I understand now why Russian schoolchildren memorize enormous portions of this mournful, beautiful poem. It's quintessentially Russian: with jealousy, duels, heartbreak, and slavic women built of equal parts passion and ruthlessness. I can't believe I've gotten this far in life without reading it.
Eugene Onegin is readable, accessible, sad, and at times hilarious. It's surprisingly modern too, as the author breaks the fourth wall with readers to foreshadow his story, to mock his own writing, even to mock the ugly feet of Russian women! It reminds the reader a bit of the facetious satire of Jonathan Swift and the mocking humor of Alexander Pope.[1]
There is something about the Russian character that both fascinates and confuses westerners. It's a sort of uncanny valley for us: we think we should understand these people, and sometimes we do, but mostly we think we understand them when we really don't. Thus the various category errors western rulers have been making about Russians for centuries as we foolishly engage in conflicts with them.[2]
A word on this translation by Charles Johnston. I was brought to it from Douglas Hofstadter's overwhelming tome Le Ton beau de Marot, which contains entire chapters discussing, comparing and analyzing different English translations of Eugene Onegin as part of a debate on what aspects of poetic structure and form should be preserved in translation. Hofstadter also discusses the slanderous (there's no other word for it) criticism Vladimir Nabokov levels at any Eugene Onegin translator who emphasizes form over meaning. For whatever reason it really bugged the shit out of Nabokov that anybody would attempt a rhyming translation of Pushkin's poem!
Thus it's a delicious irony that Nabokov's own translation of Eugene Onegin (at least what little I've read of it) is practically unreadable. And by stark, stark contrast, this English translation by Charles Johnston, which preserves rhyme and meter as important form elements, is a joy to read.
There was once a time in my life where I spoke and understood Russian at a very basic level, although I've long ago lost it under several layers of dust in my brain. And so, like most English speakers, I'll likely never know what it's like to read Pushkin in the original; I'll never grasp it satisfactorily that way. But this translation conveys something to me of the original, and that something is beautiful, and very much worth reading.
Footnotes:
[1] See Pope's "The Rape of the Lock," a poem about a theft of a lock of a woman's hair, mockingly framed as an epic event among the gods.
[2] As Napoleon, the British Empire and most infamously WWII Germany found out. FAFO!
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[Readers, the notes below are here to help me order my thinking and better remember what I read. Please skip it all and return to your lives!]
Notes:
Translator's Note:
5-6 Interesting here how the translator takes on Vladimir Nabokov directly, engaging with Nabokov's argument that the exact meaning in translation is the only meaning, and thus a "good" translation of Eugene Onegin should never sacrifice exact meaning in order to include form elements like rhyme structure or meter. Nor should attempts be made to transmit other aspects of the work, like Pushkin's sparkling jokes, wordplay or epigrams, or, as Johnston puts it "the snap of his final couplets" if this compromises the author's original meaning. [Just think about an example in reverse: if you were a non-English speaker about to read Edgar Allan Poe's poem "The Raven" in translation, do you think that translation would be better or worse if it were unrhymed, if it had no meter, or if it left out the rushing, pulsing, pacing of the original? Nabokov's idea is laughable on its face: the rhyme, the meter, the structure, the pacing, all are intrinsic parts of this poem. To exclude them in favor of an excruciatingly literal translation would convey nothing of the true form of "The Raven." Worst of all, it would bore the shit out of your readers. For more on this debate, take a look at Douglas Hoftstadter, Le Ton beau de Marot, Chapter 9.]
6 The translator does give Nabokov a little bit of credit here referring to his literal translation and gigantic commentary on Pushkin's work: "Anyway, it should be possible now, with the help of Nabokov's literal translation and commentary, to produce a reasonably accurate rhyming version of Pushkin's work which can at least be read with pleasure and entertainment, and which, ideally, might even be able to stand on its own feet as English. That, in all humility, is the aim of the present text." [I'd also like to thank this translator for not writing the standard masturbatory introductory essay that you tend to see soiling the pages of republished classic books. His commentary here is a readable and mercifully short two pages.]
Chapter 1
"To live, it hurries, and to feel, it hastes."
-Prince Vyazemsky
Stanza Iff
We learn here about Eugene/Evgeny's upbringing, living under a heavily indebted father; on his desultory education, etc.
