Perhaps, when time had helped in quelling


The girlish hopes on which I fed,


I might have found (who knows?) another


And been a faithful wife and mother,


Contented with the life I led.


Another! No! In all creation


There's no one else whom I'd adore;


The heavens chose my destination


And made me thine for evermore!


My life till now has been a token


In pledge of meeting you, my friend;


And in your coming, God has spoken,


You'll be my guardian till the end. . . .


You filled my dreams and sweetest trances;


As yet unseen, and yet so dear,


You stirred me with your wondrous glances,


Your voice within my soul rang clear. . . .


And then the dream came true for me!


When you came in, I seemed to waken,


I turned to flame, I felt all shaken,


And in my heart I cried: It's he!


And was it you I heard replying


Amid the stillness of the night,


Or when I helped the poor and dying,


Or turned to heaven, softly crying,


And said a prayer to soothe my plight?


And even now, my dearest vision,


Did I not see your apparition


Flit softly through this lucent night?


Was it not you who seemed to hover


Above my bed, a gentle lover,


To whisper hope and sweet delight?


Are you my angel of salvation


Or hell's own demon of temptation?


Be kind and send my doubts away;


For this may all be mere illusion,


The things a simple girl would say,


While Fate intends no grand conclusion. . . .


So be it then! Henceforth I place


My faith in you and your affection;


I plead with tears upon my face


And beg you for your kind protection.


You cannot know: I'm so alone,


There's no one here to whom I've spoken,


My mind and will are almost broken,


And I must die without a moan.


I wait for you . . . and your decision:


Revive my hopes with but a sign,


Or halt this heavy dream of mine


Alas, with well-deserved derision!


I close. I dare not now reread. . . .


I shrink with shame and fear.


But surely, Your honour's all the pledge


I need, And I submit to it securely.


32


The letter trembles in her fingers;


By turns Tatyana groans and sighs.


The rosy sealing wafer lingers


Upon her fevered tongue and dries.


Her head is bowed, as if she's dozing;


Her light chemise has slipped, exposing


Her lovely shoulder to the night.


But now the moonbeams' glowing light


Begins to fade. The vale emerges


Above the mist. And now the stream


In silver curves begins to gleam.


The shepherd's pipe resounds and urges


The villager to rise. It's morn!


My Tanya, though, is so forlorn.


33


She takes no note of dawn's procession,


Just sits with lowered head, remote;


Nor does she put her seal's impression


Upon the letter that she wrote.


But now her door is softly swinging:


It's grey Filtievna, who's bringing


Her morning tea upon a tray.


'It's time, my sweet, to greet the day;


Why, pretty one, you're up already!


You're still my little early bird!


Last night you scared me, 'pon my word!


But thank the Lord, you seem more steady;


No trace at all of last night's fret,


Your cheeks are poppies now, my pet.'


34


'Oh, nurse, a favour, please . . , and hurry!'


'Why, sweetheart, anything you choose.'


'You mustn't think . . . and please don't worry . . .


But see . . . Oh, nanny, don't refuse!'


'As God's my witness, dear, I promise.'


'Then send your grandson, little Thomas,


To take this note of mine to #62038;------,


Our neighbour, nurse, the one. . . you know!


And tell him that he's not to mention


My name, or breathe a single word. . . .


' 'But who's it for, my little bird?


I'm trying hard to pay attention;


But we have lots of neighbours call,


I couldn't even count them all.'


35


'Oh nurse, your wits are all befuddled!'


'But, sweetheart, I've grown old ... I mean . . .


I'm old; my mind ... it does get muddled.


There was a time when I was keen,


When just the master's least suggestion. . . .'


'Oh, nanny, please, that's not the question,


It's not your mind I'm talking of,


I'm thinking of Onegin, love;


This note's to him.''Now don't get riled,


You know these days I'm not so clear,


I'll take the letter, never fear.


But you've gone pale again, my child!'


'It's nothing, nanny, be at ease,


Just send your grandson, will you please.'


