Eugene Onegin

any milieu. He is enormously alive to the ephemera of experience, fascinated by everything and everyone: the sublime and the ridiculous; the sacred and the profane; all the roles that people play and every style of behaviour; he is interested equally in the talented and the mediocre, in the articulate and the dumb; in Czars, peasants, soldiers, fops, rakes, society women, vulnerable girls, rascals, villains, and almost anyone else. He wants, if only fleetingly, to capture everything, to absorb it all in his appetite for lifeeven at the risk of losing himself, or perhaps out of the need to lose himself. And the vision that emerges from this fleeting race through experience is no less perceptive and suggestive than many more lengthy examinations of life. Pushkin's manner of describing phenomena is fleeting and abrupt because he is never sated, never content, never willing to stay in one place; he has to rush on to the next person or thing that catches his eye. His omnivorous curiosity lends a kind of 'lightness' as well as universality to Pushkin's worka lightness of touch, weight, and illumination. The quality is legendary in descriptions of Pushkin's art, but it can be mistaken for superficiality. Our elusive author appears to take few things seriously (not excluding himself) and often poses as a mere 'entertainer'. Entertaining he certainly is, but if we, as readers, are taken in by his ruse and allow ourselves to become inattentive, we are in danger of missing the subtle and hidden aspect of his art.

The effect of lightness, the exceptional clarity that so famously accompanies Pushkin's breadth of interests, goes hand in hand with his vaunted terseness and simplicity, his evident and easy accessibility. But his terseness can be more apparent than real, for his art has the capacity to suggest much in a few spare and simple observations, and his simplicity can be deceptive, screening from the casual reader an art of great sophistication and delicacy. To the foreign reader, especially, Pushkin's qualities of clarity and simplicity can be an impediment to the appreciation of his work; and if the reader has first come to Russian literature through the tormented and profound explorations of

Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, Pushkin's view of the passing scene, filled with a bracing humour as well as grief, may produce a rather strange impression; he is not at all what such a reader has come to expect of a Russian writer. Unlike those two later masters, Pushkin is neither philosopher nor religious thinker, neither didactic moralist nor analytical psychologist. He is both more universal in his sympathies and more modest in his artistic person.

Perhaps, in his final years, this poet of light could not fully adjust to the passing of his youth and the waning of youth's poetic energy. If he would not become a poet of the dark, perhaps he did at the last become the seer of an 'unbearable lightness of being'. In several of his later poems some spectral beast of retribution seems to haunt the poet's mind, along with premonitions of, and even yearnings for, an early death. But the ending in human life is always the same, whereas in great art, as in the plenitude of Pushkin's work, it can at least seem otherwise. Pushkin retained to the last his humility before Providence and he went to his duel and his death completely in character. We cannot, finally, answer the question: who is Pushkin? We can only say with some degree of certainty what he is: Russia's most utter artist, its closest thing to the pure poet incarnate, that being who sacrifices all the other possibilities of his human existence to the expression, through language, of life's fascinating variety. The aim of poetry, Pushkin asserted, is poetry itself; the poet emerges from the creative spirit to show us the world and speak of things beyond our normal ken; he is the voice of time's fleeting and intricate fullness.

Central to any consideration of Pushkin's art is his 'novel in verse', Eugene Onegin, a work unique in Russian literature and one with few if any parallels outside it. Although it occupies in some respects an isolated and idiosyncratic place in Pushkin's uvre, it is also his most deeply characteristic creation. It was his own favourite among his works and may well be his greatest single contribution to world literature. Despite its considerable

literary sophistication and complexity and the fact of its having been written in verse, it may be more accessible to the appreciation of non-Russian readers than most of Pushkin's other work. Almost all of us, even those who are resistant to poetry (especially in translation!), are readers of novels; and Pushkin's long poem, with its stanzas that mimic paragraphs and its verse that seems as natural as familiar prose, subtly entices us by its successful masquerade as a novel. The writer spent some eight years writing it (far longer than he devoted to any other work), and it thus accompanied him through an extended and crucial period of his life. It not only reflects the vital changes that were taking place in Pushkin himself during those years, but it also represents its author's response to a transformation in the general literary climate. By the late 1820s the rage was all for new works in prose rather than poetry, and although Russian literature had as yet produced few prose works of any lasting distinction, writers were eager to answer the demands of the time. Pushkin was among the first of the established authors to respond to the need for a serious prose literature. This change in public taste and Pushkin's effort to respond to it took place in the very years when the writer was composing Eugene Onegin. Begun when Pushkin was only 24, still ebullient in his poetic personality and still partially under the sway of his fascination with Byron, it was completed in his thirty-second year, when he was already the author of several prose works of a strongly anti-romantic cast. Onegin, as the work's hybrid nature suggests, belongs to a transitional phase in Pushkin's career and constitutes a kind of bridge linking two literary eras. It shows us its author, at the central period of his life, in the very act of crossing that bridge, attempting to transform himself from romantic poet into a novelist who would paint on a large canvas an expansive picture of social reality. Paradoxically Eugene Onegin, although written in verse, is the earliest of Pushkin's works to contain a major component of the 'prosaic' in motivation and spirit. This rather complex set of personal and historical factors informs this first great

Russian novel (and arguably the most influential) in a number of crucial ways and provides the ground for its unique flavour and a strangeness that both delights and perplexes the reader. The work is many things: a stylistic tour de force, an examination of human character and of the power in human affairs of cultural phenomena (especially social and artistic conventions), an investigation of the interconnections between literature and life, an autobiography, and an exploration of the creative process itself. It is also, of course, and above all else, incomparable poetry. Highly structured in its use of an unvarying stanzaic form and in its classically balanced design, the work nevertheless conveys an atmosphere of free-flowing spontaneity. Its verse, while observing elegantly the requirements of metre and rhyme, is able at the same time to achieve the rhythm and feel of the most natural and ordinary colloquial speech. Like a discursive prose work, the novel exhibits a wealth of genial, meandering talk and an apparently casual approach to narrative pace. The plot itself is elegantly simple. Treating of the frustrations of love, it deals, as Vladimir Nabokov puts it, 'with the emotions, meditations, acts and destinies of three men: Onegin, the bored fop; Lensky, the minor elegiast; and a stylized Pushkin, Onegin's friend'¹and, in a pleasing symmetry, with the affections and fates of three heroines: Tatyana, the shy and bookish provincial maiden; Olga, her beautiful but ordinary younger sister; and Pushkin's mercurial Muse. The action, set in the imperial Russia of the 1820s, begins in a glittering St Petersburg, moves for an extended stay to the bucolic country estate, sojourns for a chapter in Moscow, and then, as if closing a circle, comes to its end in the capital once more. Along its devious narrative route, the novel treats the reader to an engaging and suspenseful story; to lively scenes of city and country life; to portraits of a socially mixed cast of characters; to evocations of nature in its various seasons; and to

¹Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse by Alexander Pushkin, Translated from the Russian with a Commentary (New York, 1964), iv. 6.

a wealth of authorial digression and commentary, la Byron or Sterne, on the tale in the telling and on sundry literary, philosophical, and autobiographical mattersall in a shifting play of many moods and tones: lyrical, realistic, parodic, romantic, and ironic.

Much commentary on the work has focused, understandably enough, on its hero and heroine, Onegin and Tatyana, the ill-starred but non-tragic lovers who were to become the prototypes for a host of figures created by