See Stanza VI, which Hofstadter quotes in full in Le Ton beau de Marot in Chapter 8, along with three other English translation versions, it's fascinating to see how the different English translators arrange the text, how they attempt to retain the style and galloping rhythm of the poem;
Stanza VIff
Note Eugene affecting all of the necessary courtly behavior and pseudointelligence that you're supposed to have in that era to make it among the nobility: the gift for raconteuring, for witty one-liners, etc. See also his gift for seduction [an important skill in any era!], subtly hinted at in Stanza XI.
Stanza XV gives a sense of the Russian nobility's dissolute vibe, the same vibe you see in novels like Fathers and Sons or The Brothers Karamazov:
"Some days he's still in bed, and drowses,
when little notes come on a tray.
What? Invitations? Yes, three houses
have each asked him to a soirée:
a ball here, there a children's party;
where shall he go, my rogue, my hearty?
Which one comes first? It's just the same--
to do them all is easy game."
Stanza XXIII
More examples of dissolute nobility here as Eugene dresses himself in the latest fashions of London, also note the reference here about the type of trade that happened between Russia and London during this era, things also discussed in Robert K. Massie's biography of Peter the Great as well as in the book The Genesis of Russophobia in Great Britain:
"Shall I depict with expert knowledge
the cabinet behind the door
where the prize-boy of fashion's college
is dressed, undressed, and dressed once more?
Whatever for caprice of spending
ingenious London has been sending
across the Baltic in exchange
for wood and tallow; all the range
of useful objects that the curious
Parisian taste invents for one--
for friends of languor, or of fun,
or for the modishly luxurious--
all this, at eighteen years of age,
adorned the sanctum of our sage."
Stanza XXVI
The author breaks the fourth wall here and directly addresses the audience:
"Your curiosity is burning
to hear what latest modes require,
and so, before the world of learning,
I could describe here his attire;
Stanzas XXIX- XXXIV
The author breaks the fourth wall here as well, telling the reader, across several stanzas, about a past love in Eugene's life. See also Stanza XXX with a hilarious reference to Russian women's feet:
"...though I confess
that all of Russia can't contribute
three pairs of handsome ones"
Based on the next stanza it appears the author is making an extended pun on feet here. And then Pushkin goes on in Stanza XXXII about small dancing feet: he adores the "Terpsichorean [dancing] foot":
"My love for it is just as tender,
under the table's linen shield,
on springtime grasses of the field,
in winter, on the cast-iron fender,
on ballroom's looking-glass parquet
or on the granite of the bay."
Stanza XXXV
Now we return to Eugene; he is world-weary, sick of all the dramas, he's more or less given up on love and chasing girls; he has "the spleen"; also a reference to Byron's poem "Childe Harold."
Stanza L
Beautiful lines here:
"...to mourn for Russia's gloomy savour,
land where I learned to love and weep,
land where my heart is buried deep."
Stanza LIff
Here we learn that Eugene's father died, leaving him little but debts, and that Jewish creditors basically took his father's whole estate; but Eugene wasn't worried because his uncle was nearing death, and he ended up inheriting lands from him instead. He quickly bores of the country, however; he's as depressed and filled with ennui as ever.
Stanza LV-LX
The stanzas again feature Pushkin talking directly to the reader: describing how he's let go of love (just like Eugene), but that Eugene's story is absolutely, definitely not about him... Stanza LX is amusing, it's meta; see the references to how you had to bribe the censors in Russia in those days, on the author's desire to not edit his work too much ("but I refuse to chop or change"), how he has to fête the journalists to get them to write about and publicize his work; and on how he would be misunderstood by his readers eventually anyway. This is good stuff!
"I've drawn a plan and a projection,
the hero's name's decided too.
Meanwhile my novel's opening section
is finished, and I've looked it through
meticulously; in my fiction
there's far too much of contradiction,
but I refuse to chop or change.
The censor's tribute, I'll arrange;
I'll feed the journalists for dinner
fruits of my labour and my ink...
So now be off to Neva's brink,
you newborn work, and like a winner
earn for me the rewards of fame--
misunderstanding, noise, and blame!
Chapter 2
"O rus!"