36


The day wore on, no word came flying.


Another fruitless day went by.


All dressed since dawn, dead-pale and sighing,


Tatyana waits: will he reply?


Then Olga's suitor came a-wooing.


'But tell me, what's your friend been doing?'


Asked Tanya's mother, full of cheer;


'He's quite forgotten us, I fear.'


Tatyana blushed and trembled gently.


'He promised he would come today,'


Said Lensky in his friendly way,


'The mail has kept him evidently.'


Tatyana bowed her head in shame,


As if they all thought her to blame.


37


'Twas dusk; and on the table, gleaming,


The evening samovar grew hot;


It hissed and sent its vapour steaming


In swirls about the china pot.


And soon the fragrant tea was flowing


As Olga poured it, dark and glowing,


In all the cups; without a sound


A serving boy took cream around.


Tatyana by the window lingers


And breathes upon the chilly glass;


All lost in thought, the gentle lass


Begins to trace with lovely fingers


Across the misted panes a row


Of hallowed letters: E and O.


38


And all the while her soul was aching,


Her brimming eyes could hardly see.


Then sudden hoofbeats! . . . Now she's quaking. . . .


They're closer . . . coming here . . . it's he!


Onegin! 'Oh!'And light as air,


She's out the backway, down the stair


From porch to yard, to garden straight;


She runs, she flies; she dare not wait


To glance behind her; on she pushes


Past garden plots, small bridges, lawn,


The lakeway path, the wood; and on


She flies and breaks through lilac bushes,


Past seedbeds to the brookso fast


That, panting, on a bench at last


39


She falls ....


'He's here! But all those faces!


#62038; God, what must he think of me!


' But still her anguished heart embraces


A misty dream of what might be.


She trembles, burns, and waits ... so near him!


But will he come? .. . She doesn't hear him.


Some serf girls in the orchard there,


While picking berries, filled the air


With choral songas they'd been bidden


(An edict that was meant, you see,


To keep sly mouths from feeling free


To eat the master's fruit when hidden,


By filling them with song instead


For rural cunning isn't dead!):


The Girls' Song


'Lovely maidens, pretty ones,


Dearest hearts and darling friends,


Romp away, sweet lassies, now,


Have your fling, my dear ones, do!


Strike you up a rousing song,


Sing our secret ditty now,


Lure some likely lusty lad


To the circle of our dance.


When we lure the fellow on,


When we see him from afar,


Darlings, then, let's scamper off,


Pelting him with cherries then,


Cherries, yes, and raspberries,


Ripe red currants let us throw!


Never come to listen in


When we sing our secret songs,


Never come to spy on us


When we play our maiden games!'


40


Tatyana listens, scarcely hearing


The vibrant voices, sits apart,


And waits impatient in her clearing


To calm the tremor in her heart


And halt the constant surge of blushes;


But still her heart in panic rushes,


Her cheeks retain their blazing glow


And ever brighter, brighter grow.


Just so a butterfly both quivers


And beats an iridescent wing


When captured by some boy in spring;


Just so a hare in winter shivers,


When suddenly far off it sees


The hunter hiding in the trees.


41


But finally she rose, forsaken,


And, sighing, started home for bed;


But hardly had she turned and taken


The garden lane, when straight ahead,


His eyes ablaze, Eugene stood waiting


Like some grim shade of night's creating;


And she, as if by fire seared,


Drew back and stopped when he appeared. . . .


Just now though, friends, I feel too tired


To tell you how this meeting went


And what ensued from that event;


I've talked so long that I've required


A little walk, some rest and play;


I'll finish up another day.


Chapter 4


La morale est dans la nature des choses*


Necker


(1-6)7


The less we love her when we woo her,


The more we draw a woman in,


And thus more surely we undo her


Within the witching webs we spin.


Time was, when cold debauch was lauded


As love's high art. . . and was applauded


For trumpeting its happy lot


In taking joy while loving not.


