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- Herausgeber: DigiCat
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Eugene Onegin," Alexander Pushkin masterfully weaves a narrative that marries the elegance of verse with the complexity of human emotion. This novel in verse, first published in the 1820s, is celebrated for its rich character development and intricate exploration of societal norms in 19th-century Russia. Through the life of the disillusioned aristocrat Eugene Onegin and his interactions with the passionate Tatyana, Pushkin delves into themes of unrequited love, friendship, and the ennui of the Russian gentry. The structure of the work, employing the unique Odessan stanza, showcases Pushkin's innovative approach to poetry and storytelling, marking a pivotal contribution to the Russian literary canon and the development of the modern novel. Alexander Pushkin, often regarded as the father of Russian literature, was profoundly influenced by his life experiences, including his mixed heritage and the political turbulence of his time. These factors informed his perspectives on love, society, and the individual's place within it. His encounters with different social strata and his personal conflicts greatly influenced his creation of Eugene Onegin, encapsulating the contradictions of a society in transition. Readers are invited to immerse themselves in this quintessential work, which not only reflects the depth of human connection but also serves as a profound commentary on the complexities of Russian society. Pushkin's nuanced portrayal of his characters makes "Eugene Onegin" a timeless exploration of unfulfilled desires and the intricacies of social interaction, rendering it essential reading for anyone interested in the interplay of romance and existential reflection. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - An Author Biography reveals milestones in the author's life, illuminating the personal insights behind the text. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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Eugene Onegin
Table of Contents
Introduction
In a world riven by elegance and ennui, desire arrives a step too late. Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin sets this cadence from its opening scenes, tracing the currents of fashion, feeling, and fatigue through salons and snowbound fields. It is a novel in verse that turns society’s mirrors toward its readers, asking how self-knowledge can survive the pressures of performance. With urbane wit and steady melancholy, it invites us to contemplate the cost of detachment and the risks of sincerity. The story’s charm lies in its poise: bright, conversational, and graceful, yet shadowed by the knowledge that time seldom waits for understanding.
Eugene Onegin is the work of Alexander Pushkin, composed between 1823 and 1831 and published in installments from 1825 to 1832, with a complete edition following soon after. Written in Russian as a “novel in verse,” it employs a distinctive 14-line stanza in iambic tetrameter now known as the Onegin stanza. This formal design supports a narrative that moves with conversational ease while maintaining musical precision. The book stands at the crossroads of lyric poetry and social novel, blending intimacy and breadth, and it helped consolidate a modern literary language capable of capturing the nuance of everyday life.
The premise is deceptively simple. A young St. Petersburg aristocrat, Eugene Onegin, inherits a country estate and meets neighbors who live by rhythms different from the capital’s. He befriends a sincere, idealistic poet, Vladimir Lensky. Their acquaintance leads Onegin to the home of the Larin family, including two sisters—Tatyana, reflective and inward, and Olga, cheerful and sociable. From this constellation of temperaments emerges a study of manners and imagination, of city habits meeting provincial candor. Without rushing to events, the narrator dwells on atmosphere, mapping conversations, seasons, and expectations that shape choices before they are fully recognized.
The book’s classic status rests first on its formal audacity and elegance. Pushkin set a new standard for narrative freedom in verse, demonstrating that poetry could accommodate the bustle of society, the textures of daily life, and the shifting ironies of a self-aware storyteller. His supple diction and balanced tone—by turns playful, skeptical, and tender—became exemplary for later Russian writers. Eugene Onegin has long been counted a cornerstone of the national canon, not merely admired but studied as a model of clarity and measure. Its poise continues to define an ideal of artistry that feels both exacting and effortless.
Just as decisive is the way Pushkin’s narrator guides, interrupts, and confides. The voice ranges from social observation to intimate confession, pausing for digressions on books, fashion, weather, and memory. This companionship creates a second plot: the unfolding relationship between narrator and reader. We are taught how to notice, how to measure feeling against custom, and how to keep irony from curdling into cynicism. The narrator’s tact—never merely mocking, never simply solemn—allows the story to breathe. It offers an education in attention, demonstrating how style can carry moral intelligence without turning sermon or satire into a blunt instrument.
Behind the grace of the verse stand durable themes. The book considers the perils of boredom and the allure of spectacle; the friction between cultivated poses and unguarded feeling; the gap between literary fantasies and lived experience. It wonders how people learn to want, and how society trains them to appear. It examines the speeds of urban life and the patience of the countryside, setting public ritual beside private reverie. Throughout, time is the quiet antagonist: seasons turn, opportunities narrow, and understanding often arrives after the moment has passed. The result is a humane meditation on choice before consequence.
