Eugene Onegin

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 show more 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. show less

This was a clever poem that is surprisingly simple plot wise but the asides and reflections make it more enjoyable. It seems that there are many arrogant men like Eugene Onegin in Russian literature, but in short, he is a dick. After a duel, he has remorse but Tatyana figures him out. His aloofness has cheated him of his own happiness whereas Tatyana has matured and has learned to accept life's bittersweet realities. Neither are happy in the end.

No wonder this poem has remained relevant over the years.

'Hum... hum... digníssimo leitor,
A sua família passa bem?
Com sua licença: é de supor
Que queira ouvir aqui também
O que parentes são pra mim?
Pois bem, parentes são assim:
São quem nós temos de mimar,
Amar de coração, prezar,
E, por ser uma tradição,
Rever nas festas de Natal;
A quem saudar via postal,
Pra que no resto do ano não
Pensem em nós de modo algum...
Sim, Deus dê vida a cada um!'

É por citações como essa que eu adorei esse livro. Super atual (todo mundo fala isso de clássicos, mas eu não tinha visto algo tão jovem irônico mid 2000s num livro de 1800), o livro me relembrou o quanto eu gosto dos autores russos, pros quais Puchkin teria sido o pontapé inicial. É difícil falar da parte poética porque né, poesia show more métrica traduzida do russo pode não capturar o espírito original, apesar de que pelo que dizem, as traduções captaram tudo bem. De toda forma, achei as rimas muito legais, é um poema narrativo mas super leve, sem a sensação enfadonha que muitas vezes costumo ter lendo um poemão desse.
A história é simples, mas a parada realmente incrível do livro é como, sem que o texto fique desconjuntado, Puchkin começa a falar da sua vida, do processo de escrita, ser irônico com seus inimigos pessoais, e até fica algumas estrofes falando de pés femininos porque ele era um podólatra. E ao mesmo tempo, não é como se Eugênio não fosse o foco do livro: um personagem moralmente ambíguo, um produto da juventude atual, onde ter spleen, estar entediado, era sinal de profundidade e que por basicamente ser um babaca, mata seu melhor amigo. O cara literalmente ficou chateado de ser convidado prum evento chato de celebração da cunhada do amigo, que era apaixonada por ele e cujo amor o entediava, resolve dar em cima da mulher do amigo, o amigo se enfurece e marca um duelo, ele só topa, vai, ganha e fica super triste e deprimido. É tudo muito bom, muito bem escrito. 10/10 show less

Holy crap, this thing is good. It's amazing. And it's only around 200 pages, so it's not as much of a commitment as, y'know, those other Russian assholes who can't stop writing.

It's a "novel in verse," which means epic poem, wtf, in iambic tetrameter. It's organized in stanzas that are almost sonnets, but far enough off to kindof fuck with your head, or mine anyway. The scheme is abab, ccdd, effe, gg, so he's switching it up in each quatrain, which leaves me constantly off-balance. But in a good way! Tetrameter has a dangerous tendency to sound sing-songy to me, and this helps counterbalance that somehow.

It also makes a tough challenge for a translator, and for a long time Onegin was considered untranslatable. My boy Stanley Mitchell show more has done what feels like an admirable job; I'm sure if I knew Russian I'd say he brutalized the thing, but one takes what one can get and this version felt readable and elegant. He's no Mos Def, but he's pretty good with the rhymes.

The story ends abruptly at Chapter VIII; Pushkin had to do some last-minute rearranging, by which I mean burning most of a chapter that was critical of the government, which really throws the pace off there. The version I have includes some fragments after VIII - stuff that survived the flames for whatever reason - but it's really not enough to be more than a curiosity.

Tolstoy called this the major influence for Anna Karenina, and you can see it. He kinda took this story and said what if, at a crucial moment, things had gone differently? So if you read these two together it's basically like a really long Choose Your Own Adventure with only one choice. Rad!

And as an added bonus, Pushkin includes what I can only assume must be the most beautiful ode to foot fetishes ever written. It's five stanzas long, so that's 70 lines of foot fetishing. I almost wish I had a foot fetish so I could've really gotten into that bit.