But that pretentious game is dated,


But fit for apes, who once held sway


Amid our forbears' vaunted day;


The fame of Lovelaces has faded


Along with fashions long since dead:


Majestic wigs and heels of red.


8


Who doesn't find dissembling dreary;


Or trying gravely to convince


(Recasting platitudes till weary)


When all agree and have long since;


How dull to hear the same objections,


To overcome those predilections


That no young girl thirteen,


I vow, Has ever had and hasn't now!


Who wouldn't grow fatigued with rages,


Entreaties, vows, pretended fears,


Betrayals, gossip, rings, and tears,


With notes that run to seven pages,


With watchful mothers, aunts who stare,


And friendly husbands hard to bear!


9


Well, this was my Eugene's conclusion.


In early youth he'd been the prey


Of every raging mad delusion,


And uncurbed passions ruled the day.


Quite pampered by a life of leisure,


Enchanted with each passing pleasure,


But disenchanted just as quick,


Of all desire at length grown sick,


And irked by fleet success soon after,


He'd hear mid hum and hush alike


His grumbling soul the hours strike,


And smothered yawns with brittle laughter:


And so he killed eight years of youth


And lost life's very bloom, in truth.


10


He ceased to know infatuation,


Pursuing belles with little zest;


Refused, he found quick consolation;


Betrayed, was always glad to rest.


He sought them out with no elation


And left them too without vexation,


Scarce mindful of their love or spite.


Just so a casual guest at night


Drops in for whist and joins routinely;


And then upon the end of play,


Just takes his leave and drives away


To fall asleep at home serenely;


And in the morning he won't know


What evening holds or where he'll go.


11


But having read Tatyana's letter,


Onegin was profoundly stirred:


Her maiden dreams had helped unfetter


A swarm of thoughts with every word;


And he recalled Tatyana's pallor,


Her mournful air, her touching valour


And then he soared, his soul alight


With sinless dreams of sweet delight.


Perhaps an ancient glow of passion


Possessed him for a moment's sway . . .


But never would he lead astray


A trusting soul in callous fashion.


And so let's hasten to the walk


Where he and Tanya had their talk.


12


Some moments passed in utter quiet,


And then Eugene approached and spoke:


'You wrote to me. Do not deny it.


I've read your words and they evoke


My deep respect for your emotion,


Your trusting soul. . . and sweet devotion.


Your candour has a great appeal


And stirs in me, I won't conceal,


Long dormant feelings, scarce remembered.


But I've no wish to praise you now;


Let me repay you with a vow


As artless as the one you tendered;


Hear my confession too, I plead,


And judge me both by word and deed.


13


'Had I in any way desired


To bind with family ties my life;


Or had a happy fate required


That I turn father, take a wife;


Had pictures of domestication


For but one moment held temptation


Then, surely, none but you alone


Would be the bride I'd make my own.


I'll say without wrought-up insistence


That, finding my ideal in you,


I would have asked youyes, it's true


To share my baneful, sad existence,


In pledge of beauty and of good,


And been as happy ... as I could!


14


'But I'm not made for exaltation:


My soul's a stranger to its call;


Your virtues are a vain temptation,


For I'm not worthy of them all.


Believe me (conscience be your token):


In wedlock we would both be broken.


However much I loved you, dear,


Once used to you ... I'd cease, I fear;


You'd start to weep, but all your crying


Would fail to touch my heart at all,


Your tears in fact would only gall.


So judge yourself what we'd be buying,


What roses Hymen means to send


Quite possibly for years on end!


15


'In all this world what's more perverted


Than homes in which the wretched wife


Bemoans her worthless mate, deserted


Alone both day and night through life;


Or where the husband, knowing truly


Her worth (yet cursing fate unduly)


Is always angry, sullen, mute


A coldly jealous, selfish brute!


Well, thus am I. And was it merely


For this your ardent spirit pined


When you, with so much strength of mind,


Unsealed your heart to me so clearly?


Can Fate indeed be so unkind?


Is this the lot you've been assigned?


16


'For dreams and youth there's no returning;


I cannot resurrect my soul.


