Eugene Onegin

Introduction

1

Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837) is by the common consent of his compatriots Russia’s greatest writer. He is to Russia what Shakespeare is to England, Goethe to Germany and Dante to Italy. He lived at the springtime of Russian literature, which had gained its independent language only some fifty years before his birth. There was no unified language before Mikhail Lomonosov formulated it in his famous grammar of 1755. Before that, Church Slavonic coexisted with the disparate dialects of the civil service and the business community. With the growth of a centralized state a national language appeared.

In this new period Russian writers leaned heavily on Western models, and the nobility, to which Pushkin belonged, spoke French before it did Russian. French phraseology, often in its more flowery form, left its stamp on dramatists, novelists and poets during the reign of the German Empress Catherine the Great (1762–96), who loved all things French, corresponded with Voltaire and invited Diderot to St Petersburg. She freed the nobility from the service imposed on them by Peter the Great (1672–1725) and encouraged them to use their leisure in the pursuit of literature and the arts, as long as they didn’t question the fundamentals of the Russian state, in particular serfdom. Enlightenment figures at home were imprisoned or sent to Siberia.

While it would be wrong to say that Pushkin was the first authentically Russian writer, since predecessors like the fabulist Ivan Krylov and the playwright Denis Fonvizin were already incorporating the vernacular in their work, nevertheless he was the first to treat the major events of Russian history and society in an accessible way. He borrowed themes and styles from Western literature only to give them new twists from a Russian perspective. Although he tried his hand at most genres, he was essentially a poet. The new literary language had blossomed into a poetic culture in the generation preceding him, dominated by the Romantic Vasily Zhukovsky and the more classical Konstantin Batyushkov. Zhukovsky gave the language a new expressiveness and musicality, Batyushkov a fresh clarity and precision. Pushkin learned from them both. In his own generation a cluster of poets appeared – Yazykov, Delvig, Baratynsky – who became known as the Pushkin pleiad and appear as minor characters in Eugene Onegin. As elsewhere in contemporary Europe this poetic heyday was short-lived, superseded by the prose novel – Gogol, Turgenev – with which Western readers are more familiar. Pushkin himself went on to produce an historical novel, The Captain’s Daughter (1836), and other works of prose. His poetry reflected a time of hope among the younger members of the nobility, epitomized by two dates – 1812 and 1825.

In 1812, Russia’s armies defeated Napoleon. Yet on reaching Paris their younger officers were drawn to the ideals of the Enlightenment and the Revolution. Back in Russia, they were keen to introduce reforms – abolition of serfdom, a constitutional monarchy, even a republic. Having no influence on the increasingly reactionary Tsar Alexander I (1777–1825), who headed the Holy Alliance, they began forming secret societies on the model of the Western Carbonari¹ movements, aimed at overturning the government. Pushkin, then aged thirteen, befriended some of these officers when they were quartered in the grounds of his lycée. Several of his close schoolfriends would later join the secret societies. For the liberal nobility 1812 was a wake-up call. Officers were impressed by the courage of their serf soldiers. Soon, on leaving the lycée, Pushkin was writing poems deploring serfdom. Circulating all over Russia, they earned him the honour of becoming the Tsar’s first political victim, exiled in 1820. The years of hope came to an end when the young revolutionaries attempted an ill-organized coup d’état on the death of Alexander, which was mercilessly crushed by the new Tsar, Nicholas I (1825–55). The date of the revolt, 14 December 1825, gave the participants the name ‘Decembrists’.

Pushkin was still in exile at the time. During the previous years he had met the conspirators, but was not admitted to their ranks because of his volatility and indiscretion. However, when the new Tsar called him to Moscow and asked him what he would have done had he been present at the attempted revolt, Pushkin replied that he would have stood with his friends on the Senate Square in St Petersburg, the chosen place of the insurrection. Nicholas played a cat-and-mouse game with him, revoking his exile and promising to be his personal protector and censor. In fact, the task fell to the chief of the secret police. Pushkin married the beautiful Natalia Goncharova in 1831, who had no interest in his work and was happy only at court functions, which Pushkin hated, particularly after having been assigned a demeaning rank by the Tsar out of keeping with his age. Nor was he, either as a small landowner or a professional writer, able to pay for his wife’s expensive tastes.

From this moment Pushkin was trapped by the court until his death in a duel with a French émigré officer, the Baron D’ Anthès, who was paying attentions to his wife. Pushkin was thirty-seven. Later, the symbolist poet Alexander Blok remarked that it was not D’ Anthès’s bullet that killed Pushkin, but ‘lack of air’ in the court environment.

Although the Pushkin age was short-lived, and Pushkin himself died at thirty-seven, his work provided the seeds for the later Russian novel and several operas. Eugene Onegin inaugurated a lineage of superfluous men and self-sacrificing women in the novels of Mikhail Lermontov, Alexander Herzen and Ivan Turgenev, and in Tchaikovsky’s opera version of Pushkin’s novel-in-verse. Pushkin suggested the plots of Dead Souls and The Inspector General to Nikolai Gogol, appreciating the latter’s gifts for the grotesque that were outside his more classical bent. Leo Tolstoy emulated Pushkin’s storytelling manner, comparing it with Homer’s, and his novel Anna Karenina describes what might have happened to Tatiana had she given in to Onegin. With Fyodor Dostoevsky, who condemned the Onegin type as a Western intrusion and glorified Tatiana as the exemplar of Russian womanhood, a nationalist cult of Pushkin began that has not ceased. Radicals and conservatives fought over Pushkin’s characters as if they were real people. Opponents of Tsarism saw Onegin, Lensky and Tatiana as kindred victims of feudal Russia.