-Horace
Stanza Iff
Description of Onegin's (newly inherited) estate, his lack of books, his conflicts with neighbors; and then Vladimir Lensky enters the story, young, educated, well-read and not yet corrupted by the world. He and Eugene become closer and closer friends, see Stanza XIII:
"Friendship, as I must own to you,
blooms when there's nothing else to do."
Stanza XV
Eugene doesn't want to ruin Lensky's optimistic outlook:
"He smiled as Lensky talked: the heady
perfervid language of the bard,
his mind, in judgement still unsteady,
and always the inspired regard--
to Eugene all was new and thrilling;
he struggled to bite back the chilling
word on his lips, and thought: it's sheer
folly for me to interfere
with such a blissful, brief infection--
even without me it will sink;
but meanwhile let him live, and think
the universe is all perfection;
youth is a sickness; we must spare
its natural right to rave and flare."
Stanza XIXff
Lensky tells a tale of a love, Olga, that he had experienced:
"Ah, he had loved a love that never
is known today; only a soul
that raves with poetry can ever
be doomed to feel it..."
Stanza XXIIIff
Pushkin breaks the fourth wall again...
"Reader, the elder sister now
must be my theme, if you'll allow."
...as we are introduced to Tatyana for the first time:
"...Truly
she lacked her sister's beauty, lacked
the rosy bloom that glowed so newly
to catch the eye and to attract."
Stanza XXIXff
Tatyana loves romances by Richardson and Rousseau; her father, not well educated, kept these books but never read them himself; likewise his wife loved these romances too but she only had heard about them, but had never actually read them either. The author uses this as a transition into telling the readers about Tatyana's mother: how she loved someone else, but was arranged to marry Tatyana's father and how she raged and grieved the match and nearly ran away, but eventually accustomed herself to life with him as she "ruled him like an autocrat":
"...she found, in labours and in leisure,
the secret of her husband's measure,
and ruled him like an autocrat--
so all went smoothly after that."
Stanza XXXVIIff
We learn about the death of Olga's and Tatyana's father, Dmitri Larin; Lensky discusses how Dmitri had promised Olga's hand to him.
Stanza XXXVIII
Beautiful lines here on death:
"Alas! The generations must,
as fate's mysterious purpose burrows,
reap a brief harvest on their furrows;
they rise and ripen and fall dead:
others will follow where they tread...
and thus our race, so fluctuating,
grows, surges, boils, for lack of room
presses its forebears to the tomb.
We too shall find our hour is waiting;
it will be our descendants who
out of this world will crowd us too."
...and then Pushkin turns this theme into self-effacing musings on whether he will ever be remembered as a poet; see these lines from Stanza XL:
"And someone's heart will feel a quiver,
for maybe fortune will have saved
from drowning's death in Lethe river
the strophe over which I slaved;
perhaps--for flattering hope will linger--
some future dunce will point a finger
at my famed portrait and will say:
he was a poet in his day."
Chapter 3
"Elle était fille, elle était amoureuse." ["She was a girl, she was infatuated."]
-Malfilâtre [Jacques Clinchamps de Malfilâtre, 18th century French poet]
Stanza Iff
Eugene teases Lensky about all the time he spends over at the Larins' house; Lensky persuades him to come along; then Pushkin fast forwards/foreshadows to their trip home where Onegin yawns and asks (with obviously false indifference) "which one was Tatyana?" The two men are otherwise silent on the way home.
Stanza VIff
Now we see the Larin family, which is thrown into a frenzy thinking that Tatyana may have "found her man"; Tatyana basically projects onto him all the romance she's read about in her father's library of trashy novels; she's filled with all the tropes: like that the male hero would sacrifice himself for her, that he'd be both brainy and attractive, "a pattern of perfection / in which his hero's mould was cast."
Stanza XVff
The author now speaks directly to Tatyana: how she's thrown herself at the feet of a "modish tyrant"; he warns "you're condemned to perish," etc.
Stanza XVIIff
Tatyana asks her nurse whether was she in love when she was young; her nursemaid answers "What nonsense!" and goes on to explain she was arranged by matchmakers at age 13, and then sent off to a strange family; Tatyana tells her that she's in love, she asked her nursemaid for pen and paper to write a letter to Eugene.
Stanza XXIV
Pushkin now muses on Tatyana's artlessness, her lack of knowledge of deceit, her innocence, her credulousness.