I love you with a tender yearning,


But mine must be a brother's role.


So hear me through without vexation:


Young maidens find quick consolation


From dream to dream a passage brief;


Just so a sapling sheds its leaf


To bud anew each vernal season.


Thus heaven wills the world to turn.


You'll fall in love again; but learn . . .


To exercise restraint and reason,


For few will understand you so,


And innocence can lead to woe.'


17


Thus spake Eugene his admonition.


Scarce breathing and bereft of speech,


Gone blind with tears, in full submission,


Tatyana listened to him preach.


He offered her his arm. Despairing,


She took it and with languid bearing


('Mechanically', as people say), S


he bowed her head and moved away. . . .


They passed the garden's dark recesses,


Arriving home together thus


Where no one raised the slightest fuss:


For country freedom too possesses


Its happy rights ... as grand as those


That high and mighty Moscow knows.


18


I know that you'll agree, my reader,


That our good friend was only kind


And showed poor Tanya when he freed her


A noble heart and upright mind.


Again he'd done his moral duty,


But spiteful people saw no beauty


And quickly blamed him, heaven knows!


Good friends no less than ardent foes


(But aren't they one, if they offend us?)


Abused him roundly, used the knife.


Now every man has foes in life,


But from our friends, dear God, defend us!


Ah, friends, those friends! I greatly fear,


I find their friendship much too dear.


19


What's that? Just that. Mere conversation


To lull black empty thoughts awhile;


In passing, though, one observation:


There's not a calumny too vile


That any garret babbler hatches,


And all the social rabble snatches;


There's no absurdity or worse,


Nor any vulgar gutter verse,


That your good friend won't find delightful,


Repeating it a hundred ways


To decent folk for days and days,


While never meaning to be spiteful;


He's yours, he'll say, through thick and thin:


He loves you so! . . . Why, you're like kin!


20


Hm, hm, dear reader, feeling mellow?


And are your kinfolk well today?


Perhaps you'd like, you gentle fellow,


To hear what I'm prepared to say


On 'kinfolk' and their implications?


Well, here's my view of close relations:


They're people whom we're bound to prize,


To honour, love, and idolize,


And, following the old tradition,


To visit come the Christmas feast,


Or send a wish by mail at least;


All other days they've our permission


To quite forget us, if they please


So grant them, God, long life and ease!


21


Of course the love of tender beauties


Is surer far than friends or kin:


Your claim upon its joyous duties


Survives when even tempests spin.


Of course it's so. And yet be wary,


For fashions change, and views will vary,


And nature's made of wayward stuff


The charming sex is light as fluff.


What's more, the husband's frank opinion


Is bound by any righteous wife


To be respected in this life;


And so your mistress (faithful minion)


May in a trice be swept away:


For Satan treats all love as play.


22


But whom to love? To trust and treasure?


Who won't betray us in the end?


And who'll be kind enough to measure


Our words and deeds as we intend?


Who won't sow slander all about us?


Who'll coddle us and never doubt us?


To whom will all our faults be few?


Who'll never bore us through and through?


You futile, searching phantom-breeder,


Why spend your efforts all in vain;


Just love yourself and ease the pain,


My most esteemed and honoured reader!


A worthy object! Never mind,


A truer love you'll never find.


23


But what ensued from Tanya's meeting?


Alas, it isn't hard to guess!


Within her heart the frenzied beating


Coursed on and never ceased to press


Her gentle soul, athirst with aching;


Nay, ever more intensely quaking,


Poor Tanya burns in joyless throes;


Sleep shuns her bed, all sweetness goes,


The glow of life has vanished starkly;


Her health, her calm, the smile she wore


Like empty sounds exist no more,


And Tanya's youth now glimmers darkly:


Thus stormy shadows cloak with grey


The scarcely risen, newborn day.


24


Alas, Tatyana's fading quickly;


She's pale and wasted, doesn't speak!


Her soul, unmoved, grows wan and sickly;


She finds all former pleasures bleak.