By birth Pushkin was deeply embedded in Russian history. On his father’s side he could boast a 600-year lineage as a nobleman. On his mother’s he was the great-grandson of an African princeling, stolen from the harem at Constantinople for Peter the Great, under whose tutelage he rose to the rank of general. The features of Gannibal, as he was called, still showed in his great-grandson, whose African roots gave him the romantic feeling of an outsider wanting to get back to his native land (Chapter I, stanza 50). But Pushkin was equally attached to Peter, who played a dominant part in his outlook and work (see The Bronze Horseman (1833) and Poltava (1828–9)). At the same time he was envious of the new aristocracy who owed their advancement to Peter (and then to Catherine), ousting the older nobility to which his family, on his father’s side, belonged. Unloved as a child, he found a new family in his lycée, where he made lasting friendships. He was famed for his love poetry, but friendship nevertheless remained his chief value, as Onegin attests, where friends form an invisible audience or enter directly into the novel.

2

On 4 November 1823 Pushkin wrote to a friend, Prince Vyazemsky, from Odessa: ‘I am writing now not a novel, but a novel in verse – the devil of a difference. Something like Don Juan – there’s no point in thinking about publication; I’m writing whatever comes into my head.’² Odessa was Pushkin’s second place of exile after Kishinev, in Bessarabia. In Odessa he was in the employ of the Governor Count Vorontsov, who had little appreciation for his poetry, calling him ‘a weak imitator of a writer whose usefulness may be said to be very slight – Lord Byron’.³ The zest with which Pushkin wrote his new work reflected a hectic life that included an affair with the Governor’s wife.

In 1825, he was removed from Odessa, at the request of Vorontsov, to Mikhailovskoye, the Pushkin family estate in north-west Russia, which was to be his third and final place of exile, From there, in a letter to another friend, Alexander Bestuzhev, Pushkin wrote, in a different vein, about Onegin and Don Juan:

No one respects Don Juan more than I do… but it hasn’t anything in common with Onegin. You compare the satire of the Englishman Byron with mine, and demand the same thing of me! No, my dear fellow, you are asking a lot. Where is my satire? There’s not a hint of it in Eugene Onegin. The foundations of Petersburg would crack if I touched satire. – The very word ‘satirical’ should not have entered the preface. Wait for the other cantos… Canto One is merely a rapid introduction.⁴

Bestuzhev, himself a writer, was also a Decembrist. Many Decembrists were literary men, who, like Bestuzhev, saw their craft as a means of political struggle against autocracy and serfdom and were puzzled by Pushkin’s apparent departure from the radical poems that had sent him into exile. Why was Russia’s foremost poet, they asked, wasting his talent on the trivial lives of the gentry? In 1824, four years into exile, Pushkin declared in response to the most significant of Decembrist works, Kondraty Ryleyev’s Dumy (Reflections), that the aim of poetry was poetry. In a series of poems Ryleyev had evoked heroic figures from the past as models to be followed in the present. Pushkin questioned the accuracy of Ryleyev’s work, claiming that he was on the contrary projecting present ideals into the past.

Pushkin spent the first three years of his exile (1820–23) in what he called the ‘accursed town’ of Kishinev, capital of Bessarabia, serving in the office of General Inzov, Administrator for New Colonies in the South. By 1823, when the Decembrist movement was gathering steam, Pushkin had disavowed his earlier idealism. In ‘The Sower of Freedom in the Desert’, a poem written in Odessa, he scorns himself for philanthropy and the people for passivity. Indirectly, the poem targets the Carbonari and their followers in Western Europe (1820–23), crushed by the Holy Alliance. Pushkin writes to a friend that he is parodying the parable from the Matthew and Luke gospels that tells of Christ going out to sow. In Pushkin’s incarnation the saviour is ‘a moderate democrat’ who sows in vain. The Decembrists were, like the Carbonari, largely a military organization, operating through secret societies and equally disconnected from the people they wished to liberate. Pushkin’s sympathies for the Greek insurgents, whom he met in Kishinev and Odessa, likewise vanished. Could these dregs, he asked, be the descendants of Themistocles and Pericles?

Exile brought Pushkin into closer contact with his own countrymen, learning of their folklore from his beloved serf nurse, Arina Rodionovna, who appears as Filipevna, Tatiana’s nurse, in Eugene Onegin. Her songs about the seventeenth-century rebel Sten’ka Razin inspired Pushkin’s own songs about him (1826). In a letter to his brother (1824) he called him ‘the only poetic figure in Russian history’.⁵ The magnetic Emelyan Pugachov (1740?-75), who led a massive peasant revolt against Catherine the Great, dominates The Captain’s Daughter. These rebellions were popular, not directed by another class. Smaller peasant revolts were innumerable during the entire period of serfdom. Where the Decembrists wished to import Western constitutional models into Russia, Pushkin delved ever more deeply into Russian history to seek political answers for his own time. On the eve of the Decembrist revolt he completed his Shakespearean drama Boris Godunov, set in the so-called Time of Troubles (1604–13), the interregnum between the Riurik and the Romanov dynasties. Here, the people, who take centre stage, appear by turn passive, fickle, savage, murderous and finally mortified by the assassination of the deceased Boris’s family, to which they have been party. Their horrified silence at the end, when asked by the Boyars to applaud yet another Pretender, passes judgement not only on their time, but on ruling-class manipulation in every age. The centrality of the people in Boris Godunov goes beyond any of Pushkin’s Shakespearean models. But the play is Shakespearean in the sense that no one is the victor other than history. With this lesson in mind Pushkin writes to a friend, on hearing of the Decembrist defeat, that they should look upon it through Shakespearean eyes.

