ALEXANDER PUSHKIN YEVGENY
ONEGIN
—A Novel in Verse—
Translated from the Russian
with an introduction
and a note on the translation by
ANTHONY BRIGGS
PUSHKIN PRESS
LONDON
CONTENTS
Title Page
Introduction
Translator’s Note
Previous English Translations of Yevgeny Onegin
YEVGENY ONEGIN
Epigraph
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
About the Publisher
Copyright
INTRODUCTION
ALEXANDER PUSHKIN is, by universal assent, the most important figure in the history of Russian culture, and his finest work is Yevgeny Onegin (1823–31). He is to Russia what Dante is to Italy, Shakespeare to England and Cervantes to Spain, and for the Russians his novel in verse is a rough equivalent to those other nations’ greatest achievefments, The Divine Comedy, King Lear and Don Quixote. Without Pushkin the literature of his country could not have developed in the way that it did, and the Russian language itself would have been different. So, why is Yevgeny Onegin less well-known than all the other world-class masterpieces? The answer has to do with the peculiar properties of this work, which underwrite its quality but also make it very difficult to translate. English translations there have been, a dozen or so since the first one in 1881, and if we are to understand this matter we shall have to look into them in order to define the special difficulties and consider the ways in which they have been dealt with by the various translators in England and America.
This is not to say that a new formula has been discovered, and we can now magically produce a definitive or proper version to outshine all that have gone before. For one thing, each of the previous translations of this novel is an enormous achievement in itself, accomplished through hundreds of hours of devoted application and no little talent for the job in hand. English translators of Russian prose are also, in general, good linguists and gifted writers, but in their ranks lurk a good number of rather poor amateur optimists who have not been quite up to the task. There are no such mediocrities in the small field of Onegin translators; all have served Pushkin well. To equal their efforts would be no small achievement, to surpass them may be impossible, but to be different from them (in a carefully considered way) is worth attempting. But first we must look briefly at the man himself, his life and the general run of his work. Russia’s Best-Loved Writer
Alexander Pushkin, poet, dramatist, novelist and short-story writer, lived a life that was short, intense and largely unhappy. His ancestry is unusuaclass="underline" on his father’s side he came from an ancient noble family, and, on his mother’s, his great-grandfather had been brought as a black slave boy from Abyssinia, eventually to become a long-living favourite of Peter the Great. The poet was always proud of his African origins.
Born in Moscow in 1799, he attended the lycée at Tsarskoye Selo, where his talent for poetry first emerged. In 1817 he entered government service, but because of his liberal views he was exiled to the south in 1820. In 1824 he was dismissed from the service and sent into house arrest near Pskov, from where he did not return to Moscow until after the accession of Nicholas I the following year. Nicholas, aware of the dangerous attitudes displayed by this popular young writer, became his personal censor. Pushkin escaped involvement in the Decembrist revolt of 1825, not least because the serious subversives regarded him as unreliable, but his life in the capital was uncomfortable and fraught with political danger. In 1832 he married a society beauty, Natalya Goncharova, but penurious married life brought him little happiness. He died after a duel defending his wife’s honour in 1837. His had been an unsettled and recurrently troubled life, partly uplifted by his acceptance as an important writer, though even that began to fade as the age of prose stole over the landscape of poetry in which he had thriven. As with Mozart, who died at a similar age, rather than regretting what he might have written had he lived on, the world must be grateful that he wrote so prolifically during his short life. Pushkin was the author of eight hundred lyrics, a dozen narrative poems culminating in The Bronze Horseman, several dramatic works including Boris Godunov and Mozart and Salieri, a number of stories in prose, the finest of which is The Queen of Spades, and a large body of critical articles, historical studies and letters. His works are deeply loved, and many of them have been consigned to memory by educated Russians.
This writer’s greatest achievement, apart from the literary quality of his work as a whole, in which the disciplines of classicism mesh with new freedoms released in the age of Romanticism, is nothing less than to have reformed his national language. This bold claim is no exaggeration. As he grew up, the young Pushkin was presented with at least three different linguistic forces existing as separate entities in his large country. Posh people spoke French, ignoring or despising ordinary Russian, though Pushkin heard a good deal of this tongue from the local lads and also from his dear old nanny, Arina Rodionovna (who makes an endearing guest appearance as Tatyana’s nurse in the third chapter of Yevgeny Onegin). In addition, he was continually subjected in church and at school to the rich sonorities of Old Church Slavonic. By some miracle, almost without thinking about it, he created modern Russian simply by using it, choosing at will between elegant Gallicisms, vernacular Russian and his nation’s equivalent of our King James Bible and Book of Common Prayer, with a sensitivity to sound, style and meaning that gives him an elevated place in the annals of linguistic reform. The newly expressive modern language was snapped up immediately by writers such as Lermontov and Gogol, and gratefully assimilated by all the (now legendary) Russian authors who followed on so soon. Every writer since Pushkin has acknowledged the latter’s significant contribution to his rapidly developing culture, and they all look back with special affection to Yevgeny Onegin. The Story
(New readers may prefer to leave this section until later)
This strange work is both a poem and a novel, with the advantages of both—a good, modern story of frustrated love and death, with many fascinating incidents, a group of interesting characters who raise still unresolved questions of human psychology, and a literary manner that combines an acute sense of construction and form with a remarkable feeling for language at its most effective, all of this seasoned with a strong sense of humour. It has no equal or parallel in the great pantheon of world literature.
First the story. A young man, Yevgény Onégin (twenty-four years old when the novel starts in 1820), inherits his uncle’s estate, but when he goes to live there he finds the place no less boring than the city (Chapter One). He befriends a bright seventeen-year-old neighbour, Vladímir Lénsky, who is in love with a local girl, Ólga Lárina (Chapter Two). Her elder sister, Tatyána, falls in love with Onegin, and naively offers herself to him in a long letter (Chapter Three). Uninterested, Onegin rejects her approach and lives on in the country like a recluse. Months later he is invited to Tatyana’s name-day celebrations. By this time Olga and Vladimir are planning their wedding (Chapter Four). Tatyana endures a lurid nightmare, in which she is rescued by Onegin, who then stabs Lensky. The evening dance is too provincial and rustic to merit being called a ball; nevertheless, Onegin is furious with Lensky for drawing him into a grander occasion than he had anticipated, and he monopolizes Olga to an insulting degree. Lensky has no option but to challenge his “friend” to a duel (Chapter Five). He is shot dead (Chapter Six). Onegin departs. Tatyana visits his manor, browses through his books and discovers what a shallow character he is. Her family moves to Moscow (Chapter Seven). Three years later Onegin arrives in Moscow to find her married to a rich, prominent figure. In a letter echoing hers, he declares his love for her. She rejects him, saying she will not betray her husband. The story concludes in the spring of 1825 (Chapter Eight).