The neighbours shake their heads morosely


And whisper to each other closely:


'It's time she married . . . awful waste. . . .'


But that's enough. I must make haste


To cheer the dark imagination


With pictures of a happy pair;


I can't, though, readers, help but care


And feel a deep commiseration;


Forgive me, but it's true, you know,


I love my dear Tatyana so!


25


Each passing hour more captivated


By Olga's winning, youthful charms,


Vladimir gave his heart and waited


To serve sweet bondage with his arms.


He's ever near. In gloomy weather


They sit in Olga's room together;


Or arm in arm they make their rounds


Each morning through the park and grounds.


And so? Inebriated lover,


Confused with tender shame the while


(Encouraged, though, by Olga's smile),


He sometimes even dares to cover


One loosened curl with soft caress


Or kiss the border of her dress.


26


At times he reads her works of fiction


Some moralistic novel, say,


Whose author's powers of depiction


Make Chateaubriand's works seem grey;


But sometimes there are certain pages


(Outlandish things, mere foolish rages,


Unfit for maiden's heart or head),


Which Lensky, blushing, leaves unread. . . .


They steal away whenever able


And sit for hours seeing naught,


Above the chessboard deep in thought,


Their elbows propped upon the table;


Where Lensky with his pawn once took,


Bemused and muddled, his own rook.


27


When he drives home, she still engages


His poet's soul, his artist's mind;


He fills her album's fleeting pages


With every tribute he can find:


He draws sweet views of rustic scenery,


A Venus temple, graves and greenery;


He pens a lyre . . . and then a dove,


Adds colour lightly and with love;


And on the leaves of recollection,


Beneath the lines from other hands,


He plants a tender verse that stands


Mute monument to fond reflection:


A moment's thought whose trace shall last


Unchanged when even years have passed.


28


I'm sure you've known provincial misses;


Their albums too you must have seen,


Where girlfriends scribble hopes and blisses


From frontside, backside, in between.


With spellings awesome in abusage,


Unmetred lines of hallowed usage


Are entered by each would-be friend


Diminished, lengthened, turned on end.


Upon the first page you'll discover:


Qu 'crirez-vous sur ces tablettes?


And 'neath it: toute vous Annette;


While on the last one you'll uncover:


'Who loves you more than I must sign


And fill the page that follows mine.'


29


You're sure to find there decorations:


Rosettes, a torch, a pair of hearts;


You'll read, no doubt, fond protestations:


With all my love, till death us parts;


Some army scribbler will have written


A roguish rhyme to tease the smitten.


In just such albums, friends, I too


Am quite as glad to write as you,


For there, at heart, I feel persuaded


That any zealous vulgar phrase


Will earn me an indulgent gaze,


And won't then be evaluated


With wicked grin or solemn eye


To judge the wit with which I lie.


30


But you, odd tomes of haughty ladies,


You gorgeous albums stamped with gilt,


You libraries of darkest Hades


And racks where modish rhymesters wilt,


You volumes nimbly ornamented


By Tolstoy's* magic brush, and scented


By Baratynsky's penI vow:


Let God's own lightning strike you now!


Whenever dazzling ladies proffer


Their quartos to be signed by me,


I tremble with malicious glee;


My soul cries out and longs to offer


An epigram of cunning spite


But madrigals they'll have you write!


31


No madrigals of mere convention


Does Olga's Lensky thus compose;


His pen breathes love, not pure invention


Or sparkling wit as cold as prose;


Whatever comes to his attention


Concerning Olga, that he'll mention;


And filled with truth's own vivid glows


A stream of elegies then flows.


* Thus you, Yazykov,* with perfection,


With all the surgings of your heart,


Sing God knows whom in splendid art


Sweet elegies, whose full collection


Will on some future day relate


The uncut story of your fate.


32


But hush! A strident critic rises


And bids us cast away the crown


Of elegy in all its guises


And to our rhyming guild calls down:


'Have done with all your lamentations,


Your endless croakings and gyrations


On "former days" and "times of yore";


Enough now! Sing of something more!'


