Eugene Onegin

No great narrative poem invites the subtractive test more openly, because it shows its removables. The stanzas on the little feet of the first chapter, the album verses, the bad roads, the literary quarrels of the day and the invocations of the muse are the book’s charm, and some of them are plainly permitted rather than compelled; Pushkin himself omitted stanzas and printed their numbers, and the sequence survived the loss. The story would not notice them gone. The book would: the digressions are its second action, the narrator’s life running beside the hero’s and ageing across the years of writing, and without that warm voice Onegin’s coldness has nothing to be measured against and the close has no one to speak it; cut them and Onegin becomes a Byronic tale. The spine is lean and every turn of it is required: the refusal in the garden, the duel, the reversal at the ball. What holds the axis here, the lowest of the twelve but one, is the matter that is merely delightful: topical chatter in the first, third and fourth chapters, of its day and removable without loss, and a design trimmed and rearranged rather than compelled from the start, as the numbered gaps and the Journey moved to an appendix show.

Score: 8.5 / 10

The disclosure is statable and holds: lives are assembled from borrowed roles, and the book shows the roles and the cost of living them. Of Lensky it says “Он из Германии туманной / Привёз учёности плоды”
(He brought from misty Germany the fruits of learning), and he dies in the diction of an elegy; Tatiana loves by Richardson and Rousseau, and in Onegin’s library asks of him, “Уж не пародия ли он?”
(Is he not a parody?) (ch. 7). A second: a man kills his friend for fear of what the neighbours and a second will say, and the duel is social form killing through people who do not want it. A third is in the mirror of the plot, recognition arriving when it can no longer act, “А счастье было так возможно, / Так близко!”
(And happiness was so possible, so near!), and Tatiana’s fidelity disclosed as a choice made knowing love, not instead of it. What holds it here: Onegin is shown from outside for seven chapters, and his last turn of heart is given in a letter whose sincerity the book does not test; the jaded young man and the girl who loves out of a book are truths shared with the book’s models; and the social condition is drawn in sketch and irony rather than tested at the full scale of the great prose novels.

Score: 8.8 / 10

The register is middle and the temper ironic, and height is reached often, the undercutting being part of how it is reached. Tatiana’s night with her nurse and her letter, which runs outside the stanza as feeling breaks the form; the dream of the fifth chapter, the winter wood, the bear, the monsters at the table and Onegin’s knife, dreadful and folk at once, which is the book’s terror; the duel in the snow and the stanzas after Lensky’s death, with the simile of the abandoned house; Tatiana alone in the empty study; the last interview, in her room, without witnesses; and the close, “Блажен, кто праздник жизни рано / Оставил”
(blessed is he who left the feast of life early), which lifts the narrator’s farewell into elegy. What holds it here is the irony that makes it: Pushkin undercuts nearly every height within a stanza, so that the duel is followed by speculation on what Lensky might have become, and the heights are local and brief, of grace more than of grandeur.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Myth built at the core and evoked around it. Built chiefly in Tatiana: a provincial girl who reads French novels and also the figure of Russian womanhood as nineteenth-century Russia came to see it, and she bears that weight because Pushkin keeps her particular, her nurse, her name, which the narrator defends as plain and old, her fortune-telling in the frost. The dream is load-bearing folklore: the stream, the bear that carries her, the monsters at the feast with Onegin as their master, and the knife, which foretells the duel in the shape of a peasant tale. The double refusal is a built pattern, the oldest pattern of the love story turned in a mirror: the girl’s letter answered with a sermon, the man’s letter answered with fidelity. Onegin is the first full figure of the superfluous man, an archetype the book made rather than found. What holds it here: Onegin is built partly by negation and irony; the folk matter of the Yuletide divinations is evoked as colour, as the Romantic ballad had evoked it; part of the national weight on Tatiana was laid on her by later readers more than built into her; and beyond her the myth stays social type more than deep pattern.