3

Eugene Onegin is certainly about the life of the nobility down to the niceties of Onegin’s toiletry. But the popular element is very strong there and even decisive. Filipevna, based on Pushkin’s nurse, is also storyteller to Tatiana, who is rooted in peasant superstition and the Russian countryside. Of course, she also reads French and English novels and writes Russian with extreme difficulty. Her declaration of love for Onegin has to be translated by Pushkin into Russian. Nevertheless, it is clear where her roots are when, as the Princess whom Onegin is courting in Chapter VIII, she repudiates the aristocratic flummery that surrounds her and expresses her longing for the countryside and her nurse, now dead.

The language of the novel, although largely the idiom of the nobility, extends into popular speech, for which Pushkin was often taken to task at the time by conservative critics. Surpassing previous writers in this respect, Pushkin took his Russian directly from the streets, the market-places and the country estates. In Onegin he honours his Decembrist friend Pavel Katenin for translating Corneille’s Le Cid (Chapter I, stanza 18). French neo-classicism and its heroic language were a model for the revolutionary nobility. Pushkin’s Boris Godunov, by contrast, abounds with ordinary speech, as does his historical novel The Captain’s Daughter. ‘Vulgar’ expressions enter into the most intimate of Pushkin’s lyrics. By and large, writers came from the gentry, that is the minor nobility, and shared on their estates a common culture with their serfs, as the Larin family does in Onegin, despite differences in status and education. The Larin family is not wealthy. It does not employ foreign tutors or governesses. The Westernized Onegin, by contrast, grows up, handed from one to another. Only the serf nurse looks after the two sisters.

As early as Chapter III of Onegin Pushkin announces that he might give up poetry for prose. At this moment in the story he is responding to the harmful effect of Western novels and tales upon Tatiana. In the place of these he proposes to write an idyllic novel about innocent love and the ancient ways of Russia, but does no such thing, instantly returning to his heroine’s romantic agony. Towards the end of Chapter VI, as he contemplates his passing youth, he considers again the abandonment of poetry:

To Spartan prose the years are turning,

Coquettish rhyme the years are spurning;

And I – I with a sigh confess –

I’m running after her much less.

(Stanza 43)

The novel-in-verse, as Pushkin chose to call his poem, is a workshop out of which his later prose fiction emerges. His Dedication to his publisher, written after he had completed five chapters, pinpoints the character of his new work:

Accept these chapters and their rhymes,

Half-comic and half-melancholic,

Ideal and down-to-earth bucolic…

The intellect’s cold observations,

The heart’s impressions marked in tears.

Pushkin prefaced his first chapter, which he published on its own in 1825, with ‘A Conversation Between a Bookseller and a Poet’, in which the poet argues the rights of poetry against the requirements of the market. After a flood of Romantic protestation the poet suddenly accepts the bookseller’s case, abandons his verse and negotiates the sale of his manuscript in three short sentences of prose: ‘You’re perfectly right. Here’s my manuscript. Let’s come to terms.’

What Pushkin calls his ‘descent’ to prose is, however, more than a matter of using ordinary language. The death of the poet Lensky in Chapter VI not only sounds the knell of Pushkin’s youth, too, but questions the future of his own poetry in a world that kills imagination:

Let not a poet’s soul be frozen,

Made rough and hard, reduced to bone

And finally be turned to stone

In that benumbing world he goes in,

In that intoxicating slough

Where, friends, we bathe together now.

(Stanza 46)

From now on the tone of the novel changes. Pushkin completed Chapter VI about four months after the five Decembrist leaders were hanged. Repeatedly, in his manuscripts he draws sketches of his friends on the gallows, in one case adding ‘this might have been me’. In an omitted stanza he suggests that Lensky, too, had he lived, could have swung from the gallows like the Decembrist poet Ryleyev, who was also Pushkin’s acquaintance. Pushkin’s distancing from the Decembrists was part of his ‘descent’ to prose, yet the executions of his friends haunted him for the rest of his life, as they do the pages of Onegin.

Chapters VII and VIII present a post-Decembrist world full of nonentities with the exception of his poet friend Vyazemsky, who comforts an unhappy Tatiana on her entry into the monde – the same Vyazemsky from whom the epigraph to Chapter I is taken. Both Tatiana and Onegin are hopelessly isolated in this new milieu, despite the former’s well-schooled endeavours to behave comme il faut, which, as she confesses to Onegin, are a pretence. The term ‘prose’ refers not only to language, but to the prosaic world of Russia at all its levels. In Onegin Pushkin turned this prose into a new kind of poetry.

Pushkin belongs to a European shift from poetry to prose that Edmund Wilson characterizes in his excellent essay ‘In Honour of Pushkin’ (1937):

It was as if in those generations where Byron, Shelley, Keats, Leopardi, and Poe were dead in their twenties or thirties or barely reached forty, where Coleridge and Wordsworth and Beddoes and Musset burned out while still alive, where Lermontov, like Pushkin, was killed in a duel, before he was twenty seven – it was as if in that great age of the bourgeois ascendancy – and even in still feudal Russia – it were impossible for a poet to survive.

