6. John Bayley, Pushkin: A Comparative Commentary (London: Cambridge University Press, 1971).
7. Viktor Shklovsky, Ocherki po Poetike Pushkina, Evgeny Onegin (Pushkin i Stern) (Berlin: Epokha, 1923), pp. 199–220.
8. Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse, translated from the Russian with a Commentary by Vladimir Nabokov (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964).
9. Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse, trans. Douglas Hofstadter (New York: Basic Books, 1999).
10. to adapt the rhythms… verbal contortions: James E. Falen, Alexander Pushkin: A Novel in Verse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. xxviii.
A NOTE ON THE MAP
The suggested location of the characters’ estates is imaginary, but the descriptions of Onegin’s estate in the first stanza of Chapter II and stanza 15 of Chapter VII (when Tatiana visits his manor house) reflect Pushkin’s family estate at Mikhailovskoye. For an alternative location see Nabokov’s Commentary, Eugene Onegin, vol. 2, p. 31 and vol. 3, pp. 111–12.
Kishinev, Odessa, Mikhailovskoye, Moscow, St Petersburg and Boldino were the main places where Pushkin wrote Onegin (see Introduction).
Moscow, Nizhny Novgorod, Astrakhan, the Caucasus and the Crimea are the stages of Onegin’s journey.
EUGENE ONEGIN
A Novel in Verse
Pétri de vanité il avait encore plus de cette espéce d’orgueil qui fait avouer avec la meˆme indifférence les bonnes commeles mauvaises actions, suite d’un sentiment de supériorité, peut-eˆtre imaginaire.
Tire´ d’une lettre particuliére.1
Dedication1
Tired of amusing proud society,
Grown fonder of my friends’ regard,
I would have wanted with due piety
To offer you a pledge, dear bard,
More worthy of your soul’s perfection,
Full of a holy reverie,
Of poetry and clear reflection,
Of high thoughts and simplicity;
But so be it – let your affection
Accept these chapters and their rhymes,
Half-comic and half-melancholic,
Ideal and down-to-earth bucolic,
The careless fruit of leisure times,
Of sleepless nights, light inspirations,
Of immature and withered years,
The intellect’s cold observations,
The heart’s impressions marked in tears.
CHAPTER I
And it hurries to live and it hastens to feel.
Prince Vyazemsky1
I
My uncle is a man of honour,
When in good earnest he fell ill,
He won respect by his demeanour
And found the role he best could fill.
Let others profit by his lesson,
But, oh my God, what desolation
To tend a sick man day and night
And not to venture from his sight!
What shameful cunning to be cheerful
With someone who is halfway dead,
To prop up pillows by his head,
To bring him medicine, looking tearful,
To sigh – while inwardly you think:
When will the devil let him sink?
2
Reflecting thus, a youthful scapegrace,
By lofty Zeus’s2 will the heir
Of all his kinsfolk, in a post-chaise,
Flew headlong through the dusty air.
Friends of Ruslan and of Lyudmila3
Let me acquaint you with this fellow,
The hero of my novel, pray,
Without preamble or delay:
My friend Onegin was begotten
By the Neva, where maybe you
Originated, reader, too
Or where your lustre’s not forgotten:
I liked to stroll there formerly,
But now the North’s unsafe for me.4
3
Having retired from noble service,
His father lived on borrowed cash,
He gave three balls a year, impervious
And lost all in a final crash.
Eugene was saved by fate’s decision:
Madame took on his supervision,
Then to Monsieur passed on her trust.5
The child had charm, though boisterous.
Monsieur l’Abbé, a threadbare Frenchman,
Made light of everything he taught
For fear of getting Eugene fraught;
Of stern morality no henchman,
He’d mildly check a boyish lark
And walked him in the Summer Park.6
4
But when young Eugene reached the morrow
Of adolescent turbulence,
Season of hopes and tender sorrow,
Monsieur was straightway driven hence.
Behold my Eugene’s liberation:
With hair trimmed to the latest fashion,
Dressed like a London dandy, he
At last saw high society.
In French, which he’d by now perfected,
He could express himself and write,
Dance the mazurka, treading light
And bow in manner unaffected.
What more? Society opined:
Here was a youth with charm and mind.
5
We’ve all learned through our education
Some few things in some random way;
Thank God, then, it’s no tribulation
To put our knowledge on display.
Onegin was to many people
(Who judged him by the strictest scruple)
A pedant, yet an able lad.
He was by fortune talented
At seeming always to be curious,
At touching lightly on a thing,
At looking wise and listening,
When argument became too serious,
And, with a sudden epigram,
At setting ladies’ smiles aflame.
6
Custom no longer favours Latin:
The truth, therefore, was plain enough –
That he was able with a smattering
To puzzle out an epigraph,
To talk of Juvenal7 or set a
Concluding vale to a letter;
From the Aeneid8 a verse or two,
Not without fault, he also knew.
He did not have the scholar’s temper
In dusty chronicles to trace
The story of the human race:
But anecdotes he did remember
Of bygone times, which he’d relay,
From Romulus until this day.
7
The lofty passion not possessing,
That sacrifices life to rhyme,
He could, no matter how we pressed him,
Not tell a trochee from an iamb,
Homer,9 Theocritus10 he rubbished,
But Adam Smith11 instead he relished,
And was a great economist.
That is, he knew how states subsist,
Acquire their wealth, and what they live on
And why they can dispense with gold,
When, in the land itself they hold
The simple product12 ready given.
His father could not understand,
And mortgaged, therefore, all his land.
8
What Eugene knew of in addition
I have no leisure to impart,
But where he showed true erudition,
More than in any other art,
What from his early adolescence
Had brought him bliss and painful lessons,
What all day long would occupy
His aching inactivity –
This was the art of tender passion,
That Ovid13 sang and paid for dear,
Ending his brilliant, wild career
In banishment and deportation