Score: 8.7 / 10

The inheritance is Byron, Don Juan and Beppo above all, Sterne’s digressive narrator, the French and English novel of sentiment, and the Russian elegy of Zhukovsky and Batyushkov. The departure is large and was costly. Pushkin made a novel in verse, which he told Vyazemsky was “не роман, а роман в стихах: дьявольская разница”
(not a novel but a novel in verse: a devilish difference); invented a stanza for it, his own and not Byron’s ottava rima; turned Byronic posture into an object of irony, so that the Byronic hero is placed in Russian provincial life and found to be, perhaps, a parody; and set the novel’s matter in the ordinary Russian present, a name-day, a country neighbour, a provincial ball, before there was a Russian novel to do so. The stake was real: the book came out across eight years, written in part in exile, to critics who read its early chapters as a light imitation of Byron. What holds it here is that the instrument is in part Byron’s: the chatty narrator in a strict stanza, the hero of satiety and the air of improvisation came from Beppo and Don Juan, with Sterne behind both, so that the swerve from its parent is large but one of degree.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Change the form and the work loses what it knows. The stanza is the instrument of the book’s double vision: a quatrain lifts, the enclosed quatrain turns, and the couplet lands, often with a laugh, so that feeling and its deflation are joined in every fourteen lines, and the reader is made to feel and to watch himself feeling. The narrator’s presence is the form’s second instrument: the book knows that its people are made of books because the man telling it is visibly making one, discussing his rhymes and ageing across the years of its writing. The two letters set outside the stanza are its sharpest knowledge: when Tatiana and then Onegin speak without guard, the stanza falls away, and its return marks the world closing over them. The structure is a mirror, letter, refusal and lecture in the fourth chapter against letter, refusal and reproach in the eighth, and the symmetry is the meaning: the roles exchange, and time does not. Held just off the top because the Journey set after the eighth chapter and the numbered blanks loosen the frame the mirror closes.

Score: 9.3 / 10

Evidence, not promise. Belinsky’s articles of the 1840s, with the phrase “an encyclopedia of Russian life”; Dostoevsky’s Pushkin speech of 1880, which made Tatiana the Russian soul and Onegin the wanderer; Tynyanov in the 1920s, reading the poem as a structure of verbal planes; Bakhtin, who used it to show the novel as a meeting of languages; Nabokov’s version of 1964, which started a famous quarrel over whether verse can be translated at all, and his commentary; Lotman’s commentary (1980) and his studies of the everyday life the text stands on. The questions stay open: whether Onegin’s late love is love or the pull of what is now forbidden; whether Tatiana’s fidelity is virtue, defeat or a choice of selfhood; who the narrator is, and how near to Pushkin; why the book stops in mid-scene, on the husband’s spurs. What holds it here: much of the yield is philology, the allusions, the prosody, the gallicisms and the manners of the 1820s, the return of a dense surface more than of an unresolved centre; what happens is clear and why it happens is told, and the centre, once read, is less contested than the centres of the great prose novels.

Score: 9.0 / 10

The field is Russian literature of the first half of the nineteenth century and, through it, the European novel. The force: the book founded the realist Russian novel, in verse, before Russia had a prose novel to speak of, made the contemporary Russian scene a fit subject for high art, fixed a literary Russian of conversational ease, and set the pattern of a gifted man who cannot act beside a woman of greater moral strength than he. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Lermontov’s Pechorin descends from Onegin directly, and the line of superfluous men runs through Herzen, Turgenev’s Rudin and Goncharov’s Oblomov; Tatiana stands behind the heroines of Turgenev and Tolstoy; Dostoevsky argued with the book in public. Beyond Russia it runs through Tchaikovsky’s opera (1879), the translators, and Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate (1986), a novel written whole in Onegin stanzas. What holds it here: the book had heirs as a literature but almost none as a form, since the novel in verse did not become a kind, and its reach outside Russian is narrow and runs largely through other works and other media, because the poetry does not cross.

