Classics of Russian Literature | Exile, Rustic Seclusion, and Onegin (Lecture 4)

Lecture 4: In Odessa, a thriving port city on the Black Sea, Pushkin managed to irritate the local governor, who soon sent him packing back to his parents’ country estates in the north of Russia. During this time, he began a long work that would become Russia’s greatest poem. He called it a “novel in verse”: Eugene Onegin.

Inspired partly by Byron’s Don Juan, it dealt with many different literary themes and became an endless source of inspiration for writers and composers who came after Pushkin. Its central plot involves the title character, who is a strange combination of sensitivity, intelligence, and perversity. He recognizes the unusually high human value of the central female figure, Tatiana Larina, but rejects the love she offers when she is a young woman in the country. Later, when he sees her as a grande dame in St. Petersburg, it is his turn to experience rejection. The poem also deals with dueling and the death of the poet, perhaps a foreboding of the author’s fate

Suggested Reading and Listening:
Aleksandr Pushkin, Eugene Onegin, translation by James E. Falen.
Aleksandr Pushkin, Eugene Onegin—A Novel in Verse, translation and commentary by Vladimir Nabokov.
Petr I. Tchaikovsky, Eugene Onegin, an opera based on the poem.