Composed at the turning point of one whom most Russians consider the fountainhead of their literature, Eugene Onegin stands as one of the supreme achievements of Russian poetry, both for its astonishing technical rigour and its sparkling beauty as what the critic Belinsky called “an encyclopaedia of life”. Dealing with the themes of the frustrations of love and the tragic passing of youth, it depicts the fates and actions of three men: Onegin, the bored fop, Lensky the naïve lyricist, and a stylized Pushkin; and, in a pleasing symmetry, those of three women: Tatyana the bookish provincial maiden, her beautiful sister Olga, and Pushkin’s mercurial muse. Along the progress of an engrossing story, the narrator treats his reader to a vast panorama of Russian life with sweeping sensitivity, from the glittering palaces of St Petersburg to the song of serf-girls in rural provinces, and constantly intrudes upon his text to increase the suspense, mock, entertain and philosophize with indescribably beautiful lyricism. As the new generation of readers raised the banner of prose in threat of Pushkin’s protean poetic status, the book also symbolized a report of the author to himself in his act of crossing this bridge, and demonstrated in the fusion of these styles Pushkin’s determination to live on despite the parting of his poetic youth.

The novel starts in the capital St Petersburg, where the eighteen-year-old Onegin, having enjoyed a wild and dissipated youth of passion, becomes spleenful with the capital social scene and adopts the Byronic masks of cynic and dissident in rebellion, while making the acquaintance of the narrator Pushkin. News soon arrives, however, of his uncle’s death, from whom he inherits a sizeable country estate. Sojourning into the countryside his characteristic ennui soon catches up with him again, and perhaps it is because of it that he makes friends with a man of completely opposite character: Vladimir Lensky, a young naïve poet with an air of Slavic romanticism, modelled on Pushkin’s former self whom now the verse novelist regards with affectionate irony. Lensky introduces Pushkin to his beautiful fiancée Olga and her sister Tatyana, the latter quickly succumbing into a dreamy and painful love for Onegin. Tatyana expresses her feelings in a love letter, but was sternly rejected by Onegin after a stormy lecture on the nature of desire, given through his Childe Harolde mask. Utterly shaken, Tatyana was much embarrassed to find Onegin on her saint day celebration, but did not realise how much she distressed him by her evident unhappiness. In order to revenge Lensky for bring him along to the celebration and causing him distress, Onegin flirts with Olga during the course of a ball, so that she did not dance once with her fiancé. Incensed, Lensky summoned Onegin to an ill-fated duel in which he is destroyed. Horrified at killing his friend, Onegin goes on an extensive foreign trip while Tatyana discovers the true nature of her hero, more cardboard than rebel or demon, by reading the books at his abandoned house.

When Onegin returns from his sojourn back to St Petersburg, however, he finds that the former provincial miss Tatyana had transformed herself into a wonderfully successful society lady, and married the prestigious Prince N-. Now that he finally realised his suppressed feelings for her he plunges into deep despair, but finally manages to see her one early morning in her mansion. She herself suffers bitterly, not knowing whether he taunts her or whether he was sincere, but rejects him painfully as she would not betray her husband. We catch a last glimpse of Onegin, between redemption and fall, as the plot is suddenly abandoned with typical Pushkinian haste.

The work, for me, is many things: a stylistic tour de force, an examination of human character and in the influences of human affairs within cultural phenomena (social conventions etc.), an investigation on the connection between literature and life, an autobiography in the passing of youth and an exploration of the creative process itself. However, in my view, it is nonetheless first and foremost incomparable poetry. The work is rigorously structured into the classically designed Onegin stanza, a beautifully created form by Pushkin that demonstrates his astonishing technical flexibility; its fourteen lines suggest the sonnet, but is written in iambic tetrameter rather than pentameter, and follows a distinctive rhyming pattern of Masculine and Feminine rhymes as follows: FMFMFFMMFMMFMM, which are then further divided up into the combinations of three quatrains and a couplet, an octet and a sestet, or as a single unit. Despite the feeling that, even with these masterfully tailored stanzas masquerading as paragraphs, the overall lyrical structure is far too terse to sustain the flow of the novel; I have often been amazed at how the work is able to achieve the rhythm of feel of the most natural colloquial speech. This itself is a tribute of Pushkin’s unique light yet penetrating style, which becomes apparent even through translation.

