Yevgeny Onegin

INTRODUCTION

ALEXANDER PUSHKIN is, by universal assent, the most important figure in the history of Russian culture, and his finest work is Yevgeny Onegin (1823–31). He is to Russia what Dante is to Italy, Shakespeare to England and Cervantes to Spain, and for the Russians his novel in verse is a rough equivalent to those other nations’ greatest achievefments, The Divine Comedy, King Lear and Don Quixote. Without Pushkin the literature of his country could not have developed in the way that it did, and the Russian language itself would have been different. So, why is Yevgeny Onegin less well-known than all the other world-class masterpieces? The answer has to do with the peculiar properties of this work, which underwrite its quality but also make it very difficult to translate. English translations there have been, a dozen or so since the first one in 1881, and if we are to understand this matter we shall have to look into them in order to define the special difficulties and consider the ways in which they have been dealt with by the various translators in England and America.

This is not to say that a new formula has been discovered, and we can now magically produce a definitive or proper version to outshine all that have gone before. For one thing, each of the previous translations of this novel is an enormous achievement in itself, accomplished through hundreds of hours of devoted application and no little talent for the job in hand. English translators of Russian prose are also, in general, good linguists and gifted writers, but in their ranks lurk a good number of rather poor amateur optimists who have not been quite up to the task. There are no such mediocrities in the small field of Onegin translators; all have served Pushkin well. To equal their efforts would be no small achievement, to surpass them may be impossible, but to be different from them (in a carefully considered way) is worth attempting. But first we must look briefly at the man himself, his life and the general run of his work. Russia’s Best-Loved Writer

Alexander Pushkin, poet, dramatist, novelist and short-story writer, lived a life that was short, intense and largely unhappy. His ancestry is unusual: on his father’s side he came from an ancient noble family, and, on his mother’s, his great-grandfather had been brought as a black slave boy from Abyssinia, eventually to become a long-living favourite of Peter the Great. The poet was always proud of his African origins.

Born in Moscow in 1799, he attended the lycée at Tsarskoye Selo, where his talent for poetry first emerged. In 1817 he entered government service, but because of his liberal views he was exiled to the south in 1820. In 1824 he was dismissed from the service and sent into house arrest near Pskov, from where he did not return to Moscow until after the accession of Nicholas I the following year. Nicholas, aware of the dangerous attitudes displayed by this popular young writer, became his personal censor. Pushkin escaped involvement in the Decembrist revolt of 1825, not least because the serious subversives regarded him as unreliable, but his life in the capital was uncomfortable and fraught with political danger. In 1832 he married a society beauty, Natalya Goncharova, but penurious married life brought him little happiness. He died after a duel defending his wife’s honour in 1837. His had been an unsettled and recurrently troubled life, partly uplifted by his acceptance as an important writer, though even that began to fade as the age of prose stole over the landscape of poetry in which he had thriven. As with Mozart, who died at a similar age, rather than regretting what he might have written had he lived on, the world must be grateful that he wrote so prolifically during his short life. Pushkin was the author of eight hundred lyrics, a dozen narrative poems culminating in The Bronze Horseman, several dramatic works including Boris Godunov and Mozart and Salieri, a number of stories in prose, the finest of which is The Queen of Spades, and a large body of critical articles, historical studies and letters. His works are deeply loved, and many of them have been consigned to memory by educated Russians.

This writer’s greatest achievement, apart from the literary quality of his work as a whole, in which the disciplines of classicism mesh with new freedoms released in the age of Romanticism, is nothing less than to have reformed his national language. This bold claim is no exaggeration. As he grew up, the young Pushkin was presented with at least three different linguistic forces existing as separate entities in his large country. Posh people spoke French, ignoring or despising ordinary Russian, though Pushkin heard a good deal of this tongue from the local lads and also from his dear old nanny, Arina Rodionovna (who makes an endearing guest appearance as Tatyana’s nurse in the third chapter of Yevgeny Onegin). In addition, he was continually subjected in church and at school to the rich sonorities of Old Church Slavonic. By some miracle, almost without thinking about it, he created modern Russian simply by using it, choosing at will between elegant Gallicisms, vernacular Russian and his nation’s equivalent of our King James Bible and Book of Common Prayer, with a sensitivity to sound, style and meaning that gives him an elevated place in the annals of linguistic reform. The newly expressive modern language was snapped up immediately by writers such as Lermontov and Gogol, and gratefully assimilated by all the (now legendary) Russian authors who followed on so soon. Every writer since Pushkin has acknowledged the latter’s significant contribution to his rapidly developing culture, and they all look back with special affection to Yevgeny Onegin. The Story

(New readers may prefer to leave this section until later)

This strange work is both a poem and a novel, with the advantages of both—a good, modern story of frustrated love and death, with many fascinating incidents, a group of interesting characters who raise still unresolved questions of human psychology, and a literary manner that combines an acute sense of construction and form with a remarkable feeling for language at its most effective, all of this seasoned with a strong sense of humour. It has no equal or parallel in the great pantheon of world literature.

First the story. A young man, Yevgény Onégin (twenty-four years old when the novel starts in 1820), inherits his uncle’s estate, but when he goes to live there he finds the place no less boring than the city (Chapter One). He befriends a bright seventeen-year-old neighbour, Vladímir Lénsky, who is in love with a local girl, Ólga Lárina (Chapter Two). Her elder sister, Tatyána, falls in love with Onegin, and naively offers herself to him in a long letter (Chapter Three). Uninterested, Onegin rejects her approach and lives on in the country like a recluse. Months later he is invited to Tatyana’s name-day celebrations. By this time Olga and Vladimir are planning their wedding (Chapter Four). Tatyana endures a lurid nightmare, in which she is rescued by Onegin, who then stabs Lensky. The evening dance is too provincial and rustic to merit being called a ball; nevertheless, Onegin is furious with Lensky for drawing him into a grander occasion than he had anticipated, and he monopolizes Olga to an insulting degree. Lensky has no option but to challenge his “friend” to a duel (Chapter Five). He is shot dead (Chapter Six). Onegin departs. Tatyana visits his manor, browses through his books and discovers what a shallow character he is. Her family moves to Moscow (Chapter Seven). Three years later Onegin arrives in Moscow to find her married to a rich, prominent figure. In a letter echoing hers, he declares his love for her. She rejects him, saying she will not betray her husband. The story concludes in the spring of 1825 (Chapter Eight).

