EUGENE ONEGIN
ALEXANDER SERGEYEVICH PUSHKIN was born in Moscow in 1799. He was liberally educated and left school in 1817. Given a sinecure in the Foreign Office, he spent three dissipated years in St Petersburg writing light, erotic and highly polished verse. He flirted with several pre-Decembrist societies, composing the mildly revolutionary verses which led to his disgrace and exile in 1820. After travelling through the Caucasus and the Crimea, he was sent to Bessarabia, where he wrote The Captive of the Caucasus and The Fountain at Bakhchisaray, and began Eugene Onegin. His work took an increasingly serious turn during the last year of his southern exile, in Odessa. In 1824 he was transferred to his parents’ estate at Mikhailovskoe in north-west Russia, where he spent two solitary but fruitful years during which he wrote his historical drama Boris Godunov, continued Eugene Onegin and finished The Gipsies. After the failure of the Decembrist Revolt in 1825 and the succession of a new tsar, Pushkin was granted conditional freedom in 1826. During the next three years he wandered restlessly between St Petersburg and Moscow. He wrote an epic poem, Poltava, but little else. In 1829 he went with the Russian army to Transcaucasia, and the following year, stranded by a cholera outbreak at the small family estate of Boldino, he wrote his experimental Little Tragedies in blank verse and The Tales of Belkin in prose, and virtually completed Eugene Onegin. In 1831 he married the beautiful Natalya Goncharova. The rest of his life was soured by debts and the malice of his enemies. Although his literary output slackened, he produced his major prose works The Queen of Spades and The Captain’s Daughter, his masterpiece in verse, The Bronze Horseman, important lyrics and fairy tales, including The Tale of the Golden Cockerel. Towards the end of 1836 anonymous letters goaded Pushkin into challenging a troublesome admirer of his wife to a duel. He was mortally wounded and died in January 1837.
STANLEY MITCHELL was born in 1932 in London. He read Modern Languages (French, German and Russian) at Oxford. He taught at various universities – Birmingham, Essex, Sussex, San Diego California, McGill Montreal, Dar es Salaam Tanzania, Derby, University College London and Camberwell School of Art. Subjects included Russian literature and art, comparative literature, art history and cultural studies. He retired from Derby as Emeritus Professor of Aesthetics and was made an Honorary Senior Research Fellow in the Art History Department of UCL. He has translated Georg Lukács and Walter Benjamin, written a variety of articles and reviews, and given numerous lectures and talks.
ALEXANDER PUSHKIN
Eugene Onegin
A Novel in Verse
Translated with an Introduction and Notes by
STANLEY MITCHELL
PENGUIN BOOKS
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First published 1833
This translation first published in Penguin Classics 2008
1
Translation and editorial material copyright © Stanley Mitchell, 2008
All rights reserved
The moral right of the translator and editor has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
EISBN: 9781101488614
Contents
Acknowledgements
Chronology
Introduction
Further Reading
A Note on the Translation
Map
EUGENE ONEGIN
Notes
Acknowledgements
I should like to thank the following for their help: Peter Carson, my editor for his constant scrutiny; Nina Zhutovsky (St. Petersburg) who cleared up every mistake; Robert Chandler for his devotion and counsel; Angela Livingstone for her careful reading and improvements; Ruth Pavey for her pertinent comments; Carla and Dan Mitchell for their common sense; the late Hannah Mitchell for her enthusiasm and encouragement; Leonid Arinshtein (Moscow) for his suggestions; Yu D. Levin (Moscow) for his criticism; Sergei Bocharov (Moscow) for his advice about the map; Martin Thom for his clarification of the role of the Carbonari in my Introduction; PKS Architects and the Art History Department of University College, London for the use of their photocopy facilities; Tom Dale Keever for sending me an audiotape of Innokentii Smoktunovsky reading Eugene Onegin. In retrospect, I am grateful to the late Isaiah Berlin and John Bayley for having blessed my very first stanza.
I thank the following for their warm support throughout my work on Onegin: Antony Wood, Natalia Mikhailova (Deputy Director of the Pushkin Museum, Moscow), Nicholas Jacobs, Dmitry Gutov (Moscow) and Gina Barker. Above all, I am indebted more than I can say to Barbara Rosenbaum for her love of the poem and her unstinting efforts to ensure that my translation was poetic. Whether it is or not is my responsibility not hers.
Stanley Mitchell
Chronology
1799 26 May Born in Moscow. Father of ancient Muscovite aristocratic lineage; mother a granddaughter of Abyssinian General Abram Gannibal (hero of Pushkin’s unfinished novel The Negro of Peter the Great).
1811–17 Educated at newly opened Imperial Lycée at Tsarskoe Selo. First poetry (earliest publication 1814).
1817–20 Nominal government appointment in Foreign Office, St Petersburg. Life of dissipation. ‘Free-thinking’ acquaintances (future Decembrists).
1820 Completed first major narrative poem, Ruslan and Lyudmila. Exiled to south for a handful of ‘liberal’ verses on freedom, serfdom and autocracy.
1820–24 ‘Southern exile’ (via Caucasus and Crimea to Kishinev and, from July 1823, Odessa). ‘Byronic’ narrative poems, including The Captive of the Caucasus and The Fountain at Bakhchisaray. Began Eugene Onegin (1823). Recognition as leading poet of his generation.