Here's a stanza that's not about feet, so you can get a feel for how good this shit is:

Let me glance back. Farewell, you arbours
Where, in the backwoods, I recall
Days filled with indolence and ardours
And dreaming of a pensive soul.
And you, my youthful inspiration,
Keep stirring my imagination,
My heart's inertia vivify,
More often to my corner fly.
Let not a poet's soul be frozen,
Made rough and hard, reduced to bone
And finally be turned to stone
In that benumbing world he goes in,
In that intoxicating slough
Where, friends, we bathe together now.

And if that doesn't kick your ass, you're no friend of mine.

Frankly, even if it does we're probably not friends. But we could be, if you want. show less

Fan-bloody-tastic. A novel in verse with a translation that maintained the original rhyme scheme. So good on the truth of young love, so light and so funny. The duel is genuinely shocking and the ending abrupt and sad.

I hadn't realized that this would be a novel in sonnets. What a treat to find out that this translation was the inspiration for Vikram Seth's The Golden Gate which I read 20 years ago. I kinda feel that I should seek out Nabokov's non-rhymed translation for comparison.

Евгений Онегин это моя любимая романтическая поэма, равный Байрона Дон Жуан, на котором он частично смоделированы. Onegin is a cross between Byron and Wordsworth--an utterly great poem, and what is rare in any long poem, a gripping narrative.

Having recently re-read it mostly in Elton, I found its ending perhaps the best ending of a novel. Period. Chapter Eight begins with Byron for epigraph: "Fare thee well, and if for ever,/ Still for ever, fare thee well." The narrator has known Evgeny's most every thought, but not now. Narrator has followed Tatyana to Moscow, the country girl judged by all, but: a Prince finds her. And a relative of the show more Prince shows up in the hall--who can it be? Onegin? How'd he get here. What a shift in perspective. Onegin now pines for Tatyana who in youth offered herself to him; he is rejected, though T admits she loves him, before she leaves, and...her husband the general returns, only his spurs heard. At the very end, Stanza 48, a delightful cutting off in medias, "But here, my reader, you and I/ Shall leave him, and our separation/ Shall last...for ever." (204)

Elton's my favorite translation, half a century ago:

The less we love her, when we woo her,
The more we please a woman's heart,
And are the surer to undo her
And snare her with beguiling art.
Men once extolled cold-blooded taking
As the true science of love-making,
Your own trump everywhere you blew...

And it strikes me as quite close to the Russian: yes, Pushkin's "heart"
isn't in line two, but four; but Pushkin's хладнокровны
doesn't modify "debauch"--probably an English addition in one translation.
Also, Elton has a feel for easy monosyllables and rhyme absent in the newer ones. After all, Pushkin was "translating" Byron, who would only have used "debauch" ironically.
I have imitated it in my own 65-pp Parodies Lost, published 2016 [now in the British Library], though a few stanzas appeared in my earlier Westport Soundings, under the title "Onagain." It begins, "He knew--from a picture of Rod McKuen--/Of all his race, the poet makes/ The saddest face, and next to a hound/ The saddest sound. Despair, he found/ Came hardest on a sunny day/ With a butch haircut. But in the rain,/ Bedraggled, "Loneliness," he thought,/ "has wet me through." And going in / He wrote of going out again./ Though all alone, he never felt / At all poetic while he wrote."
Vikram Seth beat me to publishing his fine quasi-Pushkiny "Golden Gate," though I began mine more than a decade earlier than his 1991.
As for Pushkin, I think the film Mozart stole from his play, Mozart and Salieri. And his Onegin is unprecedented in world literature, and remarkably uninfluencial in English--Seth and Powers aside. My book also gives a biography of my brilliant Amherst College friend, Tom Weiskel, whom Clive James knew Tom's junior year abroad at Pembroke College, Cambridge, UK. Clive James mentions Tom in his last poem, "River in the Sky" in the New Yorker last Fall ('18). Harold Bloom mentored Tom, and still misses his wit and learning, 45 years later. Tom's tragic departure ends my otherwise amusing, book about Tom's parodic brilliance. show less

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.