The Falen translation of Pushkin’s “novel in verse” masterpiece really drew me in and was a very enjoyable read. Falen remains true to the original Russian rhyme and metre scheme and adds an excellent introduction and annotations. There is much to be appreciated here; the excitement and splendor of 18th century aristocratic Russia, contrasted with Onegin’s boredom and ennui, his “spleen”; a timeless story of love, rejection, loss, guilt; and Pushkin’s allusions to his development as an artist, a transition from poet to prose writer.

And scorning then Apollo’s ire
To humble prose I’ll bend my lyre:
A novel in the older vein
Will claim what happy days remain.


( )

Pure genius, a joy to read.
I cannot understand why I had let so many years pass before re-reading Eugene Onegin. ( )

The story arc is beautifully constructed. The characters are deeply affecting. The denouement took my breath away. ( )

I read this to basically just catalog allusions, as I've seen this referenced in art and literature a ton without knowing a thing about it. I can see why it was such a big deal back in the day for such a romance to take place, but by today's standards, it's unfortunately really, really basic. I don't know if I'm supposed to pity Onegin either because honestly, he's an asshole, but I did really like the poetry and the descriptions of nature (felt like I was reading Ethan Frome at times, hah). What made this 4 stars was the ruminations of life and death (which I always love) and the description of Onegin's and Lensky's friendship when they first meet, which was very pretty. ( )

This is another of those classics that it's — almost — redundant to read, because you have heard so much about them before you start. Not only from Tchaikovsky: just about every subsequent classic Russian novel involves characters discussing or comparing themselves to Onegin, Tatiana and Lensky. The plot runs along the lines we expect with all the precision of a tramcar: Tatiana falls for Onegin but he rejects her; he has to fight a duel with his best friend Lensky after flirting with his intended, Tatiana's sister Olga, and kills him; some years later Onegin falls heavily for the now-married Tatiana and it's her turn to reject him. So it's a kind of Russian Werther, a romantic tragedy in which all the players are very contemporary poets, tied up in the politics of early-19th-century Russia.

But of course it's not really about the plot. Pushkin effectively invented the rules of modern literary Russian, and developed a bouncy, Byronic Russian verse-form (the "Pushkin sonnet") to suit his chatty, up-to-date style. In tune with his heroes Byron and Sterne he loves to wander off into digressions at key moments, and it's never absolutely clear whether the numerous "missing" stanzas or half-stanzas in his numbering scheme are errors, practical jokes at the reader's expense, or simply places he intended to come back to later.

There are also the two chapters he never finished: the half-finished Onegin's Journey, which should have been Chapter VIII, and would have smoothed out the rather abrupt transition between Onegin meeting Tatiana as a young girl and then as a married woman, and the aborted Chapter X, which never got much further than a few bits of political satire attacking the Czar's government. It's not clear where he intended to fit this into the story: Onegin and Tatiana don't appear in the surviving fragments.

Stanley Mitchell taught Russian at the University of Essex and elsewhere, and was a noted left-winger and a veteran of the 1968 student protests. He worked on Pushkin throughout his academic career. His 2008 translation tries the difficult trick of putting Pushkin's tetrameter meter and demanding rhyme scheme into English, and he pulls it off astonishingly well. The rather contrived rhymes that sometimes result have a quite appropriate feeling of Don Juan about them, and the bounce and colloquial chattiness of the original come through very strongly. Just occasionally there's a bit too much of a hint of WS Gilbert (II.10: "He sang of life's decaying scene, / While he was not yet quite eighteen."). But it's great fun to read, which is surely the most important thing. ( )