He wrote and burned Chapter X in Boldino shortly after finishing the present Chapter VIII and Onegin’s Journey, but left a coded copy of the stanzas published in this volume, which have been the subject of different readings and orderings. Only two of the stanzas are almost complete. I have followed the presentation by Boris Tomashevsky, the leading Pushkin textologist of the Soviet era. While using the same stanzaic form, the chapter is entirely different from the rest of the novel, reading more like a chronicle. The content of the chapter is politically explosive, starting with a scathing satire on Alexander I and ending with an ironic history of the Decembrist movement. It also includes a sceptical hope in stanza 7, where every other line begins with ‘maybe’, that Nicholas I will reunite the Siberian exiles with their families. None of the characters in the previous chapters makes an appearance here. However, a Captain Yuzefovich reported Pushkin saying to him: ‘Onegin will either perish in the Caucasus or join the Decembrist movement.’16
The internal chronology of the novel varies from between four and seven years’ distance from the occasions of writing it. This temporal proximity emphasizes Pushkin’s closeness to his characters, in particular Onegin. The time-frame of the story (1819–24) is only just out of kilter with the length of Pushkin’s exile (1820–25). From internal evidence we can work out the ages of the characters. Pushkin himself is twenty-one when he meets Onegin, Onegin is twenty-six, Lensky eighteen, Olga sixteen, Tatiana seventeen, and nineteen when she rejects Onegin. The poem is an epitaph to youth, including Pushkin’s. Tatiana marries, but after two years she is childless. ‘It is sad to think we’re given/Our youth to be enjoyed in vain’, Pushkin reflects in his last chapter (stanza 11).
The passage of the seasons shapes this chronology, forming the backdrop not only of the novel, but of Pushkin’s generation and life as such:
Alas! each generation must
By Providence’s dispensation
Rise, ripen, fall, in quick succession,
Upon life’s furrows
(Chapter II, stanza 38)
The seasons intertwine with the characters. Tatiana naturally falls in love in spring, while Onegin’s belated passion is compared with the ‘cold and ruthless’ storms of autumn. Pushkin balances Tatiana’s heady feelings as she waits for Onegin at the end of Chapter III with down-to-earth similes from nature:
So a poor butterfly will flutter
And beat an iridescent wing,
Caught by a schoolboy, frolicking;
So a small winter hare will shudder
On seeing in the distant brush
A hunter crouched behind a bush.
(Stanza 40)
As an example of what literary criticism could get up to at the time, Pushkin was ridiculed by his chief enemy, the government spy Faddei Bulgarin, for introducing a beetle in Chapter VII:
Evening arrived. The sky has darkened.
The beetle whirrs. The waters flow.
(Stanza 15)
Was the beetle a new character, he asked. This apparently inane hostility to the ordinary in Onegin – and other works – was based on Pushkin’s mixing of the ‘low’ with the ‘high’. It was a social as well as literary attack. Something of the sort was experienced by early Wordsworth for similar reasons, but the criticism of him was mild by comparison.
NOTES
1. Carbonari: Literally, ‘charcoal burners’, a group of secret societies in France, Italy and Spain that aimed to overturn the forces of Restoration after the defeat of Napoleon.
2. I am writing now… into my head: A. S. Pushkin, Sobranie Sochinenii, vol. 9, Letters 1815–1830 (Moscow: GIKhL (Gosudarstvenoye Izdatel’stvo Khudozhestvennoi Literatury), 1963), p. 77.
3. a weak imitator… Lord Byron: (Written in French: ‘un faible imitateur d’un original tres peu recommandable’), letter from Vorontsov to Count Nesselrode, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse by Aleksandr Pushkin, translated from the Russian, with a Commentary by Vladimir Nabokov (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964), vol. 3, p. 194.
4. No one respects Don Juan… introduction: Letter of 24 March 1825, Pushkin, Sobranie Sochinenii, vol. 9, p.144.
5. the only poetic figure in Russian history: Letter to his brother, L. S. Pushkin, first half of November 1824, Pushkin, Sobranie Sochinenii, vol. 9, p.119.
6. It was as if in those generations… write in prose: Edmund Wilson, The Triple Thinkers (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962), p. 57.
7. precision and brevity… vanished youth: A. S. Pushkin o Literature (Moscow: GIKhL, 1962), p. 23.
8. Between these two types… engulfs everything: Russian Views of Pushkin, ed. and trans. D. J. Richards and C. R. S. Cockrell (Oxford: William A. Meeuws, 1976), p. 23.
9. as Nabokov has shown: See his Commentary, Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse, vol. 2, pp. 387–9.
10. to depict that indifference… nineteenth century: A. S. Pushkin, Stikhotvoreniya, vol. 1 (Leningrad: Sovetsky Pisatel’, 1955), p. 677.
11. Ah freedom… he embraced: Ibid., p. 157.
12. You want freedom for yourself alone: Ibid., p. 257.
13. Many, like myself… distant parts: Ibid., p. 213 .
14. encyclopedia of Russian life: V. G. Belinsky, Polnoye sobraniye sochinenii (Moscow: Academy of Sciences, USSR, 1953–7), vol. 7, p. 503.
15. Concerning the eighth chapter… impoverished: N. L. Brodsky, Evgeny Onegin Roman A. S. Pushkina (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoye Uchebno-Pedagogicheskoye Izdatel’ stvo Ministerstva Prosveshcheniya RSFSR, 1957), p. 337.
16. Onegin will either perish… Decembrist movement: Yu. M. Lotman, Roman A. S. Pushkina Evgeny Onegin Kommentarii (Leningrad: ‘Prosveshcheniye, 1983), p. 316.
Further Reading
The following selection is confined to books in English and excludes many excellent articles on Eugene Onegin in scholarly journals. (Some of these are indicated in The Companion to Pushkin, see below.) An extensive bibliography of critical literature, in English, Russian and other European languages, is to be found in the study below by Sally Dalton-Brown. This also lists another eleven English translations of Pushkin’s novel.
Biographies
Binyon, T. J., Pushkin (London: HarperCollins, 2002)
Feinstein, E., Pushkin (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998)
Vickery, Walter N., Pushkin, Death of a Poet (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1968)
Vitale, Serena, Pushkin’s Button (London: Fourth Estate, 1999)
Critical Works on Eugene Onegin
Briggs, A. D. P., Eugene Onegin, Landmarks of World Literature Series (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992)
Clayton, J. D., Ice and Flame: Aleksandr Pushkin’s ‘Eugene Onegin’ (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985)