Alexander Pushkin's "Eugene Onegin"

Eugene Onegin is a remarkable book written by a remarkable author, Alexander Pushkin. He was a Russian who lived during one of Europe’s most significant political upheavals, the French revolution and Napoleon’s subsequent attempt to master all of Europe. It was also a time of rapid cultural change; ideas of the feudalist aristocracy were slowly being replaced with beliefs, unleashed by the French, about the universal rights of man. Pushkin’s personal origins were no less unique. His maternal great grandfather, Ibrahim Gannibal, was an African captured from the Ottomans, Russia’s perennial enemy, and who was brought to Russia to be a servant. Gannibal eventually married into the Russian nobility, and produced many offspring; Alexander Pushkin was one of his descendants. He went on to become a prolific man of letters, and Eugene Onegin is one of his supreme achievements of writing and narration. Unsurprisingly, the book had a significant influence on later Russian geniuses including Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.

Eugene Onegin is the main character in the eponymously named book, but it includes his friend, the poet Vladimir Lensky, and two sisters, Tatyana and Olga. The text mainly focuses on Eugene’s relationship with Tatyana, which at various points is impaired, because it is characterized with love and frustration not equally shared. The story is expressed in verse not prose; and, to fully enjoy its expression, reading it out loud is what I chose. Normally, I do not read that way. But for Eugene Onegin I made an exception, and therefore can say: taking that approach was worth it, it enhanced the story’s scintillatingly fervent, lessons and insights on the messiness of life, in the areas of love, loss, aging, and emotional strife.

Eugene is a young member of the nobility who does not have to work to earn his bread; he therefore lives the life of a dilettante, attending balls, seducing many women, gambling, drinking, staying up late and sleeping for most of the day. Early in the text he has an eureka moment and realizes how meaningless most of his activities are. He subsequently falls into a depression of sorts, the kind distinctly associated with the disenchantment of modernity. In Eugene one detected

Modern man himself portrayed

With something of his true complexion

With his immoral soul disclosed

His arid vanity exposed

His endless bent for deep reflection

His cold, embittered mind that seems

To waste itself in empty dreams

Regardless of these defects, the beautiful and virtuous Tatyana falls deeply in love with Eugene. Some of the most riveting and lyrical verses express the intensity of her love. Tatyana:

Fell in love. For thus indeed

Does Spring awake the buried seed

Long since her keen imagination

With tenderness and pain imbued

Had hungered for the fatal food

She had to tell him how she felt, but could not arrange a private meeting. Eugene receives a letter from Tatyana which expresses her longing and yearning, and at that point he must make a decision on whether to continue his playboy existence or surrender to the duties and obligations of married life. Eugene chooses the former because, despite his unhappiness, he does not want to give up his freedom and he fears the monotony of marriage. When Eugene rejects Tatyana’s love, he tells her

However much I loved you, dear

Once used to you…I’d cease, I fear

These lines provide a window into Eugene’s character. He could have had the beautiful Tatyana if he wanted, for she was willing to surrender herself entirely to him. But she wanted a husband, not a fling. He chose to be honest about his unsuitability to that task, rather than, for pleasure’s sake, wear a mask.

Tatyana’s love sickness is profound and oppressive, but this is the result of her youth more than Eugene. Some of the best lines describe early adulthood, that period when emotions, positive and negative, are extremely intense; when, due to the lack of the cynicism that results from experiencing life’s disappointments, the turbulence of emotions is completely exposed:

But flaming youth in all its madness

Keeps nothing of its heart concealed

Its loves and hates, its joys and sadness

Are babbled out and soon revealed.

Meanwhile Eugene’s friend, the poet Vladimir Lensky, is only 18 when he falls in love with Olga, and his soul was:

Aflame with virgin fire. Olga

Gave Lensky intimations

Of youthful ecstasies unknown

This relationship looks promising because Vladimir, unlike his friend Eugene, is fit for marriage:

So Lensky soared as he awaited

His wedding day two weeks ahead

With joy his heart anticipated

The mysteries of the marriage bed

The frigid yawning days to be

He never pictures once, not he

While we…perceive full well what home life means

But one long string of dreary scenes

But my poor Lensky, deep at heart

Was born to play this very part

Tragically, their union is never consummated because of Lensky’s untimely death in a duel with is erstwhile friend Eugene. The cause of their discord is Eugene’s flirtation with Olga at a ball. Lensky is furious and wants to avenge this slight against his honour, and so he challenges Eugene to a duel. The latter accepts because a refusal would have been perceived as cowardly. Lensky loses and dies at the tragically tender age of 18.

Returning to Tatyana, at times, her despair is so intense, the reader gets the impression, that she will be permanently scarred from Eugene’s rejection, but she eventually marries a dashing member of the military elite, and goes on to live what seems like a life contented and complete. Eugene, in contrast, remains disappointed and frustrated. As time passes, he begins to question the value he placed on the freedom of the single dilettante. Years later, his yearning for love appears, just as the winter is ending. The not-coincidental parallels between the beginning of spring, and the burning pangs of desire, will also sound familiar to many readers:

How sad I find your apparition

O spring!...O time of love’s unrest

What sombre echoes of ambition

Then stir my blood and fill my breast

What tender and oppressive yearning

Possess me on spring’s returning

Eugene also recognizes that he is not getting younger, and that the spring holds lessons for the passing of his youth

Do we mark with lamentation

How nature’s lively renovation

Compares with our own fading youth

For which no spring will come, in truth

These existential reflections lead Eugene to regret his decision of rejecting Tatyana’s love, and he blames his youthful naiveté for that choice:

How sad that youth, with all its power

Was given us in vain, to burn

That we betrayed it every hour

And were deceived by it in turn

When he sees Tatyana again, she is married and unavailable, and (perhaps not coincidently) Eugene falls in love with her. At this point, the cynic might say that Tatyana’s marital status is what makes her suddenly so desirable to Eugene, and Pushkin alludes to this possibility when he tells the reader that

We’ve got to have forbidden fruit

Or Eden’s joys for us are moot

A more charitable interpretation is that Eugene discovered that the freedom he so initially desired, and that led him to reject the stability of marriage to Tatyana, was overrated. In classic tragic fashion, by the time he learns this necessary truth, it is too late: Tatyana is unavailable, and his youth is fading. Eugene nonetheless tries to woo her, and, despite her continued feelings for him, she refuses his advances. It was the right move, because one gets the sense that, as soon as Tatyana gave herself to Eugene, he would lose interest in her. Their characters, or aims, are not compatible. Meanwhile, she may not be passionately in love with her husband, but he provides the stability and commitment that she desires. Many readers of Eugene Onegin will find these themes to be very familiar.