He adds:

There was for the man of imagination and moral passion a basic maladjustment to society in which only the student of society – the social philosopher, the historian, the novelist – could find himself and learn to function. And to deal with the affairs of society, he had to learn to speak its language, he had – as Goethe and Hugo did, as Pushkin did just before he died – to train himself to write in prose.⁶

A heroic age had come to an end that began with the French Revolution and of which the Decembrist revolt was Europe’s last echo. In poems of 1821 and 1824 Pushkin mourned the death of the epoch’s giants, Napoleon and Byron, despite his fluctuating attitudes to them. (Onegin’s study is adorned with a portrait of Byron and a statuette of Napoleon.) Pushkin was already concerning himself with the role of prose in 1822, at the height of his Romantic period, a decade before he embarked on prose fiction, insisting on the need for ‘precision and brevity’, as well as ‘thought and more thought’. While poetry, he acknowledged, was different, it, too, he declared, would benefit from ‘a larger stock of ideas’, adding: ‘Our literature won’t get very far on memories of vanished youth.’⁷

Pushkin is referring here to elegiac poetry, including his own, which prevailed in his day. Onegin is, of course, full of ‘memories of vanished youth’, largely in the digressions. An ironic seesaw turns between ‘remembrance of things past’ and the narrative demands of the present. Recidivist memories are quenched by a brisk couplet, allowing the story to continue, as in the ‘little feet’ digression from Chapter I:

Their charming words and glances cheat

As surely as… their little feet.

(Stanza 34)

Or a digressive stanza tunes back into the narrative, as when Pushkin, having mourned the absence of ballerinas he has known in the past, whisks his hero into the theatre of today:

My goddesses! Where now? Forsaken?

Oh hearken to my call, I rue:

Are you the same? Have others taken

Your place without replacing you?

When shall I listen to your chorus,

Behold in soul-filled flight before us

Russia’s Terpsichore again?…

The house is full; the boxes brilliant…

(Chapter I, stanzas 19–20)

The digressions are slower in pace than the narrative, more insistent, impassioned, full of questions. The language is more archaic, more ‘poetical’. Pushkin’s narrative in general is precise, brief and straightforward. Rarely is a noun accompanied by more than one adjective. But Pushkin’s recourse to the past is more than a question of ‘vanished memories’. It is also an attachment to past values, traditions, institutions, sometimes ironically expressed, but not always. In a world dominated by Western fashions Pushkin likes to return to the ‘good, old days’. He is constantly calling his generation ‘light’, that is, without depth, not rooted. The digressions refer either to the past or the future, to ‘vanished memories’ or future hopes. Tatiana and Onegin are likewise immersed in their past, while Lensky thinks only of a happy or heroic future. Nevertheless, the narrative takes place in the present, although told mostly in the pasttense. Here is the real world which Pushkin describes with a mixture of realism and irony – from the benevolent evocations of country customs to the repugnant chatter of the monde. The most Romantic episode in the novel, Tatiana’s dream, is firmly based in folklore. The digressions remain the locus of romanticism, but they are always tempered with irony, as in the examples given above, and they get fewer towards the end of the novel. Romanticism and realism contrast most starkly in the Narrative between Lensky’s elegiac poem written on the eve of the duel and Pushkin’s meticulous account of the duel itself. Where Lensky writes:

Whether I’m piercèd by an arrow

Or whether it should miss – all’s well:

A predetermined hour will tell

If we’re to wake or sleep tomorrow

(Chapter VI, stanza 21)

Pushkin describes, as if from a manual, the loading of pistols:

The pistols glistened; soon the mallets

Resoundingly on ramrods flicked,

Through cut-steel barrels went the bullets,

The cock has for the first time clicked.

(Chapter VI, stanza 29)

Irony bridges the several, often contradictory planes of the novel – linguistic, stylistic, cultural, social. There is scarcely anything in Onegin, from characters to environment, from convictions to sentiment, that is not touched by it. The one exception is Pushkin’s description of nature. Onegin reflects a world in flux. Some commentators have compared his irony with that of the German Romantics. This is wrong. The latter conceived the world as an illusion to be ironically punctured, not in favour of the real world, but a primordial chaos. Postmodernists have interpreted Pushkin in a similar way. Like the Romantics, Pushkin uses irony to remove illusion, but this makes his fictional world more rather than less real, which is how it was taken to be by his contemporaries and the generations that followed them.

Of Lensky and Onegin, for example, Alexander Herzen, exiled revolutionary of the decade succeeding Pushkin, wrote:

Between these two types – between the dedicated enthusiast and poet and, on the other hand, the weary, embittered and useless man, between Lensky’s grave and Onegin’s boredom – stretched the deep and muddy river of civilized Russia, with its aristocrats, bureaucrats, officers, gendarmes, grand-dukes and emperor – a dumb and formless mass of baseness, obsequiousness, bestiality and envy, a formless mass which draws in and engulfs everything.⁸

Or, as Pushkin puts it, that ‘slough/Where, friends, we bathe together now’ (Chapter VI, stanza 46). I have already referred to Dostoyevsky’s praise for Tatiana as the epitome of Russian womanhood.

Nevertheless, the characters are not of the kind we find in a realist prose novel. They are silhouettes. The encounters between Onegin and Tatiana are few, and the decisive ones are the responses to letters. There is a simple symmetry about their relationship: Tatiana falls in love with Onegin and is rejected; Onegin falls in love with her and is rejected. It is the symmetry of a mathematical equation or a chemical formula of the kind that Goethe pursues in his novel The Elective Affinities (1809). It gives the relationship between hero and heroine a spare objectivity that is consolidated by the central preoccupations of the novel – the nature of passion, romantic love, romantic literature, libertinage, marriage, the position of women, morality. Neither Onegin nor Tatiana develops slowly; they jump from situation to situation like film cuts. Pushkin agreed with his friend Katenin that the result of omitting the former Chapter VIII (Onegin’s Journey) was to make ‘the transition from Tatiana the provincial miss to Tatiana the grande dame… too unexpected and unexplained’ (Foreword to Fragments of Onegin’s Journey). But it is not just a question of excising a chapter. The characters are not the ‘independent’ actors of prose fiction. They are half-lyrical, half-novelistic. This is obvious in Chapter I, where Pushkin enters the story as Onegin’s friend, sharing the same discontent. They cross one another’s paths twice again in the novel, in Onegin’s Journey (stanza 10), when Onegin traverses the same route in the Caucasus that Pushkin had taken at the beginning of his exile, and in a variant, when they meet face to face in Odessa. Yet Pushkin is quick to disclaim identification with him. What we see in Chapter I is a fusion of poet and hero, followed by their parting, when Onegin is invited to his uncle’s deathbed, and resumes his separate status. But Pushkin’s friendship and their travel plans give Onegin a deeper sensibility than was evident before. The theme of exile unites them both – self-imposed for Onegin, who flees his killing of Lensky. Even after this Pushkin continues to speak indulgently of his hero. At the end of the novel Pushkin bids farewell to his ‘strange comrade’ (the Russian word sputnik can mean ‘travelling companion’). Onegin is part Pushkin’s earlier self.

