Eugene Onegin - читать бесплатно онлайн полную версию книги автора Александр Пушкин (ч. 2)

ennui

I squander the days that doom has measured out. And how they weigh! I know about my span, that fortune's jurisdiction has fixed; but for my heart to beat I must wake up with the conviction that somehow that same day we'll meet... ``I dread your stern regard surmising in my petition an approach, a calculation past despising -- I hear the wrath of your reproach. How fearful, in and out of season to pine away from passion's thirst, to burn -- and then by force of reason to stem the bloodstream's wild outburst; how fearful, too, is my obsession to clasp your knees, and at your feet to sob out prayer, complaint, confession, and every plea that lips can treat; meanwhile with a dissembler's duty to cool my glances and my tongue, to talk as if with heart unwrung, and look serenely on your beauty!... ``But so it is: I'm in no state to battle further with my passion; I'm yours, in a predestined fashion, and I surrender to my fate.

'' {223} XXXIII No answer comes. Another letter he sends, a second, then a third. No answer comes. He goes, for better or worse, to a

soirée.

Unheard she appears before him, grim and frozen. No look, no word for him: she's chosen to encase herself inside a layer of Twelfth Night's chillest, iciest air. To batten down their indignation is all those stubborn lips desire! Onegin looks with eyes of fire: where are distress, commiseration? No tearstains, nothing. Wrath alone is graven on that face of stone. XXXIV Perhaps some secret apprehension lest signs of casual weakness drew her husband's or the world's attention... Ah, all that my Onegin knew... No hope! no hope! He leaves the revel, wishes his madness to the devil, drives home -- and plunging deeper in, once more renounces world and din. And he remembers, in the quiet of his own room, how cruel spleen had once before, across the scene of social buzz and modish riot, tracked him, and put him in duress, and locked him in a dark recess. {224} XXXV Once more he turned to books, unchoosing, devouring Gibbon and Rousseau, Manzoni and Chamfort,

¹²

perusing Madame de Staël, Bichat,

¹³

Tissot,

¹⁴

Herder, and even at times a Russian -- nothing was barred beyond discussion -- he read of course the sceptic Bayle

¹⁵

and all the works of Fontanelle

¹⁶

-- almanacs, journals of reflection, where admonitions are pronounced, where nowadays I'm soundly trounced, but where such hymns in my direction were chanted, I remember when --

e sempre bene,

gentlemen. XXXVI What happened? Though his eyes were reading, his thoughts were on a distant goal: desires and dreams and griefs were breeding and swarming in his inmost soul. Between the lines of text as printed, his mind's eye focused on the hinted purport of other lines; intense was his absorption in their sense. Legends, and mystical traditions, drawn from a dim, warm-hearted past, dreams of inconsequential cast, rumours and threats and premonitions, long, lively tales from wonderland, or letters in a young girl's hand. {225} XXXVII Then gradually upon sensation, and thought, a sleepy numbness steals; before his eyes, imagination brings out its faro pack, and deals. He sees: in slush, stretched out and keeping motionless as one soundly sleeping in bed, a young man, stiff and chilled; he hears a voice; ``well, what? he's killed!'' And foes he sees, long-since forgotten, a rogue, a slanderer, a poltroon, young traitresses by the platoon, comrades despised, and comrades rotten; a country house -- and

one

who still sits there beside the window-sill! XXXVIII He got so used to this immersion, he almost lost his mind, expired, or joined us poets. His conversion would have been all that we required! It's true, the magnet-like attraction of Russian verse, its force in action, -- my inept pupil, at that hour, so nearly had them in his power. Who could have looked the poet better, as in the nook he'd sit alone by blazing fireplace, and intone

Idol mio

Benedetta,

and on the flames let fall unseen a slipper, or a magazine? {226} XXXIX The days flew past; by now the season in warmer airs was half dispersed. He's neither died, nor lost his reason, nor turned a poet. In the burst of spring he lives, he's energetic; he leaves one morning the hermetic apartment where a double glaze has kept him warm in chimney's blaze while, marmot-like, he hibernated -- along the Neva in a sleigh, past ice-blocks, blue and squared away, he drives in brilliant sun; striated along the street lies dirty snow; and like an arrow from a bow XL over the slush, where is he chasing? You've guessed before it all began: to his Tatyana, yes, he's racing, my strange, incorrigible man. He goes inside, corpse-like of feature... the hall's without a living creature, the big room, further, not a cat. He opens up a door. What's that that strikes him with such force and meaning? The princess, sitting peaked and wan, alone, with no adornment on; she holds a letter up, and leaning cheek upon hand she softly cries in a still stream that never dries. {227} XLI Who in that flash could not have reckoned her full account of voiceless pain? Who in the princess for that second would not have recognized again our hapless Tanya! An emotion of wild repentance and devotion threw Eugene at her feet -- she stirred, and looked at him without a word, without surprise or rage... his laden, his humbly suppliant approach, his dull, sick look, his dumb reproach -- she sees it all. The simple maiden, whose heart on dreams was wont to thrive, in her once more has come alive. XLII Tatyana leaves Onegin kneeling, looks at him with a steady gaze, allows her hand, that's lost all feeling, to meet his thirsty lips... What daze, what dream accounts for her distraction? A pause of silence and inaction, then quietly at last says she: ``Enough, stand up. It's now for me to give you honest explanation. Onegin, d'you recall the day when in the park, in the