You're right. And will you point with praises


To trumpet, mask, and dagger* too,


And bid us thuswise to renew


Our stock of dead ideas and phrases?


Is that it, friend?'Far from it. Nay!


Write odes,* good sirs, write odes, I say . . .


33


'The way they did in former ages,


Those mighty years still rich in fame. . .


.' Just solemn odes? .. . On all our pages?!


Oh come now, friend, it's all the same.


Recall the satirist, good brother,


And his sly odist in The Other*


Do you find him more pleasing, pray,


Than our glum rhymesters of today?.. . .


'Your elegy lacks all perception,


Its want of purpose is a crime;


Whereas the ode has aims sublime.


' One might to this take sharp exception,


But I'll be mute. I don't propose


To bring two centuries to blows.


34


By thoughts of fame and freedom smitten,


Vladimir's stormy soul grew wings;


What odes indeed he might have written,


But Olga didn't read the things.


How oft have tearful poets chances


To read their works before the glances


Of those they love? Good sense declares


That no reward on earth compares.


How blest, shy lover, to be granted


To read to her for whom you long:


The very object of your song,


A beauty languid and enchanted!


Ah, blest indeed . . . although it's true,


She may be dreaming not of you.


35


But I my fancy's fruits and flowers


(Those dreams and harmonies I tend)


Am quite content to read for hours


To my old nurse, my childhood's friend;


Or sometimes after dinners dreary,


When some good neighbour drops in weary


I'll corner him and catch his coat


And stuff him with the play I wrote;


Or else (and here I'm far from jesting),


When off beside my lake I climb


Beset with yearning and with rhyme


I scare a flock of ducks from resting;


And hearing my sweet stanzas soar,


They flap their wings and fly from shore.


36*


And as I watch them disappearing,


A hunter hidden in the brush


Damns poetry for interfering


And, whistling, fires with a rush.


Each has his own preoccupation,


His favourite sport or avocation:


One aims a gun at ducks on high;


One is entranced by rhyme as I;


One swats at flies in mindless folly;


One dreams of ruling multitudes;


One craves the scent that war exudes;


One likes to bask in melancholy;


One occupies himself with wine:


And good and bad all intertwine.


37


But what of our Eugene this while?


Have patience, friends, I beg you, pray;


I'll tell it all in detailed style


And show you how he spent each day.


Onegin lived in his own heaven:


In summer he'd get up by seven


And, lightly clad, would take a stroll


Down to the stream below the knoll.


Gulnare's proud singer* his example,


He'd swim across this Hellespont;


Then afterwards, as was his wont,


He'd drink his coffee, sometimes sample


The pages of some dull review,


And then he'd dress. . . .


(38) 39


Long rambles, reading, slumber's blisses,


The burbling brook, the wooded shade,


At times the fresh and youthful kisses


Of white-skinned, dark-eyed country maid;


A horse of spirit fit to bridle,


A dinner fanciful and idle,


A bottle of some sparkling wine,


Seclusion, quietthese, in fine,


Were my Onegin's saintly pleasures,


To which he yielded one by one,


Unmoved to count beneath the sun


Fair summer's days and careless treasures,


Unmindful too of town or friends


And their dull means to festive ends.


40


Our northern summers, though, are versions


Of southern winters, this is clear;


And though we're loath to cast aspersions,


They seem to go before they're here!


The sky breathed autumn, turned and darkled;


The friendly sun less often sparkled;


The days grew short and as they sped,


The wood with mournful murmur shed


Its wondrous veil to stand uncovered;


The fields all lay in misty peace;


The caravan of cackling geese


Turned south; and all around there hovered


The sombre season near at hand;


November marched across the land.


41


The dawn arises cold and cheerless;


The empty fields in silence wait;


And on the road . . . grown lean and fearless,


The wolf appears with hungry mate;


Catching the scent, the road horse quivers


And snorts in fear, the traveller shivers


And flies uphill with all his speed;

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