The choice of books seemed strange indeed;
But soon her thirsting spirit savoured
The mystery that those pages told
And watched a different world unfold.
22
Although Onegin's inclination
For books had vanished, as we know,
He did exempt from condemnation
Some works and authors even so:
The bard of Juan and the Giaour,*
And some few novels done with power,
In which our age is well displayed
And 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 schemes.
23
Some pages still preserved the traces
Where fingernails had sharply pressed;
The girl's attentive eye embraces
These lines more quickly than the rest.
And Tanya sees with trepidation
The kind of thought or observation
To which Eugene paid special heed,
Or where he'd tacitly agreed.
And in the margins she inspected
His pencil marks with special care;
And on those pages everywhere
She found Onegin's soul reflected
In crosses or a jotted note,
Or in the question mark he wrote.
24
And so, in slow but growing fashion
My Tanya starts to understand
More clearly nowthank Godher passion
And him for whom, by fate's command,
She'd been condemned to feel desire:
That dangerous and sad pariah,
That work of heaven or of hell,
That angel. . . and proud fiend as well.
What was he then? An imitation?
An empty phantom or a joke,
A Muscovite in Harold's cloak,
Compendium of affectation,
A lexicon of words in vogue . . .
Mere parody and just a rogue?
25