Throughout the course of the novel I became increasingly troubled by a fundamental ambiguity in Pushkin’s treatment of the characters’ reality: are they poetic symbols of the page, or character studies of the world? There are, of course, ample arguments for either side, but also similarly insurmountable difficulties. Taking the formalist approach I have often been frustrated by some major action in the novel, which have been so bewildering in terms of the “real” characters’ psychological movements. The Lensky- Onegin duel stands as a case in point, for the killing of a bosom friend for the mere sake of an immature girl’s wavering affections seems at best irrational, especially later when Lensky discovers that Olga cared nothing of Onegin after all! Interpreting this symbolically, however, may lead us to understand Lensky as a representation of Pushkin’s former, naïve youth of inexperienced poetic sensibilities, and Onegin his more mournful, mature allegiance to prose (at their first meeting, Pushkin remarked that “Lensky was all poetry, Eugene all prose”); in the duel between these friends, therefore, we may gain an insight into a more clarified movement: that of Pushkin younger poetic self battling against his older prosaic self, in search of his new alliance for a changing Russian audience. The fact that the death of Lensky does not seem to remove his presence from the novel may also be explained: since although Lensky was ‘killed off’, to cease completely to be young and a poet was the same as a death penalty for Pushkin. The work thus became for me, under this regard, to be more of a symbolic autobiography for the author in helping himself across the transition rather than the somewhat awkward action sequence it attempts to relate, a statement of Pushkin’s struggle and his determination that ‘life’s chalice never runs dry’.

Unfortunately, there are also problems for this pure symbolist approach. Pushkin’s characters are themselves avid readers of fiction, and Pushkin has great satirical fun in showing how each of the characters, like those he would have met at the Petersburg balls, seem to be often nothing more than the books they read, the roles they are asked to play. Onegin has adopted the currently fashionable masks of cynic and dandy from his increased readings of Byronic poetry, but his lack of solid identity is made clear by Pushkin’s sharp observation that “he buried himself in books/ to make others’ ideas his own.” Tatyana, too (though less parodied by the author, as she is capable of genuine feeling), takes her identity from various books: we are told that when she falls in love, she does so as one of the heroines in the French romances she has read, which has planted ideas into her head; in some respects she represents the savage female, a figure of the dreams of (male) romantic writers; she encounters her fate in a literary parody, not by going into the dark recesses of a medieval castle, but by reading the books in the abandoned house, a symbol of the absent hero. Perhaps, as the book cunningly concludes, we can never really extract ourselves from our ‘text’, just as those lost in the deceptive glitter of the Russian capital can never unmask themselves. Luckily, this does not make human experience any less real for Pushkin, or us less responsible for our actions; the masks we wear and the roles we play are part of what makes us human beings, an attitude which I found sparklingly original. There is, however, no simple answer to the ambiguity of the character’s realities; in fact, the novel suggests that such ambiguities may in fact reflect our own lives, and defy simple human judgement.

Despite the brightly scherzos within which the stylized narrator dances for most part of the novel, there is an undeniable sadness within it, which is made particularly poignant to the reader through some of its most soulful passages, on the passing of youth and innocence. ‘O dreams! Where have your sweetness vanished? /and where has youth (glib rhyme) been banished? / Can it be true, its bloom has passed, / Has withered, withered now at last?’ laments the narrator after he mourns the death of Lensky. The idealized Pushkin expresses with heartbreaking lyricism his despair that the bridge which he now must cross will be burnt after this passage, that the mercurial delight of vital youth was ‘silenced ere he scarce raised his lyre’. He admits that, as he is ‘thirty soon, at last’, that colder dreams and sterner cares seek his attention, and haunts his vision with nightmares of strife. The golden days of his Apollonic youth, reckless and whirling, have finally passed with his broken lyre into a bleak imagination of old age, of this ‘stagnant swamp in which we wallow’. But despite the ending of his Springtime Pushkin wills himself to live on and seek new dreams within this ‘wretched civilisation’ (as opposed to ‘sweet wilderness where I passed my youth’), but to cease completely to be a poet, as I mentioned before, would be death to him. So even at the end of this chapter of lamentations, he still beckons his youth to ‘Come stir the bleak imagination/ Enrich the slumbering heart’s dull load…Let not the poet’s soul grow bitter/ Or congeal into lifeless stone.”

As a novelistic whole, heartrending suffering, the loss of youth and disappointment have a prominent place in the world of the Onegin, but so does the celebration of life in all its enticing minutiae, its continual interplay of truth and falsehood, and its satirical blur of mask and personality. In my opinion it thus gives neither a conventionally comic nor conventionally tragic ending. Although Onegin and Tatyana remain with their fundamental flaws, and are still unhappy and unfree (like Pushkin himself), there is no overt statement of tragedy, as both the hero and heroine are still alive, and young enough to start a new life yet. I get the sense that, despite the aesthetic roundness of the novel (its action takes place in a full circle), that life still beckons for the characters, that the novel may unwind beyond its pages where Onegin will redeem himself to be worthy of, if not Tatyana’s, someone else’s love. In his generosity of spirit the author grants his characters, and thereby himself, the prospect of regeneration and renewal. I finished the book with a deepening sense of possibility, despite the mournful adagio in which it spiralled to a stop, which became intertwined with an ardent desire to preserve life in all its kaleidoscopic wonders. One simply can no longer bear to waste it. For in Pushkin’s effort to reinvent himself, life’s chalice, he tells us all, never runs dry; life’s novel (which people both read and write) never comes to an end for the taker of risks.

Want to comment on this Book Reviews? Sign up to Edit Red and you will be able to comment on Book Reviews and get access to: Upload your own stories and poems, get readers and their feedback, promote your work...