would be punished and punish others. As soon as a challenge was issued, strict codes governed the response, whether or not the aggrieved party felt personal outrage. Failing to issue a challenge when provoked was also dishonorable. If a gentleman was insulted by a person who then refused to accept a challenge to a duel, or if a challenge that should have been issued for some reason was not, one means for the insulted party to restore his honor was to commit suicide, or at least to attempt it. In Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (Part IV, ch. 18), the humiliated Count Vronsky shoots himself soon after his mistress Anna, near death with puerperal fever and just delivered of Vronsky’s child, is reconciled to her husband. As a point d’honneur, the deceived husband should have called out the lover. But Karenin, an enlightened government bureaucrat,

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refuses to be maneuvered by a military code he despises. Perhaps Vronsky, pressing his revolver to his chest and pulling the trigger, was in despair at losing Anna; but for certain he was desperate to restore his honor.

To duel and gamble meant to assert one’s individual initiative and thus to act, and feel, more free – even though, paradoxically, the outcome was utterly out of one’s control. Staking everything on a single bullet (or card) opened a person to arbitrariness and fate. Pushkin participated passionately in both duels of honor and games of chance. He favored high-stakes games and tended to lose heavily (his known losses at cards amount to 80,000 rubles, his wins to a mere 7,000); he had a reputation for playing honestly and for paying his large debts “conscientiously, even when his opponents cheated.”8 In Pushkin’s most famous short story, “The Queen of Spades” (1833), the cautious hero Germann ends up in a madhouse after he fails to win on three cards (three, seven, ace) that he had been promised, in a dream, would yield him a fortune. He played them as per the instructions – but at the last moment, inexplicably, the ace turns into a Queen of Spades. Germann’s error had not been gambling. It was his refusal to gamble, that is, his trying to fix in advance the results of a game of chance. Such calculation always struck Pushkin as servile and dishonorable.

“Chance, in Pushkin’s view, was the servant of the greater thing that he called fate.”9 This seeming paradox lies at the heartof Pushkin’s creative art and personal worldview (the poet was morbidly superstitious); it unites spontaneity and constraint in a fashion peculiar to this poet. Symmetry, often of dazzling complexity, governs his worlds. Events are balanced and circular; for all the easy banter, nothing is forgotten and no escape is possible from the choices and accidents that each hero must answer for. Exemplary here is Pushkin’s novel in verse, Eugene Onegin, a perfectly proportioned genre hybrid. It partakes equally of novel and poem. The “novelistic” factors include a chatty and digressive narrator, abundant everyday detail, protagonists who mature over several years, and unimpeded conversation that fits effortlessly into lines of verse. The novel cuts off at mid-scene in a most capricious manner. Onegin is on his knees in Tatyana’s boudoir. She has just rejected his advances and left the room. Her husband has just clinked his spurs in the doorway. At that moment “most dire for the hero,” the narrator chooses to withdraw from the story. If the well-made novel ends with a wedding or a death, Pushkin gives us neither. The novelistic dimension encourages openness, surprise, uncertainty.

Representing the poetic aspect is, first of all, the Onegin stanza itself, the novel’s structural “paragraph.” As tightly coiled as the novel is garrulous and expansive, this stanza is remarkably flexible: a fourteen-line verse unit in iambic tetrameter, with a regular scheme of feminine and masculine rhymes, arranged in three differently rhymed quatrains (first alternating, then pair, finally “ring”

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construction) followed by a rhyming couplet (AbAb CCdd EffE gg).10 Pushkin invented the stanza in May 1823, intrigued by Byron’s verse narratives and most likely also inspired by the freely rhymed salacious verse of the seventeenth-century French fabulist La Fontaine. With several notable interruptions, eight chapters (over 5,000 lines) of these sturdy, intricately rhymed stanzas propel the plot of Eugene Onegin forward with an intoxicating and self-confident momentum. Each stanza-paragraph has a characteristic pace or spin: the opening quatrain and ending couplet are sedate and urbane; the middle stretch is blurred, excited, suggestive; the ending couplet snaps the paragraph shut.