In Chapter VIII Pushkin’s Muse embodies each of Pushkin’s feminine ideals in turn until she becomes Tatiana. (In Onegin’s Journey (stanza 9) he embraces the ideal of the housewife!) Pushkin’s friend the poet Wilhelm Küchelbecker remarked that he saw Pushkin himself in the new Tatiana. It has also been suggested that Pushkin intended his heroine as a model for his future wife to follow. There has been an industry of attempts in Russia to identify Pushkin’s characters with real people. But the direct source of his characters is his poetry. They are poetic creations. They proceed from his lyrical self. Pushkin constantly refers to them as ‘my Eugene’, ‘my Tatiana’, ‘my Lensky’. Each is endowed with a specific vocabulary that accompanies him or her through the story. Onegin is ‘strange’, ‘odd’, ‘eccentric’, ‘addicted to dreams’, ‘abrasive’, his mind is ‘sharp’ and ‘chilled’, his humour ‘bilious’, his epigrams ‘dark’. Nor is he just a Russian type. Pushkin noted in a draft that Onegin always took three novels with him: Charles Mathurin’s Melmoth the Wanderer, François-René de Chateaubriand’s René and Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe:

In which the epoch was displayed

And modern man put on parade

And fairly faithfully depicted:

With his depraved, immoral soul,

Dried up and egotistical,

To dreaming endlessly addicted,

With his embittered, seething mind

To futile enterprise consigned.

(Chapter VII, stanza 22)

The epithets attending Tatiana belong, by contrast, to elegiac poetry. She is ‘wayward’, ‘silent’, ‘sad’, ‘shy’, ‘dreamy’, ‘contemplative’, ‘languid’, ‘pale’, ‘strange’ – ‘strange’ not in the manner of Onegin, but as an anomaly in her family, in rural society and later in the monde where she hides her true feelings. In the early chapters she is always to be found at a window, contemplating the moon. Tatiana is transformed when she becomes a princess, but when she tells Onegin that this is only outward show, she speaks as she used to when she first met him. Like Onegin she is characterized by the foreign novels she reads. These, however, are the pre-Romantic or sentimental novels of the eighteenth century rather than the early nineteenth-century Romantic fiction that Onegin enjoys. She identifies with the heroines of Samuel Richardson, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Mme de Staël, whose novel Delphine appeared just at the beginning of the new century, in 1802. Although Tatiana is ‘Russian to the core’ (Chapter V, stanza 4), her letter to Onegin is not only a translation of a non-existent French original, but, as Nabokov has shown, French translators have found no difficulty in rendering it back into their own language more or less literally. It echoes not only phrases from Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse, one of Tatiana’s favourite novels, but other French sources beyond Tatiana’s ken. The letter can be decoded as a palimpsest of borrowings, while it retains the spontaneous passion that has moved generations of readers in Russia.⁹

Lensky, the poet, is, like Onegin, part of Pushkin himself, writing the kind of elegiac poetry that his creator had written in an earlier phase and that recurs in the digressions. But there is also an exalted strain in him that belongs, on the one hand, to the civic Romanticism associated with the Decembrists and, on the other, to the libertarian ideals brought back from his studies in Göttingen. In the text Pushkin chooses a more prosaic future for Lensky, had he lived – that of the gouty, cuckolded landowner. It is unlikely that this Lensky could be added to Edmund Wilson’s list of poets unable survive in a world of ‘prose’, since he is not of their mould, and his alternative future – to become another Ryleyev, Nelson, Kutuzov – is left tongue-in-cheek in the omitted stanza. Among the epithets attaching to Lensky are: ‘virginal’, ‘pure’, ‘sweet’, ‘tender’, ‘rapturous’, ‘exalted’, ‘enthusiastic’, ‘inspired’, ‘ardent’, simple’. The words ‘vague’, ‘obscure’, ‘limp’, ‘ideal’, ‘tearful’ apply to his poetry. The subjects of his verse are ‘love’, ‘despond’, ‘parting’, ‘graves’, even ‘Romantic roses’. The last image of him is his own grave. He and Tatiana share to some extent a similar sensibility. Not for nothing does she refer to Onegin as ‘the slayer of her brother’ (Chapter VII, stanza 14).

Olga, too, has her linguistic aura, more limited than those of the main characters. These vocabularies have their counterparts in European literature. Tatiana’s and Onegin’s reading are entirely European. The comic Russian debate on the merits of the ode and elegy contextualize Lensky’s poetry in Chapter IV (stanzas 32–4). These ramifications extend the range of the characters, turning them from individuals into types. Nor is it just a linguistic matter. Pushkin is quite serious about the ‘immorality’ of contemporary Western literature and its baleful effect upon vulnerable young female readers in Russia. In testing the characters against these influences Pushkin creates a clearing-house for a new, as yet undefined literature. But this clearing-house was to become its greatest monument. In his novel-in-verse Pushkin takes the same path of ‘lost illusions’ as Balzac was to do. Lensky is pointlessly killed without becoming either a hero or a cuckold; Onegin is left stranded at the end of the novel. Tatiana alone adapts herself sorrowfully to the high society she loathes, unlike the heroines of her favourite novels who die in order to save their integrity.