Many people who do not yet know the original work will recognize this as substantially the same story that is told in Tchaikovsky’s famous opera of the same name. This work has enjoyed a massive rise in popularity over the years (as has the overall public estimation of the composer’s genius) and it has now become a special favourite among opera-lovers. Tchaikovsky not only wrote the music but also penned nearly all of the libretto, which is a work of the highest literary-musical achievement—anything but the desecration of a sacred text, as it has so often been described by the Russians themselves. But that is another story…

Critics have been rather too kind to Onegin. The cold facts could scarcely be clearer: an experienced man about town with several duels behind him ruthlessly dispatches an ingénu poet for no obvious reason, though one suspects he is motivated by envy of the young man’s happiness. We have no space to develop this argument in detail, but readers should be warned against the diversity of false excuses paraded to exculpate the eponymous “hero”. He has been seen as a helpless child of his age, someone constrained by the stifling political atmosphere of the day in Russia, a victim of Fate, a sufferer from the mysterious (non-existent) European malaise called mal du siècle, a slave to contemporary convention and codes of behaviour, and a prey to all sorts of other unseen forces conditioning his conduct—all of this in a (largely unsuccessful) attempt to mitigate his guilt as the murderer of young Lensky. The most famous of Onegin critics and translators, Vladimir Nabokov, tried to persuade himself (and us) that Yevgeny is much younger than he really is, so that the two men might seem more evenly matched and the killer less culpable. Some critics acknowledge his unprincipled behaviour but claim that in his worst moments he is “acting out of character”. But the truth remains clear: Onegin had many opportunities and methods for avoiding first the duel and then the death of his opponent—and he spurned them all. Moreover, everything he does, sad to say, is consistently in character. Mind you, this is only one opinion; its very opposite was asserted by an American critic who believes that “Onegin is actually determined [by Russian society] in all his actions.” A great deal of alternative critical material is available to those interested in looking further into the characterization of Yevgeny Onegin.

Much the same applies to other characters in the novel, who are also open to a wide range of interpretation. The heroine, Tatyana, for instance—lovely young girl that she is—may have been glorified somewhat beyond her deserts. For one thing, her rapid development over a couple of years from bumpkin status to the top echelons of St Petersburg society is a challenge to probability, as indeed is the conversion (over a similar period) of the amoral, hard-hearted Onegin into a lovelorn worshipper near to madness. And, by the way, the famous rejection scene in Chapter Eight is rather a sham—there could surely be no serious prospect of Tatyana’s throwing away the advantages of her new position for the corpse-like apparition who has suddenly re-emerged to stalk her. As to Lensky and Olga, they have been treated rather too ponderously by a number of critics. The young couple are still teenagers and surely cannot be expected to bear scrutiny as if they were fully developed adults with a lot of life experience.

These issues, and numerous others like them, need to be argued through in detail—as they often have been in many dozens of books. We mention them briefly to demonstrate the psychological complexity of this novel, as well as the life-and-death issues that are at stake in it. These factors alone put this novel into an important place; despite the flippant tone adopted by the ostensibly casual narrator, his story plumbs greater depths of significance than you will find in contemporary stories and novels in Europe, from Austen to Chateaubriand, and from Richardson to Rousseau and Goethe. The Onegin narrative, with its interest in psychology, morality and (obliquely) politics, its musings on happiness and death, and its remarkable progress from the boisterous, youthful high spirits of Chapter One to “the resigned and muffled tragedy” (Prince Mirsky) that ensues, reads like a true and immediate precursor of the profound Russian writing that will outclass the literary achievement of all other nations in the nineteenth century. Even without the poetry, it makes the husband-hunt of Pride and Prejudice, written only a decade earlier, seem old-fashioned and superficial.

But you cannot begin to assess Yevgeny Onegin without the poetry, because this is its greatest strength. It flows and bubbles “like champagne in sunshine” (Mirsky again), with all the fluency and irony of Byron at his best but under stricter control. As in Don Juan, for instance, there are many digressions, but Pushkin keeps them shorter, timing their flow and return with immaculate precision and nice apologies for having strayed from the path of narrative duty. These little cadenzas are among the loveliest delights of the novel, especially in the first chapter, when Pushkin amusingly presents ideas on education, society values, food and drink, seduction techniques, the theatre, the ballet and the ballroom, the loveliness of a winter morning in the city and the contrasting countryside—while all the time sketching a subtle portrait of his “hero”, not sparing the faults of his character, which will determine the tragedy about to unfold. The carefully modulated developments and interruptions are so exquisitely written, and the details of Russian life are so lovingly set down (with undiscriminating twenty-twenty vision), that all lovers of Russian literature come together in nominating the opening section of Yevgeny Onegin as the best Russian ever written, and they all know large tracts of it by heart. (This admirer once learnt the first sixty stanzas by heart and went about like William Wordsworth, declaiming them in the country air.) Would that an earnest translator could capture even a glimmer of this unusual quality in a poor English version. Further details about the quality of the novel, and some technical material explaining the translator’s strategy and tactics may be pursued in the Translator’s Note.