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.
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.)
Pushkin would bring Russian into line with the English language. Here was an impure tongue that had flourished and expanded through promiscuity—she was anybody’s. It was the same story in literature. Take, for instance, the famous and favourite line of French poetry, the Alexandrine, long before Pushkin so tied-down, symmetrical and unbending that it had become tedious. Every line (of twelve or thirteen syllables) must be end-stopped, and at the halfway point it must pause noticeably to create a “caesura”. Rhyming couplets were de rigueur, and they must alternate one-syllable rhymes with two-syllable rhymes (hence the twelve or thirteen). What mattered was not the actual ending alone—in the interests of “rich rhyming” you were even required to supply a “supporting consonant” (before the last stressed syllable), which would mean in an English equivalent that bloom/gloom was a legitimate rhyme, but tomb/gloom was not; likewise, belated/related yes, related/created no.
Pushkin’s response to all this was to throw the rule book away and elope with Shakespeare, having fallen in love with the Englishman’s unrhymed iambic lines with their asymmetry, free-flowing enjambment, linguistic inventiveness and capacity for springing surprises (such as lapsing occasionally into prose). This libertarian attitude was also applied to subject matter. Voltaire had raised an acidulated protest against Shakespeare’s use in serious drama of the vulgar phrase “not a mouse stirring” on the Elsinore battlements; Pushkin thought the mouse had as much right to be there and to enjoy being mentioned as anyone else in the play. Like his master, the Russian poet wanted every sort of disregarded creature to emerge onto the published page. Commoners would sit down with kings, bawdiness would live alongside beauty, and people of every description would be brought forward.
Take, for instance, an inconspicuous stanza halfway through the first chapter of Yevgeny Onegin (35), in which the jaundiced young Onegin comes back home in the early morning after partying. Interesting and beautiful things are happening all around him, but he is too disaffected and hungover to notice anything. Pushkin rubs this idea in by treating us readers to a little pantomime of morning-fresh activity totally lost on his hero.
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