Score: 9.1 / 10

Survival of the text, weighed on form, presence and fabric. Form: whole, in Pushkin’s own editions of 1833 and 1837, with authorial gaps that are part of the work; the burned tenth chapter was never in it, and nothing that makes the work is lost. Presence: in its own language as wide as any book’s, taught in every Russian school through every regime, quoted as proverb, its stanzas held by heart by readers who have read nothing else in verse; translated into most written languages and many times into English; alive also on the stage through Tchaikovsky. Fabric: the surface is fixed to a moment, the fashions, the restaurants, the theatre of the 1820s, and has outlived it; the details are read now as the life of the book, not its datedness. What holds it here: nearly two centuries with presence total in its language earns the figure, and no more, because abroad it is read chiefly in the academy and in translations that by common consent lose the poem, a narrower presence than that of the great Russian novels.

Score: 9.1 / 10

Judged on Pushkin’s Russian, and this is the axis on which the book is surest. The stanza is his own invention and is held through the whole book without monotony; its variety inside the fixed scheme is the craft: syntax runs across the quatrains or stops dead at them, now one sentence through fourteen lines, now broken into dialogue, now a list, and the couplet can be epigram, sigh or shrug. The opening, “Мой дядя самых честных правил”
(My uncle, of most honest principles), puts the voice, the hero and the irony in one line. The aphorism lands in the couplet: “Привычка свыше нам дана: / Замена счастию она”
(Habit is given us from above in place of happiness). The registers are many and each exact: Lensky’s elegy, “Куда, куда вы удалились, / Весны моей златые дни?”
(Whither, whither have you gone, golden days of my spring?), parodied and mourned in one; the nurse’s peasant speech; the society’s French; and Tatiana’s letter, in which a girl who writes Russian badly writes Russian’s most famous letter. The language set the standard of literary Russian. What holds it a step from the top is the making beyond the verse: the plot leans on coincidence, Onegin returning to find, at the one ball, the one woman; the hero is a sketch for seven chapters; and the Journey is a fragment appended. Judged on the passages known in the Russian, not on every stanza; nothing in them is slack.

Score: 9.5 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the dandy’s day in the first chapter, the barber, the ballet, the champagne; and Tatiana’s dream, a folk nightmare of a bear and a hut of monsters. One law governs them: each is a life lived through received forms, the fashion and the folk tale, and the narrator’s voice holds both at the same distance, fond and exact. The comic and the fatal obey the same physics: the duel arises from the comedy of manners at the name-day and is carried out by its rules, so that Lensky dies of etiquette. Tatiana’s letter breaks the stanza and her refusal keeps a form she chooses; Onegin learns feeling when the form forbids it. The tone moves from banter to elegy and back within a stanza without breaking. What holds it here are the joints of a book composed over eight years and in several moods: the satiric Petersburg of the first chapter and the grave Tatiana of the eighth are almost different books, the narrator who began as Onegin’s friend ends as Tatiana’s admirer, and the omitted stanzas and the Journey, apart in manner, show the trimmed design.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Within its limits the orders held are many, and held, not listed. Consciousness: Onegin’s ennui, Tatiana’s love and her self-command, Lensky’s illusion, and the narrator’s own life, exile and memory. The family: the Larins, the mother’s marriage, the nurse who was married at thirteen, a funeral, the marriage market in Moscow. Society in three registers: the capital, the provincial gentry and its neighbours, Moscow; the ball, the duel code. The natural order, in the seasons turned through the year; folk belief, in the divinations and the dream; literature itself, as an order of life; and death, in the duel and the grave by the stream. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: for an encyclopedia of Russian life the book holds little of the state, of work or of the sacred. History is almost absent, the political stanzas having gone into the fire; labour is glimpsed, in Onegin’s light reform of the corvée and the peasants seen from the manor, and the sacred is folk belief at most. It is a novel of the gentry and of three or four persons, it holds less than the great prose novels hold, and the figure says so.

Score: 8.4 / 10