Stanza XXVI
Pushkin again breaks the fourth wall here and talks directly to the readers:
"I see another problem looming:
to save the honour of our land
I must translate--there's no presuming--
the letter from Tatyana's hand:
her Russian was as thin as vapour,
she never read a Russian paper,
our native speech had never sprung
unhesitating from her tongue,
she wrote in French...what a confession!
what can one do? as said above,
until this day, a lady's love
in Russian never found expression,
till now our language--proud, God knows--
has hardly mastered postal prose."
This passage is interesting on a few levels: after all, Pushkin himself wrote so lyrically that, if anything, he may have been the writer who proved that the Russian language can produce poetry as beautiful and artful as any other.
Stanza XXVII
"... it's the foreign phrase that trips
like native idiom from their lips."
Stanza XXI
Douglas Hofstadter singled out this stanza in Le Ton Beau de Marot, sharing four different versions of translations into English. It is a fascinating exercise: you can see which translator takes the most liberties with the original text, but you can also see which translation is "the best"... and while it's hard to say exactly why one is better than another, it has nothing to do with the liberties they take with the facts or form of the original.
"Tatyana's letter, treasured ever
as sacred, lies before me still.
I read with secret pain, and never
can read enough to get my fill.
Who taught her an address so tender,
such careless language of surrender?
Who taught her all this mad, slapdash,
heartfelt, imploring, touching trash
fraught with enticement and disaster?
It baffles me. But I'll repeat
here a weak version, incomplete,
pale transcript of a vivid master,
or Freischütz as it might be played
by nervous hands of a schoolmaid:"
[The idea here is Pushkin is offering for the reader a translation of a letter that Tatyana wrote in French, and in his weak ability he will translate it into Russian for the reader... although we are reading an English translation of this translation effort, of a letter that probably never existed in French in the first place! It was just a conceit that the author used as part of the story, but the idea that the author could actually have this letter in his possession makes this whole story into a strange kind of reality where his characters are somehow "real" in his world.]
Stanza XXXIVff
Tatyana asks her nursemaid to have her grandson send the letter; she can't even mention Onegin's name at first but then she eventually does; however, days pass and he doesn't answer back. Some days later Eugene comes to the house, but Tatyana rushes out of the house in terror as soon as he arrives.
Stanza XXXIX
Funny blurb here where Pushkin writes about maidservants picking berries and being forced to sing while they work--under the assumption that they can't eat the berries while singing:
"Maidservants on the beds just now
were picking berries from the bough,
singing in chorus as directed
(on orders which of course presume
that theivish mouths cannot consume
their masters' berries undetected
so long as they're employed in song:
such rustic cunning can't be wrong!)"
The song that follows is basically about keeping a guy guessing, and being a little bit hard to catch, a little bit hard to get.
Stanza XLI
Now, in the last stanza of the chapter, we're back to Tatyana, she decides to return back to the house and she finds herself suddenly face to face with Eugene: and then the author leave the audience with a cliffhanger, saying:
"I lack the strength required to say
what came from this unlooked-for meeting;
my friends, I need to pause a spell,
and walk, and breathe, before I tell
a story that still wants completing;
I need to rest from all this rhyme:
I'll end my tale some other time."
Chapter 4
"La morale est dans la nature des choses."
--Necker [Jacques Necker, statesman and finance minister for Louis XVI]
"Morality is [inherent] in the nature of things." [Interestingly, Jacques Necker was one of the few people in the French establishment who argued against the printing of the unbacked paper money assignats that quickly led to a hyperinflation in France in the late 1700s, a subject surprisingly entertainingly written about in A.D. White's book Fiat Money Inflation in France.]
[This chapter is quite beautiful and it is structured in an interesting way; it really tackles some of the games that we play in love; there's some good redpill-type talk here about how men and women manipulate each other and how it turns us cynical, to a point where later in our lives we've been too damaged to see a good thing right in front of our faces.]
Stanza VII
"With womankind, the less we love them,
the easier they become the charm,
the tighter we can stretch above them
enticing nets to do them harm."
Stanza IX
"Evgeny thought in just this fashion.
From the first youth he'd known the force,
the sufferings of tempestuous passion;
its winds had blown him far off course.
