Eugene Onegin

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

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

A wonderful novel from early 19th century Russia, translated into clear and readable English prose in this edition. The narrator is a minor character and keeps us entertained throughout, with a great variety of tone and digression, but always coming back to the main story. The story is intensely Russian - vastness of sky and countryside, contrast between country and city, country customs, fashionable society in town, ways to avoid boredom or to succumb to it, family entertainments, love-hate relations with France and the French, memorable characters, even the minor ones - and packs a wonderful story into less than 150 pages. Amid all this, the central love story, between Onegin and Tatiana, is told with delicacy, beauty and show more psychological insight. Definitely one to re-read. 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

So... this is Pride & Prejudice isn’t it? I mean you have the 2 guys and 2 girls, the optimistic one and the prideful cynic, the more introspective girl falls for the cynic, at one point she even goes to his house and mooches about while he’s away... this is distinctly Pride & Prejudice shaped.

Not to say it goes in the same direction, far from it.. but i won’t say more about that as it will spoil things.

This is poetry and translated which can be iffy, i can't judge the quality of the translations, i started with whatever one is on Gutenberg but my ancient ereader seemed to have some trouble with the file and i eventually switched to the version on the PoetryinTranslation site. It seemed good enough.

Main issue with this is the show more author finds it really hard to stay on topic, especially in the early sections. And when his mind wandered mine often followed, i glazed over several times. However when its actually telling the story its pretty good.
I was tempted to give it 4-stars due to the strong later sections but restrained myself. show less

I first encountered this at Endellion, when we were singing the Tchaik adaptation. I'm fascinated by the way in which Pushkin uses himself as a narrator and character all at once; want to punch Onegin in the head; and am fairly unconvinced by Tatyana as a romantic heroine. I know, I know, total blasphemy, but there you have it.

I suspect this may be the first appearance of the Meg Murry type in literature, which bears examination -- the quiet, bookish, outsider who is so prized by writers like myself as characters we identified with.

The notes in this version range from utterly inadequate to stunningly obvious. It's better than the Constance Garrett translation, but that's like saying a root canal is better than death by drowning.