Summary
Evgenni Onegin, pronounced as best as I can tell yev-gainy on-yay-gen is a Russian aristocrat, that seems to be the only stories from Russia I read. Onegin evidently falls into a literary category known as “superfluous men”, Onegin has drank the glass to the bottom and is bored. Bored of the fancy balls, the gossip, the incessant conversation, of everything. Inheriting his uncle’s estate he moves there with no real hopes or ambitions but is surprised to run into a young poet named Vladimir Lensky. This young poet is still full of life and hope much like Onegin’s younger self and helps to lift the boredom and bring color back into Onegin’s life. The poet falls in love with a pretty coquettish girl named Olga, but we ignore her in favor of her more interesting sister Tatyana. Olga had the looks and Tatyana the brains, unfortunately for her she falls in love, the way that only a sixteen-year-old can, with Onegin. She writes him a letter declaring her love and putting herself at his mercy. He replies in what is now known as “Onegin’s Sermon” the essence of which is that Onegin felt like the marriage would be a disaster because he would become bored with her, and eventually her with him. The tone of his reply was polite but also condescending. This of course completely devastates Tatyana who retires into the background of the novel for a time. Shortly thereafter the poet Lensky tricks Onegin into coming to a country ball. This upsets Onegin, who hates the society and finds nothing diverting there. He chooses quite unaccountably to start flirting with the poet’s fiancé Olga, they dance, and she appears to be attracted by Onegin’s studied advances. This causes the poet to callout Onegin and demand satisfaction by a duel. The once friends now face off, with Onegin surviving he is of course distraught by his friend’s death and decides to travel to take his mind off of it. The novel then jumps forward a couple years, Onegin back from his travels goes to a St. Petersburg ball and is surprised to find the innocent 16-year-old transformed into a lady of high society, and now married to a older general. Immediately smitten he does everything he can think of to rekindle their relationship but in an epic turnabout Tatyana gives him her own sermon. She essentially says that she is going to remain faithful to her husband and the novel ends with Onegin yet again in turmoil.
Thoughts
Overall, this book was just okay. I had heard Pushkin mentioned in such hollowed tones by other Russian authors like Dostoevsky and Gogol I had high expectations. This novel itself was written obviously in Russian, but also quoting Wikipedia
Almost the entire work is made up of 389 fourteen-line stanzas (5,446 lines in all) of iambic tetrameter with the unusual rhyme scheme AbAbCCddEffEgg, where the uppercase letters represent feminine rhymes while the lowercase letters represent masculine rhymes.
I did not realize this before getting into it, so that leaves it up to the translator (in my case Mary Hobson) to decide to try and keep to the literal sense ignore the rhythmical structure, or lose meaning in favor of sound? The result is a novel that sounds like it was written by Choose Goose. Sometimes the lines are powerful, other times not so much. After this book I will not read anymore Pushkin unless I learn Russian because you are too much reliant on the translator. Especially for this kind of work no matter how talented the translator is, you will be reading them and not Pushkin. That is not to say there aren’t memorable parts in the book like Pushkin getting distracted by feet:
The storm: oh, how I envied waves That raced, in turn, toward the shore, To lap her feet, her loving slaves! And how I longed, then, I repeat, To press my lips to those dear feet!
Or one of my favorite sections
But my Onegin’s only thought Was for Tatiana; not that wild And timid young girl, who had taught Herself to love, poor simple child, But for this cool, reserved princess This unapproachable goddess Of the resplendent, regal Neva. Oh men! I fear that you all save a Slight trace of Eve’s maternity. What’s given does not appeal to you, The ceaseless serpent calls you to Itself, to the mysterious tree: Forbidden fruit – you don’t think twice; Without it there’s no paradise.
I don’t mean to be too harsh to Hobson as the task was impossible from the outset, and there are some truly beautiful lines in the book, but I went through the book twice and was left lukewarm by it. Onegin reminded me of a Russian version of Husyman’s Des Esseintes. The Russian becomes a hermit, the Frenchman an eccentric. I also found it interesting that Pushkin himself would die in a duel that he initiated because a guy was flirting with his wife who was beautiful, but also known as a flirt. On paper Pushkin identified with Onegin and in life with Lensky. I’ll end this review with Tatyana’s later thoughts about Onegin:
A phantom, a mere imitation, A fashionable dictionary? … Might he not be a parody?