Spoilt by the habit of indulgence,
now dazzled by one thing's effulgence,
now disenchanted with the next,
more and more bored by yearning's text,
bored by success' giddy trifle,
he heard in stillness and in din
a deathless murmur from within,
found that in laughter yawns could stifle:
he killed eight years in such a style,
and wasted life's fine flower meanwhile."
Stanza XI
"Yet Tanya's note made its impression
on Eugene, he was deeply stirred:
that virgin dream and its confession
filled him with thoughts that swarmed and whirred..."
[Basically here Eugene doesn't want to join a club that would have someone like him for a member, and he really ruins it by red-pilling this young innocent girl, telling her not only that all this stuff is foolishness, but telling her exactly why it is foolishness.]
Stanza XIV
[Here is where Eugene really hammers Tatyana explaining how love never lasts.]
"Believe (as conscience is my warrant),
wedlock for us would be abhorrent.
I'd love you, but inside a day,
with custom, love would fade away;
your tears would flow--but your emotion,
your grief would fail to touch my heart,
they'd just enrage it with their dart.
What sort of roses, in your notion,
would Hymen strew for our delight?
why, they could last a whole fortnight!" [That's harsh]
Stanza XVI
"Listen to me without resentment:
girls often change to their contentment
light dreams for new ones ... so we see
each springtime, on the growing tree,
fresh leaves ... for such is heaven's mandate.
You'll love again, but you must teach
your heart some self-restraint; for each
and every man won't understand it
as I have ... learn from my belief
that inexperience leads to grief."
Stanza XXIII
Here the reader sees Tatyana suffer, pine away, and grow weak and pale.
Stanza XXV
Now the author switches to describing Olga and Lensky, "Quite drunk with love's illusion"; he reads to her, they flirt, they play chess, they're distractedly in love with each other.
Stanza XXXV
[Pushkin gets meta here, he switches from thinking about the mushy poetry that Vladimir might have written for Olga, and begins mocking his own efforts at poetry]
"But I myself read my bedizened
fancies, my rhythmic search for truth,
to nobody except a wizened
nanny, companion of my youth;
or, after some dull dinners labour,
I button all the wandering neighbour
and in a corner make him choke
on tragedy; but it's no joke,
when, utterly worn out by rhyming,
exhausted and done up, I take
a rambling walk beside my lake,
and duck get up; with instant timing,
alarmed by my melodious lay,
they leave their shores and fly away."
[Even the ducks can't stand Pushkin's poetry...]
Stanza XXXVIIff
Here the focus comes back to Eugene, how he's basically into himself, he doesn't really think all that much about his friends or his community. Then an extended metaphor in the following stanzas of oncoming winter, likewise the oncoming middle age of Eugene. Then, we return to Eugene's empty day-to-day life, playing billiards, drinking; while he can't help but wonder about the Larin family: he asks Lensky how everyone's doing, perhaps he's beginning to see that he really blew it when this young innocent girl expressed her love for him. Lensky says that Eugene is invited to dinner at the Larins' house, Eugene tries to beg off but is persuaded to go.
Stanza LI
Finally, here tying up the whole idea about the difference between a man who believes in love (who is "Happy a hundredfold") and the pitiful cynic who is too cool and too nihilistic to embrace genuine love.
"And he was loved ... at least he never
doubted of it, so lived in bliss.
Happy a hundredfold, whoever
can lean on faith, who can dismiss
cold reason, sleep and sensual welter
like a drunk traveler in a shelter,
or, sweeter, like a butterfly
in flowers of spring it's drinking dry;
but piteous he, the all-foreseeing,
the sober head, detesting each
human reaction, every speech
in the expression of its being,
whose heart experience has cooled
and save from being charmed or fooled!"
Chapter 5
"O, never know these frightful dreams, thou, my Svetlana!"
-Zhukovski [Vasily Zhukovsky, 1783-1852]
Stanza Iff
The first few stanzas here are a genuinely beautiful passage describing the Russian winter and the Russian spirit in the same breath.
Stanza Vff
Tatyana is superstitious, she's worried about how she's ever going to come to be married; in fact, she goes into a panic with various superstitions; comments here on age, wisdom and how children and young people are easily fooled, easily given misguided hopes:
"...hope, in child's disguise,
is there to lisp its pack of lies."
