Although it occupies in some respects an isolated and idiosyncratic place in Pushkin’s œuvre, it is also his most deeply characteristic creation. It was his own favourite among his works and may well be his greatest single contribution to world literature. Despite its considerable literary sophistication and complexity and the fact of its having been written in verse, it may be more accessible to the appreciation of non-Russian readers than most of Pushkin’s other work. Almost all of us, even those who are resistant to poetry (especially in translation!), are readers of novels; and Pushkin’s long poem, with its stanzas that mimic paragraphs and its verse that seems as natural as familiar prose, subtly entices us by its successful masquerade as a novel. The writer spent some eight years writing it (far longer than he devoted to any other work), and it thus accompanied him through an extended and crucial period of his life. It not only reflects the vital changes that were taking place in Pushkin himself during those years, but it also represents its author’s response to a transformation in the general literary climate. By the late 1820s the rage was all for new works in prose rather than poetry, and although Russian literature had as yet produced few prose works of any lasting distinction, writers were eager to answer the demands of the time. Pushkin was among the first of the established authors to respond to the need for a serious prose literature. This change in public taste and Pushkin’s effort to respond to it took place in the very years when the writer was composing Eugene Onegin. Begun when Pushkin was only 24, still ebullient in his poetic personality and still partially under the sway of his fascination with Byron, it was completed in his thirty-second year, when he was already the author of several prose works of a strongly anti-romantic cast. Onegin, as the work’s hybrid nature suggests, belongs to a transitional phase in Pushkin’s career and constitutes a kind of bridge linking two literary eras. It shows us its author, at the central period of his life, in the very act of crossing that bridge, attempting to transform himself from romantic poet into a novelist who would paint on a large canvas an expansive picture of social reality. Paradoxically Eugene Onegin, although written in verse, is the earliest of Pushkin’s works to contain a major component of the ‘prosaic’ in motivation and spirit. This rather complex set of personal and historical factors informs this first great Russian novel (and arguably the most influential) in a number of crucial ways and provides the ground for its unique flavour and a strangeness that both delights and perplexes the reader.

The work is many things: a stylistic tour de force, an examination of human character and of the power in human affairs of cultural phenomena (especially social and artistic conventions), an investigation of the interconnections between literature and life, an autobiography, and an exploration of the creative process itself. It is also, of course, and above all else, incomparable poetry. Highly structured in its use of an unvarying stanzaic form and in its classically balanced design, the work nevertheless conveys an atmosphere of free-flowing spontaneity. Its verse, while observing elegantly the requirements of metre and rhyme, is able at the same time to achieve the rhythm and feel of the most natural and ordinary colloquial speech. Like a discursive prose work, the novel exhibits a wealth of genial, meandering talk and an apparently casual approach to narrative pace. The plot itself is elegantly simple. Treating of the frustrations of love, it deals, as Vladimir Nabokov puts it, ‘with the emotions, meditations, acts and destinies of three men: Onegin, the bored fop; Lensky, the minor elegiast; and a stylized Pushkin, Onegin’s friend’1—and, in a pleasing symmetry, with the affections and fates of three heroines: Tatyana, the shy and bookish provincial maiden; Olga, her beautiful but ordinary younger sister; and Pushkin’s mercurial Muse. The action, set in the imperial Russia of the 1820s, begins in a glittering St Petersburg, moves for an extended stay to the bucolic country estate, sojourns for a chapter in Moscow, and then, as if closing a circle, comes to its end in the capital once more. Along its devious narrative route, the novel treats the reader to an engaging and suspenseful story; to lively scenes of city and country life; to portraits of a socially mixed cast of characters; to evocations of nature in its various seasons; and to a wealth of authorial digression and commentary, à la Byron or Sterne, on the tale in the telling and on sundry literary, philosophical, and autobiographical matters—all in a shifting play of many moods and tones: lyrical, realistic, parodic, romantic, and ironic.

Much commentary on the work has focused, understandably enough, on its hero and heroine, Onegin and Tatyana, the ill-starred but non-tragic lovers who were to become the prototypes for a host of figures created by later Russian writers. Those critics who approach the text as a realistic novel and who accept its heroes as more or less psychologically plausible representatives of their society, have viewed the two main characters in quite varied and even conflicting ways. To some, Onegin is a victim of his environment, a potentially creative man whose personal fulfilment is frustrated by the limited opportunities available to him in his era. To others he is an anti-hero, an amoral hedonist and misanthropic egoist. Tatyana, though usually regarded in an almost hagiographic light (she is for many Russians the most beloved heroine in their literature), also has a few detractors, readers who see her as an immature woman in whom instinctual drives and vague intuition rather than active intelligence or innate spiritual nobility account for most of her actions. All those critics who attempt such analyses of the characters are confronted by certain puzzling inconsistencies in their behaviour; in different parts of the novel they seem almost to be different people. A reasonable explanation, not much noted, for the antithetical interpretations the heroes have evoked is that they are dichotomous in their very natures: over the long period of the novel’s composition, Pushkin’s own artistic values and aims were changing, and it seems quite likely that his characters evolved as well, that his image of them ripened and deepened over that period. There is also a fundamental, if rich, ambiguity in the author’s treatment of Onegin and Tatyana as both character-studies and poetic symbols.

Other critics of the work have taken a more formalist approach, viewing the characters less as real people than as reflections of literary stereotypes. Literary art and language itself, in their view, are always self-referential, uninvolved in any realities supposed to exist outside the work.