Although it is currently fashionable to disparage Belinsky’s ‘crudely sociological’ approach to literature, there is much to be said (especially if we remove the word ‘Russian’) for his observation. For all this work’s literary self-consciousness (it is an encyclopedia of literature, too), what a richly woven and glittering tapestry of life it contains, much of it supplied in apparently casual passing fashion, as was Pushkin’s way. He shows us the theatre, where on a public stage writers, actors, and audience all perform and where the wings become a setting for erotic adventure; he gives us dance in its many shapes and styles: the ballet, the society ball, the country shindig, the peasant stomp; other music and song: in opera, in a regimental band, in the singing of serf-girls; food and dining, in fashionable restaurants and at rustic feasts; the architectural environment in churches, palaces, city mansions, apartments, urban hovels, and country manors; the varying styles of clothing; the books; the protocols of duelling; the customs of matchmaking, courtship, and marriage; life as played out in passionate youth and in resigned middle-age; the relationships of parents and children; the ways of the contemporary city and the ancient traditions of the countryside; the horses and conveyances that people use (which are also metaphors for the Pushkinian rush to experience life’s variety, or at least to observe it from the window of a moving carriage)—all the activities, codes, customs, and conventions through which we live and which determine, whether we observe or defy them, who we are. And note as well the lively capsule biographies of some of the novel’s minor characters: Tatyana’s parents, Onegin’s father and uncle, the rake Zaretsky, and even the two alternative futures imagined for Lensky beyond the novel’s time-frame. Once again, in these mini-biographies, the author’s touch is light and fleeting, his method the sparing use of a few trivial and prosaic details, the more insignificant the more telling.

Let me close these brief introductory remarks on Pushkin’s masterwork with a few observations on some of its autobiographical implications. It presents, among its other texts, the writer’s report to himself at mid-career, recording his discoveries about life and art and his concerns for his creative future. Not only the novel’s narrator, it should be noted, but also the three other major characters are quite clearly expressions of Pushkin’s personality. Onegin, despite the author’s disclaimer to the contrary, bears some of Pushkin’s own human traits, and the two share a number of social masks; the essential and decisive difference between them, of course, is that Onegin has none of the poet in him. Lensky, on the other hand, who does possess a genuine if immature poetic sensibility, is not unlike the younger Pushkin, a persona the writer has outgrown and now regards with affectionate irony. The conflict in the novel between Onegin and Lensky, so perplexingly motivated in terms of the characters’ psychology, represents much more plausibly a conflict in the soul of the author, a struggle between his ‘prosaic’ and ‘poetic’ selves (recall the description when the two characters first meet: Lensky all poetry, Onegin all prose). If it seems that Pushkin takes the cynical Onegin rather seriously and merely mocks the naïve Lensky, this is something of a subterfuge, a device to conceal his own passionate commitment, even as he questions it, to poetry. Onegin, Pushkin’s ‘friend’, is at once his baser alter ego and a symbol of his new allegiance to the truths of prose. Tatyana, whom the narrator calls his ‘ideal’ and who by the novel’s end is identified with Pushkin’s Muse, seems on a symbolic plane to stand as the artist’s emblem for the native sources of his poetry, or as an avatar of his art itself. She is a figure who, though unhappy and unfree (like Pushkin himself), remains steadfast in her adherence to values beyond the gratifications of the self. There is an undeniable sadness in this sparkling novel, especially at its end. If it opened to the tune of a sprightly scherzo, it closes to the strains of a somewhat mournful adagio. Pain and disappointment have a prominent place in the world of Onegin, but so too does the celebration of life in all its enticing minutiae; and thus the novel gives us neither a conventionally happy nor a conventionally unhappy ending. It avoids, to be sure, any overt statement of tragedy, for the hero and heroine still live, are indeed still relatively young. Their stories, abruptly abandoned in typically Pushkinian fashion, remain incomplete, their ultimate fates still unresolved. In his final chapter does Pushkin even try to rescue his hapless hero from the shallowness of his egoism? Does he seek to make him worthy through his suffering of someone’s, if not Tatyana’s, love? Could the tale that unwinds beyond the pages of the book be resumed, could it take unexpected turns and move in new directions, are other outcomes possible? One suspects, despite the aesthetically pleasing roundedness of the poem, that the answers are yes, that other roads lie ahead for the heroes, that life still beckons. In his generosity of spirit the author gives to his characters, and thereby to himself, the possibility of renewal. The concluding chapters of Eugene Onegin are Pushkin’s farewell to his poetic youth. Henceforth, in his effort to reinvent himself, and as a sign of his commitment to become yet more fully engaged in the life of literature, he would devote his energies mainly to prose. For Pushkin, however, to cease completely to be a poet was to die, and in his ‘novel in verse’ he announces a continuing will to live. Life’s chalice, he tells us in its final stanza, never runs dry, life’s novel (which the artist both reads and writes) never comes to an end for the taker of risks.

NOTE ON THE TRANSLATION

If art holds a mirror up to nature, it frequently does so—as in this masterpiece of Pushkin’s—by first directing that mirror at other works of art. The world of Eugene Onegin derives perhaps as much from Western European literary antecedents and traditions as it does from its author’s Russia, and in doing so it provides a paradoxical picture of life mimicking art. The literary translator, in seeking to participate in this international colloquy, holds, as it were, yet another mirror up to these already doubled or tripled mirrors. It is a devilish and tricky business, this game in a house of mirrors, this effort to catch and reflect elusive reflections. There are occasions when the translator, however carefully he tries to grip his own mirror by its edges so as not to smudge the glass, will inadvertently allow his hands to enter the picture and thus obscure the view.

In attempting to reproduce poetry, the verbal art most closely tied to its native language and the most susceptible to distortion in the transfer to another, the translator faces particularly vexing difficulties. Verse, perhaps, can be translated; great poetry is something else.