Stanza XIff
Tatyana has a surreal dream (which takes place over several stanzas) where she's on a flimsy ice bridge above violent floodwaters; a bear rears up and begins stalking her; eventually the bear actually takes her to his home, and then the bear is gone and a group of monsters are sitting around a table, and among the group is Eugene Onegin himself; Tatyana becomes curious and opens the door a little bit, the group all laughs at her, shouting, "She's mine, she's mine." But then Eugene shouts louder than them all "She's mine!" Olga and Lensky appear, but Eugene becomes enraged and attacks Lensky with a knife.
Stanza XXIff
Tatyana finds herself awake, her sister Olga asks her what she was dreaming about, but Tatyana doesn't answer and stays in bed reading Martin Zadeka [at first I assumed this was yet another romance novelist of that era, but in fact he was sort of a Swiss Nostradamus-type writer who wrote books of predictions that were translated into Russian]. She tries to seek out the meaning of her dream in the book of predictions.
Stanza XXVff
Now the Larin family is throwing a big party, everyone in the community comes, one man, Monsieur Triquet, recites French to Tanya and gives her a book ("he passes for witty" is Pushkin's derogatory description). Lensky along with Onegin, and they sit across from Tanya; she almost faints but she pulls it together and survives the dinner.
Stanza XXXIIff
Now everybody's drunk at this point, and Monsieur Triquet sings a song to Tatyana, badly and off-key ("Tanya nearly dies"); Eugene feels genuine sorrow for her in discomfort here.
Stanza XXXVIIIff
The author breaks the fourth wall once again, to tell the reader what's coming:
"...there'll be a fight. For that I give
my word; no welshing, as I live."
Stanza XXXIXff
Now there's dancing, and Eugene dances several dances with Olga, making Lensky not only jealous but outraging everyone else at the party with his audacity; now a mazurka plays and Eugene takes Olga once again and says something to her, making her blush heavily; Lensky insists on the next dance, but Olga refuses him, saying she has pledged that dance to Eugene. Lenksy can't believe it, he's dumbfounded:
Stanza XLV
"He finds the shock beyond all bearing;
so, cursing women's devious course,
he leaves the house, calls for his horse
and gallops. Pistols made for pairing
and just a double charge of shot
will in a flash decide his lot."
Chapter 6
La, sotto giorni nubilosi e brevi,
Nasce una gente a cui 'l morir non dole.
-Petrarch
[The author doesn't offer a translation but I'll do my best here:
"There, under days cloudy and brief,
Is born a people unaggrieved by death.]
Stanza Iff
Eugene drives off reflecting with [disturbing] pleasure on his vengeful act insulting Lensky; everyone crashes at the house except Eugene; people are sleeping on the floors, on dining room chairs; in Olga and Tatyana's room all the women are sleeping--except Tatyana, who stares out the window, wondering what Eugene's intentions were when he did what he did. She sees him for what he is now.
Stanza IVff
We are introduced to Zaretsky, a friend of Eugene and a reformed hothead.
Stanza VIIff
Eugene receives the challenge letter from Lensky, and now finds himself regretting what he did; he replies to the challenge, writing "at any time he'd be prepared."
Stanza XIIff
Lensky thinks about the duel the next morning, his plan was not to see Olga beforehand, but then Olga runs up to him the next morning, "carefree and gay, / the same as any other day."
Stanza XIV
"'Last night, what made you fly so early?'
was the first thing that Olga said.
All Lensky's thoughts went hurly-burly,
and silently he hung his head.
Rage died, and jealousy's obsession,
Rage died, and jealousy's obsession,
before such candour of expression,
such frank tendresse; away they stole
before such playfulness of soul!
he looks, in sweet resolution,
and then concludes: she loves him yet!
Already born down by regret,
he almost begs for absolution,
he trembles, knows not what to tell;
he's happy, yes, he's almost well..."
Stanza XXXff
The duel: Eugene fires first and kills Lensky with a shot through the chest.
Stanza XXXVIff
Pushkin muses on the loss of Lensky's life,
"...his lyre, now stilled, in its high mission
might have resounded long and loud
for aeons."
This is followed by an excised stanza where the poet is more realistic, even mocking, saying that Lensky would more likely get old, get the gout, "he'd have died in bed."
Stanza XLIIIff
The author muses on his own advancing age: he's nearly thirty, "my noon is here," he decries his fading youth, his fading skills, before promising the reader he will return to the story.
