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. Such readings also face difficulties and complications. Pushkin's fictional heroes are themselves avid readers of fiction, they construct their identities as much from books as from available social roles. Onegin, in resisting the constrictions of social conventions, adopts the dissident poses of dandy and cynic; but these are only further conventional masks, disguises borrowed from books. Onegin's lack of a solid identity becomes clear to the reader, and to Tatyana within the novel itself, with the realization that he is mostly a congeries of literary affectations, a parody: he has modelled himself on the currently fashionable Byronic type, while at the same time he appears, in Tatyana's vivid literary imagination, as the thrilling hero of a Gothic romance. Pushkin has great satirical fun in playing with these various literary echoes and he has his hero, more empty shell than either rebel or demon, confront his fate not in a romantically primordial wilderness, but in the homely setting of a Russian country estate. Similarly, Tatyana, though less parodied by the author (because she is capable of genuine feeling), is composed of a number of literary and cultural personae. To the narrator she contains elements of the 'savage female', a being untouched by civilization's denaturing forces (a fantasy of many male romantic writers); to Onegin, when he first encounters her, she is merely a naive provincial girl; and by the novel's end she is for both Onegin and her new aristocratic milieu the very embodiment of a successful society hostess and legislatrix. Tatyana too confronts her fate in a kind of literary parody: she discovers the true nature of her hero not by a passage into the dark recesses of a medieval castle, but by reading Onegin's books in his abandoned country house, itself a symbol of the hero's vacancy.
We may note, in order to illustrate one of Pushkin's methods for revealing the power of cultural determinants in his characters' behaviour, the various explanations the narrator gives for
Tatyana's falling in love. We are told that she does so as a 'child of nature', spontaneously and without artificial contrivance; that she falls in love in response to the neighbours' gossip, which has planted the idea in her mind; that it is due to the influence of the epistolary novels she has read; or that it was simply appropriate to her age and social expectations. Having amused his readers with this shrewd undermining of typical romantic attitudes, Pushkin then surprises them and complicates their perceptions of 'truth' by giving a beautifully poetic description of Tatyana as a girl actually in love, with all the restless pain, joy, and dreaminess of her condition. The scene occurs, furthermore, in the wonderfully effective context of Tatyana's conversation with her concerned old nurse, seen in touching and realistic counterpoint to the feverish young girl.
Lensky is yet another figure who derives from books. Creating himself out of his naive literary readings and aspirations, he becomes a gentle parody of the sentimental romantic poet. What is particularly interesting and somewhat paradoxical, however, is that most of the characters transcend their function as parodies. They are treated by their creator with a sometimes puzzling blend of ironic detachment and sympathetic concern. It is one of the charms of the novel that the author (or at least the narrator) shares at times the viewpoint and attitudes of his most nave reader.
The narrator constantly intrudes on his story, postponing with his various digressions its progress, speculating on where it might lead, and frequently frustrating his reader's expectations. By exposing the work's contrived 'literariness', the narrator continually threatens to subvert or deconstruct the novelistic 'truth' of his tale. But then again, on resuming his narrative, he will recapture our interest in his heroes' fates and reignite an acceptance of their 'reality'. In his frequent address to both 'readers' and 'friends' (the latter comprised apparently of more sophisticated sorts of reader), the author anticipates almost all the potential ways of approaching and interpreting his book and seems to be trying to fashion, out of an amalgam
of both nave and sophisticated sensibilities, his ideal reader. We, his actual readers, like the solvers of a Chinese puzzle, must work out for ourselves the answers to a number of riddles the work proposes. What is the true nature of art? Where do the boundaries between literature and life lie? Or are there no boundaries, only a tangled network of intersecting threads that connect the lives we lead with the books we read? Perhaps, as this thoroughly modern and timeless work suggests, we are unable, despite all our strivings for personal 'authenticity', to be anything but the roles we play, the products and the playthings of literary and social conventions.
Pushkin's intricate and playful exploration of the connections between art and life permeates the work. His own practice as a poet is a case in point, issuing not only from his own genius, but from his enormous reading and his extensive knowledge of literary tradition. The novel's verse, poetry of the highest order, is also at times a pastiche of all the many clichs of poetic imagery and diction, of the techniques and formal conventions of a vast existing literature; though the writer may violate or mix or parody these traditions, he cannot exist without them. In support of its author's sly yet revealing game, the novel is full of literary allusions and references to other writers; it mocks the easy conflation of literature and life in countless ways: by the device, for example, of mixing real with fictional personages. Most prominently, of course, Pushkin has inserted himself into his book, not only as its narrator, but as the ostensible friend of its hero, Onegin. Tatyana, to give another instance, encounters and captivates at a Moscow soire Prince Vyazemsky, Pushkin's actual friend and fellow-poet. When the poem momentarily turns historical novel, the Emperor Napoleon briefly appears, only to be condemned as the impostor (in Russian memory) whose heroic pretensions were consumed by a Moscow conflagration and by life's intractability. Napoleon also figures in the novel as an icon of the European romantic imagination and, ironically, as the idol of the westernized Russian Onegin, who keeps a statuette of his hero in his study.
Again and again the work demonstrates that cultural myths are deeply embedded in the modern consciousness, that we cannot disentangle ourselves from our words or extricate our 'selves' from our texts. None of this, happily, seems to make human nature in Pushkin's eyes any less real or human characters any less responsible for their actions. The disguises we wear and the poses we assume or, contrastingly, the more active and creative roles that we may elect to play in life, define us as human beings.
The early-nineteenth-century critic Belinsky remarked famously that Pushkin's novel is 'an encyclopedia of Russian life'. 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