The poeticality of Eugene Onegin pertains not only to its formal structure. Events also unfold in a mirrored way, although displaced in time. And meanwhile the unfolding story is punctuated by the narrator’s repeated assertions – tinged but not tainted by irony – that no act is evil or good in itself but that timing is all: he or she is “blessed” who manages to live through life’s challenges in the right order, at the right age, for the right length of time. This neoclassical sense of the proper place for things, the proper “pitch,” pace, and rhythm that help us to see how one episode in a life might fit into a balanced and justified whole, is as crucial to Pushkin’s writings in prose fiction and history as it is in a line of his verse. But what is this right order, and from what perspective can we know it?

Tatyana sends Onegin a lovesick letter in Chapter 3. He sends her lovesick letters in Chapter 8. He lectures her on the modesty befitting an honorable maiden in Chapter 3 (she listens but is silent). She lectures him on his duties as an honorable man in Chapter 8 (he listens but is silent). No one gets together, each slides by the other, each is in love with the other but not at the same time, and for this reason energy in the novel is stored, not squandered. Such precious, unspent pressure figured high among Pushkin’s ideals for a well-balanced work of art, and he provides several metaphors for containing it. One occurs near the end of Eugene Onegin, in Eight, l: the “magic crystal” [magicheskii kristall] or glass ball for guessing fortunes. The author admits to gazing into this crystal, many years earlier, seeking (in Nabokov’s words)“the farstretchofafree novel.” How can a free thing be sought in a closed, symmetrical structure?

Imagine a kaleidoscope: a tube with a set of mirrors at one end and a slot for the eye at the other. Life’s myriad events, confusions, coincidences, accidents – what Pushkin called, collectively, sluchai [“chance”] – are a heap of brightly colored shards of glass on the novelist’s horizon, the faceted mirrored surface at the end of the tube. The poet-novelist’s task is to rotate the kaleidoscope so that these arbitrary shards, falling out in random heaps, are refracted within the funnel of the novel to form patterns. Pushkin did not write “psychological prose” that claimed access to every irregular, messy nook and cranny of another’s

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consciousness (the pioneer in that realm is Mikhail Lermontov, still a decade away). His complexity lies in his juxtaposition of multiple reflecting surfaces. Pushkin produces consciousness and intelligence in his characters (and pleasure in his readers) by the intersection of many planes. Thus he attends fastidiously to how, when, and by whom story lines are cut off and then resumed, and when the reader is allowed to hook up the various parts. In Eugene Onegin these “stress-lines” of the plot criss-cross with a perfectly controlled poetic stanza. The effect is a sort of glittering visual mesh, suggesting depth but delivering a profusion of edges. Pushkin’s ideals are the classical ones of public honor, duty, fearlessness in facing death, taking risks while young and letting go of one’s fantasies when old.

Pushkin was a born poet who labored hard to learn the art of prose. Although he eventually managed to write lines that didn’t scan, he never abandoned the symmetrical ideal. In his finished prose works of the 1830s (only four were completed out of thirty begun), roundedness – returning to the beginning, but at another level – became his compromise with the linear impulses of accumulation, conversion, and collapse. Delaying the reward, or stripping back a disguise to reveal that we remain what we have always been, could turn an incipient tragedy into a comedy and a mass of quotidian details into a potential poem. Of course Pushkin as prose writer employed so-called “situation rhymes” (the prefiguring and echoing of narrative events), but his poetic nature demanded more: not just the repetition of similar parts but a structural symmetry within the work as a whole, subordinating even free personality to its sway.Boris Godunov (1825) reveals just such a balanced construction, for example, when Grigory Otrepiev wakes up from a dream in scene 5 and then, as Dmitry the Pretender, falls asleep (and falls out of the play) five scenes before the end.11 A “symmetrical situation rhyme” also frames

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