Chapter 7
"Moscow, loved daughter of Russia, where can we find your equal?"
-Dmetriev [Ivan Dmitriev, 1760-1837]
"How can one not love Mother Moscow?"
-Baratynsky [Yevgeny Baratynsky, 1800-1844]
"You criticize Moscow? Why make such a fuss of seeing the world? What on earth can be better? A place where you'll find none of us."
-Griboedov [Alexander Griboyedov, playwright 1795-1829]
Stanzas I-IV
These first four beautiful pastoral-style stanzas bring to mind the poetry of Keats: see for example "Ode to a Nightingale."
Stanza Vff
We now return to Eugene who lives in seclusion not too far from Tatyana's family's home; we see Vladimir Lensky's grave; it's been some number of years and the gravesite is lonely, abandoned, ignored; the author refers to two young girls who would come by "to see the grave, and shed a tear" but who haven't come by a while; the path to the grave was once well-trod, now it's overgrown.
Stanza X
The reader also learns that Olga's time of grief was brief because "Another had the skill to ravish / her thoughts away"; she's now married (happily, the author implies); it seems obvious to the reader that Lensky died a pointless, foolish death.
Stanza XIV
Tatyana is now home without Olga; she's lonely, she still has passionate feelings for Eugene, but
"...her obligation
must be to hold in detestation
the man who laid her brother low."
Also:
"The poet's [Lensky's] dead ... already though
no one recalls him or his verses;
by now his bride-to-be has wed
another, and his memories fled
as smoke in azure sky disperses."
Stanza XVIff
Tatyana wanders over to the house that Eugene used to live in; she goes inside and talks to the housekeeper; she gets permission to go back and return to the house and read some of the books that Eugene kept; she read some of the books, looks at his marginalia:
"...Everywhere
Onegin's soul encountered there
declares itself in ways unwitting--
terse words or crosses in the book,
or else a query's wondering hook."
Stanza XXIV
Tatyana discovers that Onegin is not all that: he's actually just a shallow loser unworthy of her passion, she figures this out by learning about his mind by reading his books and his notes in those books. [This is an interesting conceit, judging somebody by their intellectual exercises--or lack thereof. I guess it's a lot better than marrying somebody and then discovering this once it's too late!]
"And so, at last, feature by feature,
Tanya begins to understand
more thoroughly, thank God, the creature
for whom her passion has been planned
by fate's decree: this freakish stranger,
who walks with sorrow, and with danger,
whether from heaven or from hell,
this angel, this proud devil, tell,
what is he? Just an apparition,
a shadow, null and meaningless..."
Stanza XXVff
Tatyana has basically lost her girlishness; she's become serious, not interested in any of the other gentlemen who tried for her; she travels to Moscow (despite all the enormous hardships of such a trip) to go to a "marriage fair": basically what happens here is her family takes her to various social functions in Moscow hoping to find a suitable husband; the reader learns that the family goes with the support of an old invalid aunt, Tatyana's mother's sister, who is dying of consumption; it reads as if the aunt paid their way.
Stanza XXXVII
For those familiar with Napoleon's invasion of Russia and how Moscow basically abandoned the city and set it on fire as part of their defensive strategy, and how this ultimately led to the total annihilation of Napoleon's entire army, this stanza does a good job of rendering it in brief verse.
Stanza XLVff
Pretty funny here how the author gently mocks Tatyana's various extended family members: one is still wearing the same bonnet, another "dumb," another a liar, yet another "mean and glum," another one overeats and overdrinks, etc. and then all their daughters, the girls who are Tatyana's age, see her as
"a bit provincial and affected,
too pale, too thin, but on the whole
not bad at all..."
Tatyana is very guarded around all of them, she doesn't talk about "her sacred store of bliss and weeping"; she's not into the gossip they all talk about:
"This world's so vacuous that it's got
no spark of fun in all its rot!"
Stanza LIIIff
This world simply does not agree with Tanya, she prefers the woods and the country; she's completely indifferent to the dances, to the whole scene here. But while she's watching from the side of things "a general of majestic bearing" seems to have discovered her; "'Who? that fat general?' Tanya cried." And then the author leaves the reader with yet another cliffhanger, saying he'll return to his (anti)hero Eugene.