4

The Romantic narratives that Pushkin wrote in the first four years of his exile throw more light on the place that the novel-inverse occupies in Pushkin’s life and work. Written under the influence of Byron’s early ‘Southern’ poems (Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, The Corsair, The Giaour – all referred to in Onegin), each bears the imprint of exile. A fortuitous holiday took Pushkin away from Kishinev at the beginning of his exile to the Caucasus and the Crimea in the company of a friendly family, the Rayevskys. From them he discovered Byron and was helped by the English governess and the sons and daughters of the family to read him in English, of which he had no previous knowledge. However, he never developed sufficient mastery of English to read Byron satisfactorily in the original and depended on French prose translations. Two of his Romantic poems, The Captive of the Caucasus (1820–21) and The Fountain at Bakhchisaray (1821–3), germinated in this exotic environment. The first directly anticipates Onegin in its aim ‘to depict that indifference to life and its pleasures, that premature ageing of the soul, which are the distinctive features of the youth of the nineteenth century’.¹⁰ A nameless nobleman, fleeing into nature from the constraints of civilization, falls captive to a Caucasian tribe among whom he languishes amid the splendours of the mountain scenery. Emotionally dead, he cannot respond to the local girl who helps him to escape across a river and drowns herself while he looks on without response. He is an early Onegin, lethal to himself and others, yet elegiac rather than demonic in disposition. Just as he bears no name, so he is hardly a character, which Pushkin was the first to admit. The poem is more a series of lyrical and descriptive fragments. One of these is an invocation to freedom by the Prisoner that appealed to the young Decembrists:

Ah freedom! It was you alone

He sought still in the desert world;

With feeling driven out by passions,

Grown cool to dreams and to the lyre,

He listened with excitement to

The songs inspired by you, and full

Of faith, of fiery supplication,

Your august idol he embraced.¹¹

If Onegin did join the Decembrists in the fragmentary Chapter X, as some scholars suppose, then this passage anticipates how he might have felt on the rebound of his disappointed love for Tatiana.

A more demonic figure, this time with a name, Aleko, a perhaps conscious variant of Pushkin’s first name, appears in The Gipsies (1824), written concurrently with the first chapters of Onegin. When living in Kishinev, Pushkin had apparently spent several weeks with a roving gipsy tribe. In this poem a disaffected Russian nobleman once more seeks refuge in a more natural way of life, this time in a gipsy encampment, where he returns the attentions of a fiery young woman, Zemphira, who, through Prosper Mérimée’s translation, was to become the prototype for Bizet’s Carmen. When, after two years, Zemphira tires of him and takes a younger gipsy lover, Aleko, in a fit of jealousy, kills them both. Zemphira’s father, the Elder of the tribe, dismisses him with the sentence: ‘You want freedom for yourself alone’,¹² a phrase repeated by Dostoyevsky to condemn what he diagnosed as the corrosive individualism infecting Russia from the West. Pushkin’s Tatiana, he pointed out, refused the freedom Onegin offered so as not to build her happiness on the unhappiness of her husband. Both the indifference of the captive and the possessiveness of Aleko enter into Onegin’s character – from his dismissal of Tatiana’s early love for him to his overwhelming passion for her when she is married and distinguished. Already in her dream, when he silences the monsters crying ‘mine’ to her with his own grim uptake of the word, Tatiana recognizes this egotism. As in The Gipsies possessiveness and murder go hand in hand. Tatiana sees the destroyer in Onegin. The killing of Lensky in the dream foretells the duel. Was he an angel or a tempter, she had asked Onegin in her letter. In the dream he is truly demonic. In both the Elder’s judgement on Aleko and Tatiana’s rejection of Onegin, Dostoyevsky discovered a Russian ethos, and perhaps he was right. Certainly, Pushkin’s work, from The Gipsies and Onegin onwards, may be summed up as a debate with the West and a search for Russian values. The concept of the nation, first raised by the French Revolution, was being discussed throughout Europe at this time, and not least in Russia.

The earlier poem, The Fountain of Bakhchisaray, has no relevance to the novel apart from its elegiac epigraph and a recollection of the fountain in Onegin’s Journey. The epigraph reads: ‘Many, like myself used to visit this fountain; but some are no more and the others are wandering in distant parts.’¹³Pushkin took the epigraph from the thirteenth-century Persian poet Sadi via a French translation of Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh, where it is included. The second half of the epigraph recurs in the final stanza of Onegin, almost certainly applying, among others, to the fallen and exiled Decembrists, as the authorities were quick to suspect. Indeed, Vyazemsky was rapped over the knuckles by the authorities for quoting these lines in an article. The Fountain recounts a Romantic tale of a Polish princess captured and loved unrequitedly by a Crimean Khan and murdered by his hitherto favourite, Zarema. Putting her to death in turn, the Khan erects a ‘fountain of tears’ in memory of the Polish princess. Pushkin on his visit to the Crimea found the once gorgeous palace of Bakhchisaray deserted and the fountain rusted over. In Onegin’s Journey he imagines it still working.

