Many people who do not yet know the original work will recognize this as substantially the same story that is told in Tchaikovsky’s famous opera of the same name. This work has enjoyed a massive rise in popularity over the years (as has the overall public estimation of the composer’s genius) and it has now become a special favourite among opera-lovers. Tchaikovsky not only wrote the music but also penned nearly all of the libretto, which is a work of the highest literary-musical achievement—anything but the desecration of a sacred text, as it has so often been described by the Russians themselves. But that is another story…
Critics have been rather too kind to Onegin. The cold facts could scarcely be clearer: an experienced man about town with several duels behind him ruthlessly dispatches an ingénu poet for no obvious reason, though one suspects he is motivated by envy of the young man’s happiness. We have no space to develop this argument in detail, but readers should be warned against the diversity of false excuses paraded to exculpate the eponymous “hero”. He has been seen as a helpless child of his age, someone constrained by the stifling political atmosphere of the day in Russia, a victim of Fate, a sufferer from the mysterious (non-existent) European malaise called mal du siècle, a slave to contemporary convention and codes of behaviour, and a prey to all sorts of other unseen forces conditioning his conduct—all of this in a (largely unsuccessful) attempt to mitigate his guilt as the murderer of young Lensky. The most famous of Onegin critics and translators, Vladimir Nabokov, tried to persuade himself (and us) that Yevgeny is much younger than he really is, so that the two men might seem more evenly matched and the killer less culpable. Some critics acknowledge his unprincipled behaviour but claim that in his worst moments he is “acting out of character”. But the truth remains clear: Onegin had many opportunities and methods for avoiding first the duel and then the death of his opponent—and he spurned them all. Moreover, everything he does, sad to say, is consistently in character. Mind you, this is only one opinion; its very opposite was asserted by an American critic who believes that “Onegin is actually determined [by Russian society] in all his actions.” A great deal of alternative critical material is available to those interested in looking further into the characterization of Yevgeny Onegin.
Much the same applies to other characters in the novel, who are also open to a wide range of interpretation. The heroine, Tatyana, for instance—lovely young girl that she is—may have been glorified somewhat beyond her deserts. For one thing, her rapid development over a couple of years from bumpkin status to the top echelons of St Petersburg society is a challenge to probability, as indeed is the conversion (over a similar period) of the amoral, hard-hearted Onegin into a lovelorn worshipper near to madness. And, by the way, the famous rejection scene in Chapter Eight is rather a sham—there could surely be no serious prospect of Tatyana’s throwing away the advantages of her new position for the corpse-like apparition who has suddenly re-emerged to stalk her. As to Lensky and Olga, they have been treated rather too ponderously by a number of critics. The young couple are still teenagers and surely cannot be expected to bear scrutiny as if they were fully developed adults with a lot of life experience.
These issues, and numerous others like them, need to be argued through in detail—as they often have been in many dozens of books. We mention them briefly to demonstrate the psychological complexity of this novel, as well as the life-and-death issues that are at stake in it. These factors alone put this novel into an important place; despite the flippant tone adopted by the ostensibly casual narrator, his story plumbs greater depths of significance than you will find in contemporary stories and novels in Europe, from Austen to Chateaubriand, and from Richardson to Rousseau and Goethe. The Onegin narrative, with its interest in psychology, morality and (obliquely) politics, its musings on happiness and death, and its remarkable progress from the boisterous, youthful high spirits of Chapter One to “the resigned and muffled tragedy” (Prince Mirsky) that ensues, reads like a true and immediate precursor of the profound Russian writing that will outclass the literary achievement of all other nations in the nineteenth century. Even without the poetry, it makes the husband-hunt of Pride and Prejudice, written only a decade earlier, seem old-fashioned and superficial.
But you cannot begin to assess Yevgeny Onegin without the poetry, because this is its greatest strength. It flows and bubbles “like champagne in sunshine” (Mirsky again), with all the fluency and irony of Byron at his best but under stricter control. As in Don Juan, for instance, there are many digressions, but Pushkin keeps them shorter, timing their flow and return with immaculate precision and nice apologies for having strayed from the path of narrative duty. These little cadenzas are among the loveliest delights of the novel, especially in the first chapter, when Pushkin amusingly presents ideas on education, society values, food and drink, seduction techniques, the theatre, the ballet and the ballroom, the loveliness of a winter morning in the city and the contrasting countryside—while all the time sketching a subtle portrait of his “hero”, not sparing the faults of his character, which will determine the tragedy about to unfold. The carefully modulated developments and interruptions are so exquisitely written, and the details of Russian life are so lovingly set down (with undiscriminating twenty-twenty vision), that all lovers of Russian literature come together in nominating the opening section of Yevgeny Onegin as the best Russian ever written, and they all know large tracts of it by heart. (This admirer once learnt the first sixty stanzas by heart and went about like William Wordsworth, declaiming them in the country air.) Would that an earnest translator could capture even a glimmer of this unusual quality in a poor English version. Further details about the quality of the novel, and some technical material explaining the translator’s strategy and tactics may be pursued in the Translator’s Note.
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE The Cultural Road Not Taken
PUSHKIN’S spontaneous incorporation of vernacular speech into ancient and modern Russian was matched by a similar, but more carefully considered, development in his themes, subjects, stories and style. With access to a large library when very young he read voraciously, especially the classics, French Neoclassical works (particularly the stylized seventeenth-century theatre) and not a little English literature. To his eternal credit he chose not to follow the French models. French professors have always controlled their language carefully, guarding it against “corruption” from abroad by scrutinizing every new word or phrase, and voting on whether to accept it into the French lexicon or refuse its admission. (Incidentally, I have just checked on Google and discovered to my astonishment that, even in our digital age, the Académie française still operates as the “official moderator of the French language”, insisting that definite rules always be obeyed in the interests of “purity and eloquence”. It is an unpleasant thing to say, but the collapse of the French language from its position as as the main language of international communication a couple of centuries ago may owe much to unhealthy overprotection of this kind.)