Chapter 8
Fare thee well, and if forever,
Still forever, fare thee well.
-Byron
Stanza IIIff
Pushkin talks about "selling out" as a poet here, using a metaphor of pimping out his Muse at parties, at feasts, where listeners won't or can't appreciate his gift. It's a discussion of the development of his Muse over the years, again through a metaphor of Pushkin introducing her to society... and at one of the parties Eugene is there, in quite an unusual device to bring us from outside the fourth wall right back into the story. Interesting!
Stanza XIII
Eugene has left his old village, "started a life of pointless roaming," he's running from his act with Lensky, he's bored, empty.
Stanza XIVff
We meet Tatyana as a woman now, completely unaffected, wealthy, married to a grand prince, etc.
"She was unhurried, unobtrusive,
not cold, but also not effusive."
"Can it be she?" Eugene can't believe it's her, he asks the man standing next to her who she is and the man answers, "My wife." The prince brings him over to meet her and she doesn't even really react to him at all over a polite conversation.
Stanza XXIff
The prince invites Eugene to a party at his place, Eurgene shows up, he sits with Tanya briefly and he can hardly say a thing to her while she sits there calm, cool and collective. You can see how she is transformed, she's grown up, she's sophisticated but not full of herself, she's nothing like the girl she was before.
Stanza XXIX
Eugene has essentially been tyrranized by his desires across his youth:
"But when a later age has found us,
the climacteric of our life,
how sad the scar of passion's knife:
as when chill autumn rains surround us,
throw meadows into muddy rout,
and strip the forest around about."
Stanza XXX
"Alas, Eugene beyond all query
is deep in love, just like a boy;
spends light and darkness in the dreary
brooding that is the lover's ploy."
Eugene has become the teenager that Tatyana used to be... [!]
Stanza XXXI
"But she refuses to perceive him,
even if he drops or pines away.
At home she'll equably receive him,
in others' houses she may say
a word or two, or stare unseeing,
or simply bow: within her being
coquettishness has got no trace..."
Stanza XXXII
Eugene writes her a letter, it manipulative, it's also confessional as he shares his own childish feelings, you can tell right away that it's written with the wrong kind of tone:
"But so it is: I'm in no state
to battle further with my passion;
I'm yours, in a predestined fashion,
and I surrender to my fate."
Stanza XXXIIIff
She doesn't answer. He sends a second, a third, and she never answers; at the next party he sees her and she doesn't even react to him; he expects her to be indignant or have something to say to him, but she's cool as a cucumber.
Stanza XXXIXff
Onegin loses all emotional continence and rushes over to her home, barges in on her and throws himself at her feet. She gives him an explanation of a sort, explaining that she has no interest in the grande monde social class she now moves in, she'd rather be in a neglected garden reading a book.
Stanza XLV
Tatyana then remonstrates him for his foolish passion:
"What power enslaves you, with your seeming
advantages of heart and brain,
to all that's trivial and inane?"
She tells him she loved him, she refers back to the lecture he gave her in that alley, she thanks him for it, but tells him she's "another's wife" and that's that. She leaves him thunderstruck and speechless, just as Tatyana's husband appears.
Stanza XLIX
...and then Pushkin again breaks the fourth wall here and talks directly to the readers, hoping "you took at least a grain" of something out of his poem; Pushkin also thanks the Muse for giving him these characters and this story, and then ends the poem with "an abrupt goodbye."
Vocab:
Penates: household gods of ancient Rome, guardians of the home, family, and provisions.
Nacreous: having the iridescent, pearly luster of mother-of-pearl; describing something lustrous and shimmering that sometimes has a rainbow-like quality.
Periwig: archaic term for wig; a highly styled wig worn formerly as a fashionable headdress by both women and men.
Bedizened: dressed up or decorated gaudily.
Verst: a Russian measure of length, about 0.66 mile (1.1 km).
Calèche: a light low-wheeled carriage with a removable folding hood
Melpomene: the Greek god of tragedy
Climacteric: a critical period or event.
To Read:
Vladislav Ozerov: Fingal
Vasily Zhukovsky: Svetlana (poem)
Madame de Staël: Delphine
Poetry of Gavrila Derzhavin 1745-1816
Nicolas Chamfort: Maximes et Pensées