The narrative poem Ruslan and Lyudmila (1817–20) was written, apart from its Introduction and Epilogue, before his exile and encounter with Byron’s ‘Southern’ poems. Its light-hearted tone links it much more with the later Byron of Don Juan, which prompted the writing of Onegin. Belonging to the exuberant tradition of mock-epic going back via Voltaire to Ariosto in the Renaissance, it is set in Kievan Russia, cradle of Russian civilization, in the reign of the Grand Duke Vladimir (c. 978–1015). Yet it is shot through with ironic references to contemporary St Petersburg, echoing Pushkin’s three wild years there after leaving school. The poem ensured Pushkin’s fame. Nothing like it had ever been heard before. Essentially a fairy tale, with some historical elements, it tells of the abduction of Lyudmila from her bridal bed by the wicked dwarf magician, Chernomor, and how her bridegroom, Ruslan, outwits and defeats three rivals to rescue her. It is to this playful atmosphere that Pushkin returns after three years of exile in ‘accursed Kishinev’, putting behind him his Romantic poems (except for The Gipsies) and introducing a new hero:

Friends of Ruslan and of Lyudmila,

Let me acquaint you with this fellow,

The hero of my novel, pray,

Without preamble or delay:

My friend Onegin was begotten

By the Neva, where maybe you

Originated, reader, too

Or where your lustre’s not forgotten

(Chapter I, stanza 2)

The old Romantic hero is brought back to St Petersburg and placed in the social context he has deserted. While he bears the scars of his predecessors, he is now the subject of irony.

5

Started in 1823 in Kishinev, Onegin was completed eight years later in the village of Tsarskoye Selo, which housed both the imperial summer palace and Pushkin’s lycée. Pushkin finished Chapter I in 1824 in Odessa on the Black Sea, to which he was transferred after Kishinev, and published it separately in 1825. Chapter II he wrote in the same year in Odessa together with part of Chapter III, which he completed in the following year, 1825, on the family estate at Mikhailovskoye in north-west Russia and his last place of exile. Here, from 1825 to 1827, he wrote Chapters IV to part of VII, which he finished in St Petersburg in 1828. Chapter VIII he wrote in Boldino, his father’s estate in the province of Nizhny Novgorod, south-west of Moscow, in 1830, revising it and adding Onegin’s letter in Tsarskoye Selo in 1831. By then he was thirty-two.

It will be seen from this trajectory that the romantic involvements of the four characters largely coincide with Pushkin’s stay in Mikhailovskoye. The countryside described in these chapters – the cornfields stretching out from Onegin’s manor house, the fields, valleys and woods where Tatiana wanders – reproduce the surroundings of Pushkin’s family estate. Exile was lonely here, forbidding the dissipations enjoyed in Kishinev and Odessa, but it allowed him to write the central chapters of Onegin and the magnificent historical drama Boris Godunov. And, as happened when the Rayevskys passed through Kishinev, so here in the neighbouring estate of Trigorskoye Pushkin found a hospitable family with attractive, intelligent daughters to engage his affections and his poetry. To one of the Rayevsky daughters has been ascribed the famous digression on little feet in Chapter I. Pushkin wrote his final tragic and bitter St Petersburg chapter in Boldino, where on his engagement to Natalia Goncharova he had received 200 serfs from his father and so become a landowner. His most creative times were spent in Boldino, but his desire to settle there foundered on the demands of his wife and the Tsar, both of whom wanted him in the capital. While Pushkin was now at the height of his powers, his popularity started to wane as an indifferent, bourgeois reading public emerged and populist journalists began attacking aristocratic literature. Pushkin’s growing isolation left its tone on much of the last chapter. Even the critic Vissarion Belinsky, his champion in the next generation, called him a poet of the landowning class. Belinsky, a commoner, strove for an embattled and critical literature that would replace what he saw as Pushkin’s resigned acceptance of the status quo. Nevertheless, he described Onegin as an ‘encyclopedia of Russian life’.¹⁴ In the new intellectual world of Russia, divided into opposing camps, especially the Westernizers and Slavophiles, it was not possible to repeat Pushkin’s universality, at least not in verse, and in prose not before Tolstoy. Pushkin’s many-sidedness did indeed depend on the pivotal position of the minor nobility and the momentary hope for national unity that inspired its most remarkable members. It also required a reading public for which poetry was still the most meaningful literary idiom. Eugene Onegin generated themes and characters for subsequent writers, but as a form it remained unique. One or two poets, notably Mikhail Lermontov, attempted something similar, but without success. Pushkin himself uses the Onegin stanza again in a small fragment, Yezersky (1832), in which he laments the decline of the old nobility. The hero, descendant of an ancient lineage, is now a civil servant, so anticipating the deliberately named Eugene of The Bronze Horseman (1833), who, no longer a nobleman, is destroyed by one of the recurrent floods that invade Peter the Great’s historic city.

The original Chapter VIII was meant to describe Onegin’s journey between leaving his estate and returning to St Petersburg. Chapter IX would have been the present Chapter VIII. In 1853, Pavel Katenin, writing to Pavel Annenkov, Pushkin’s biographer, suggested a political reason for the chapter’s exclusion:

Concerning the eighth chapter of Onegin, I heard from the late poet in 1832 that besides the Nizhny market and the Odessa port, Eugene saw the military settlements organized by Count Arakcheyev, and here occurred remarks, judgements, expressions that were too violent for publication and he decided were best assigned to eternal oblivion. Therefore, he discarded the whole chapter from his tale – a chapter that after cancellation has become too short and, so to speak, impoverished.¹⁵

The aim of these military establishments, established by Alexei Arakcheyev in 1817, was to reduce the cost of a standing army during peacetime by dragooning government peasants into labour camps, where they would combine military service with working on the land under punitive discipline. One of these settlements outside Odessa might have attracted the attention of Onegin as it did that of the Decembrist leader, Pavel Pestel, who hoped to break into it at the time of the planned revolt and incite the detainees to mutiny. As it stands, the published Fragment resembles a travelogue punctuated by the hero’s cries of ‘ennui’, as he moves restlessly from one place to another. Critics have noticed a similarity with Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, which continued to fascinate Pushkin and which he attempted to translate as late as 1836.