allée

where fate had fixed our confrontation, humbly I heard your lesson out? Today it's turn and turn about. {228} XLIII ``For then, Onegin, I was younger, and also prettier, I'll be bound, what's more, I loved you; but my hunger, what was it in your heart it found that could sustain it? Only grimness; for you, I think, the humble dimness of lovelorn girls was nothing new? But now -- oh God! -- the thought of you, your icy look, your stern dissuasion, freezes my blood... Yet all the same, nothing you did gave cause for blame: you acted well, that dread occasion, you took an honourable part -- I'm grateful now with all my heart. XLIV ``Then, in the backwoods, far from rumour and empty gossip, you'll allow, I'd nothing to attract your humour... Why then do you pursue me now? What cause has won me your attention? Could it not be that by convention I move in the

grand monde

? that rank, and riches, and the wish to thank my husband for his wounds in battle earn us the favour of the Court? that, for all this, my shame's report would cause widespread remark and tattle, and so in the

salons

could make a tempting plume for you to take? {229} XLV ``I weep... In case there still should linger your Tanya's image in your mind, then know that your reproving finger, your cold discourse, were less unkind -- if I had power to choose your fashion -- than this humiliating passion and than these letters, and these tears. At least you then showed for my years respect, and mercy for my dreaming. But now! what brings you to my feet? What trifling could be more complete? What power enslaves you, with your seeming advantages of heart and brain, to all that's trivial and inane? XLVI ``To me, Onegin, all this glory is tinsel on a life I hate; this modish whirl, this social story, my house, my evenings, all that state -- what's in them? All this loud parading, and all this flashy masquerading, the glare, the fumes in which I live, this very day I'd gladly give, give for a bookshelf, a neglected garden, a modest home, the place of our first meeting face to face, and the churchyard where, new-erected, a humble cross, in woodland gloom, stands over my poor nurse's tomb. {230} XLVII ``Bliss was so near, so altogether attainable!... But now my lot is firmly cast. I don't know whether I acted thoughtlessly or not: you see, with tears and incantation mother implored me; my sad station made all fates look the same... and so I married. I beseech you, go; I know your heart: it has a feeling for honour, a straightforward pride. I love you (what's the use to hide behind deceit or double-dealing?) but I've become another's wife -- and I'll be true to him, for life.'' XLVIII She went -- and Eugene, all emotion, stood thunder-struck. In what wild round of tempests, in what raging ocean his heart was plunged! A sudden sound, the clink of rowels, met his hearing; Tatyana's husband, now appearing... But from the hero of my tale, just at this crisis of his gale, reader, we must be separating, for long... for evermore. We've chased him far enough through wild and waste. Hurrah! let's start congratulating ourselves on our landfall. It's true, our vessel's long been overdue. {231} XLIX Reader, I wish that, as we parted -- whoever you may be, a friend, a foe -- our mood should be warm-hearted. Goodbye, for now we make an end. Whatever in this rough confection you sought -- tumultuous recollection, a rest from toil and all its aches, or just grammatical mistakes, a vivid brush, a witty rattle -- God grant that from this little book for heart's delight, or fun, you took, for dreams, or journalistic battle, God grant you took at least a grain. On this we'll part; goodbye again! L And my companion, so mysterious, goodbye to you, my true ideal, my task, so vivid and so serious and yet so light. All that is real and enviable for a poet, in your pursuit I've come to know it: oblivion of life's stormy ways, sweet talk with friends. How many days since, through the mist that dreams arise on, young Tanya first appeared to me, Onegin too -- and there to see, a free romance's far horizon, still dim, through crystal's magic glass, before my gaze began to pass. {232} LI Of those who heard my opening pages in friendly gatherings where I read, as Sadi

¹⁷

sang in earlier ages, ``some are far distant, some are dead''. They've missed Eugene's completed etching. But she who modelled for the sketching of Tanya's image... Ah, how great the toll of those borne off by fate! Blest he who's left the hurly-burly of life's repast betimes, nor sought to drain its beaker down, nor thought of finishing its book, but early has wished it an abrupt goodbye -- and, with my Eugene, so have I. {233}

Notes to Chapter Eight

Gavrila Derzhávin (1745-1816), ``Russia's first outstanding poet'' (Nabokov). While still at the Lyceum in Tsarskoe Selo, in 1815, Pushkin read some of his verses to him. The stanza was unfinished.

Lenore,

romantic ballad by Gottfried August Bürger, 1773.

Rout

(Eng.), an evening assembly without dancing; means properly crowd.'' Pushkin's note.

⁴

Refers to Pushkin's poem

The Demon,

of 1823.

⁵

Hero of Griboedov's

Woe from Wit

, 1824.