The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Romanticisms 105

construction) followed by a rhyming couplet (AbAb CCdd EffE gg).10 Pushkin invented the stanza in May 1823, intrigued by Byron’s verse narratives and most likely also inspired by the freely rhymed salacious verse of the seventeenth-century French fabulist La Fontaine. With several notable interruptions, eight chapters (over 5,000 lines) of these sturdy, intricately rhymed stanzas propel the plot of Eugene Onegin forward with an intoxicating and self-confident momentum. Each stanza-paragraph has a characteristic pace or spin: the opening quatrain and ending couplet are sedate and urbane; the middle stretch is blurred, excited, suggestive; the ending couplet snaps the paragraph shut.

The poeticality of Eugene Onegin pertains not only to its formal structure. Events also unfold in a mirrored way, although displaced in time. And meanwhile the unfolding story is punctuated by the narrator’s repeated assertions – tinged but not tainted by irony – that no act is evil or good in itself but that timing is all: he or she is “blessed” who manages to live through life’s challenges in the right order, at the right age, for the right length of time. This neoclassical sense of the proper place for things, the proper “pitch,” pace, and rhythm that help us to see how one episode in a life might fit into a balanced and justified whole, is as crucial to Pushkin’s writings in prose fiction and history as it is in a line of his verse. But what is this right order, and from what perspective can we know it?

Tatyana sends Onegin a lovesick letter in Chapter 3. He sends her lovesick letters in Chapter 8. He lectures her on the modesty befitting an honorable maiden in Chapter 3 (she listens but is silent). She lectures him on his duties as an honorable man in Chapter 8 (he listens but is silent). No one gets together, each slides by the other, each is in love with the other but not at the same time, and for this reason energy in the novel is stored, not squandered. Such precious, unspent pressure figured high among Pushkin’s ideals for a well-balanced work of art, and he provides several metaphors for containing it. One occurs near the end of Eugene Onegin, in Eight, l: the “magic crystal” [magicheskii kristall] or glass ball for guessing fortunes. The author admits to gazing into this crystal, many years earlier, seeking (in Nabokov’s words)“the farstretchofafree novel.” How can a free thing be sought in a closed, symmetrical structure?

Imagine a kaleidoscope: a tube with a set of mirrors at one end and a slot for the eye at the other. Life’s myriad events, confusions, coincidences, accidents – what Pushkin called, collectively, sluchai [“chance”] – are a heap of brightly colored shards of glass on the novelist’s horizon, the faceted mirrored surface at the end of the tube. The poet-novelist’s task is to rotate the kaleidoscope so that these arbitrary shards, falling out in random heaps, are refracted within the funnel of the novel to form patterns. Pushkin did not write “psychological prose” that claimed access to every irregular, messy nook and cranny of another’s