He wrote and burned Chapter X in Boldino shortly after finishing the present Chapter VIII and Onegin’s Journey, but left a coded copy of the stanzas published in this volume, which have been the subject of different readings and orderings. Only two of the stanzas are almost complete. I have followed the presentation by Boris Tomashevsky, the leading Pushkin textologist of the Soviet era. While using the same stanzaic form, the chapter is entirely different from the rest of the novel, reading more like a chronicle. The content of the chapter is politically explosive, starting with a scathing satire on Alexander I and ending with an ironic history of the Decembrist movement. It also includes a sceptical hope in stanza 7, where every other line begins with ‘maybe’, that Nicholas I will reunite the Siberian exiles with their families. None of the characters in the previous chapters makes an appearance here. However, a Captain Yuzefovich reported Pushkin saying to him: ‘Onegin will either perish in the Caucasus or join the Decembrist movement.’¹⁶

The internal chronology of the novel varies from between four and seven years’ distance from the occasions of writing it. This temporal proximity emphasizes Pushkin’s closeness to his characters, in particular Onegin. The time-frame of the story (1819–24) is only just out of kilter with the length of Pushkin’s exile (1820–25). From internal evidence we can work out the ages of the characters. Pushkin himself is twenty-one when he meets Onegin, Onegin is twenty-six, Lensky eighteen, Olga sixteen, Tatiana seventeen, and nineteen when she rejects Onegin. The poem is an epitaph to youth, including Pushkin’s. Tatiana marries, but after two years she is childless. ‘It is sad to think we’re given/Our youth to be enjoyed in vain’, Pushkin reflects in his last chapter (stanza 11).

The passage of the seasons shapes this chronology, forming the backdrop not only of the novel, but of Pushkin’s generation and life as such:

Alas! each generation must

By Providence’s dispensation

Rise, ripen, fall, in quick succession,

Upon life’s furrows

(Chapter II, stanza 38)

The seasons intertwine with the characters. Tatiana naturally falls in love in spring, while Onegin’s belated passion is compared with the ‘cold and ruthless’ storms of autumn. Pushkin balances Tatiana’s heady feelings as she waits for Onegin at the end of Chapter III with down-to-earth similes from nature:

So a poor butterfly will flutter

And beat an iridescent wing,

Caught by a schoolboy, frolicking;

So a small winter hare will shudder

On seeing in the distant brush

A hunter crouched behind a bush.

(Stanza 40)

As an example of what literary criticism could get up to at the time, Pushkin was ridiculed by his chief enemy, the government spy Faddei Bulgarin, for introducing a beetle in Chapter VII:

Evening arrived. The sky has darkened.

The beetle whirrs. The waters flow.

(Stanza 15)

Was the beetle a new character, he asked. This apparently inane hostility to the ordinary in Onegin – and other works – was based on Pushkin’s mixing of the ‘low’ with the ‘high’. It was a social as well as literary attack. Something of the sort was experienced by early Wordsworth for similar reasons, but the criticism of him was mild by comparison.

NOTES

1. Carbonari: Literally, ‘charcoal burners’, a group of secret societies in France, Italy and Spain that aimed to overturn the forces of Restoration after the defeat of Napoleon.

2. I am writing now… into my head: A. S. Pushkin, Sobranie Sochinenii, vol. 9, Letters 1815–1830 (Moscow: GIKhL (Gosudarstvenoye Izdatel’stvo Khudozhestvennoi Literatury), 1963), p. 77.

3. a weak imitator… Lord Byron: (Written in French: ‘un faible imitateur d’un original tres peu recommandable’), letter from Vorontsov to Count Nesselrode, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse by Aleksandr Pushkin, translated from the Russian, with a Commentary by Vladimir Nabokov (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964), vol. 3, p. 194.

4. No one respects Don Juan… introduction: Letter of 24 March 1825, Pushkin, Sobranie Sochinenii, vol. 9, p.144.

5. the only poetic figure in Russian history: Letter to his brother, L. S. Pushkin, first half of November 1824, Pushkin, Sobranie Sochinenii, vol. 9, p.119.

6. It was as if in those generations… write in prose: Edmund Wilson, The Triple Thinkers (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962), p. 57.

7. precision and brevity… vanished youth: A. S. Pushkin o Literature (Moscow: GIKhL, 1962), p. 23.

8. Between these two types… engulfs everything: Russian Views of Pushkin, ed. and trans. D. J. Richards and C. R. S. Cockrell (Oxford: William A. Meeuws, 1976), p. 23.

9. as Nabokov has shown: See his Commentary, Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse, vol. 2, pp. 387–9.

10. to depict that indifference… nineteenth century: A. S. Pushkin, Stikhotvoreniya, vol. 1 (Leningrad: Sovetsky Pisatel’, 1955), p. 677.

11. Ah freedom… he embraced: Ibid., p. 157.

12. You want freedom for yourself alone: Ibid., p. 257.

13. Many, like myself… distant parts: Ibid., p. 213 .

14. encyclopedia of Russian life: V. G. Belinsky, Polnoye sobraniye sochinenii (Moscow: Academy of Sciences, USSR, 1953–7), vol. 7, p. 503.

15. Concerning the eighth chapter… impoverished: N. L. Brodsky, Evgeny Onegin Roman A. S. Pushkina (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoye Uchebno-Pedagogicheskoye Izdatel’ stvo Ministerstva Prosveshcheniya RSFSR, 1957), p. 337.

16. Onegin will either perish… Decembrist movement: Yu. M. Lotman, Roman A. S. Pushkina Evgeny Onegin Kommentarii (Leningrad: ‘Prosveshcheniye, 1983), p. 316.