Pushkin’s figures are memorable because they are types without becoming ciphers. Onegin, elegant and weary, is often cited as an early portrait of the “superfluous man,” educated and privileged yet unsure how to spend himself. Lensky embodies youthful conviction and poetic ardor, a temperament formed as much by reading as by experience. Tatyana’s inwardness makes her attentive to language, custom, and conscience; Olga’s lightness gives the social world its charm. None is treated with cruelty. The narrator acknowledges both their limits and their dignity, letting character emerge from gesture and context rather than from pronouncement or ornament.
Form does more than adorn; it thinks. The Onegin stanza—fourteen lines in iambic tetrameter with an intricate, recurring rhyme pattern—creates a dance of expectation and surprise. Its turns accommodate anecdote, description, aphorism, and sudden tenderness, all within a measured frame. That balance has challenged translators for generations, producing a rich tradition of English versions and critical commentary. The music of the original has also inspired artists beyond the page, most famously in Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s operatic adaptation. Such afterlives testify to a structure whose elegance invites reinvention while preserving the heartbeat of Pushkin’s design.
Eugene Onegin arises from post-Napoleonic Russia, when the nation’s elite looked outward to European fashions and inward to its own estates and obligations. The book moves between Petersburg’s polished surfaces and the countryside’s slower cadences, attentive to rank, wealth, and custom. Serfdom still shaped the economy; conversation often flowed in French; ambition and propriety shared drawing rooms. Pushkin writes with the perspective of someone at home in both registers, neither dazzled nor disdainful. This double vision allows the narrative to reflect its society without turning it into a caricature, and to register how history presses, quietly, on private choices.
The poem’s influence is wide and traceable. Later Russian prose and poetry found in it a template for mixing social breadth with psychological nuance. Writers across the nineteenth century engaged its questions about personality and vocation, and critics continually returned to its narrator’s method as a touchstone for literary tact. Beyond literature, the story has lived on in opera, theater, and cinema, each medium testing the resilience of its characters and situations. Its presence in classrooms and handbooks owes less to decree than to the vitality of its pages, which reward both close analysis and re-reading.
To approach Eugene Onegin is to learn a way of reading. Attend to the seasonal clock, to dances and dinners, to the books characters borrow and the masks they wear. Notice how the narrator places a detail, defers a scene, or circles a thought. The poem is generous to those who listen for its modulations of tone—from sparkling banter to reflective hush—and to those who sense how description doubles as judgment. Even in translation, that calibration of sound and sense remains. The result is not merely a story but a conversation about how stories shape taste, memory, and moral attention.
Its contemporary relevance follows naturally. Onegin speaks to worlds that prize display, to lives curated in public, to the fatigue that polish can hide, and to the hazards of postponing candor. It reminds us that irony cannot substitute for commitment, that literature can both mislead and clarify, and that self-knowledge often demands stepping outside familiar rooms. Yet the poem never scolds; it invites. Its enduring appeal lies in a union rare in any age: formal perfection that shelters generous understanding. In these pages, style is not escape but insight, and the music of speech becomes a measure of freedom.
Synopsis
Eugene Onegin is a novel in verse by Alexander Pushkin, composed in the 1820s and early 1830s, that blends narrative with the poet’s commentary on culture, art, and society. Set between St. Petersburg’s salons and the Russian countryside, it follows a young aristocrat whose education and privilege have left him polished yet weary. The narrator, an urbane presence within the story, moves between intimate confession and ironic distance, sketching a world of fashion, theater, and literary tastes. From the outset, Onegin’s elegant routines appear hollow, and the poem poses quiet questions about purpose, sincerity, and the costs of sophistication without conviction.
Summoned by an inheritance after a relative’s death, Onegin leaves the capital for a rural estate, shifting the story from metropolitan display to provincial rhythms. There he befriends Vladimir Lensky, a neighbor newly returned from Germany, an idealistic poet whose fervor contrasts with Onegin’s skepticism. Through their conversations, Pushkin stages a dialogue between Romantic aspiration and worldly disenchantment. The countryside brings a different social texture—landowners’ visits, harvest rituals, and evenings of music and talk—while the narrator’s digressions sketch the manners of the day. Within this setting, the Larin family appears, linking private feeling to the pressure of community opinion.
The Larins are modest landowners: a practical mother and two daughters whose temperaments are sharply distinct. Olga, Lensky’s fiancée, is openly cheerful and conventional, beloved for her easy charm. Tatyana, the elder sister, is solitary and inward, drawn to reading and reverie more than social bustle. Onegin accompanies Lensky to their home and, with polished courtesy, makes a reserved impression. In these encounters, Pushkin tracks the intersections of temperament and circumstance: Lensky’s rapture, Onegin’s restraint, and the household’s quietly ordered life. The narrator, attentive to provincial customs, underlines how expectations shape courtship, reputation, and the fragile space afforded to individual desire.
Tatyana’s imagination, nourished by novels, turns toward Onegin with a seriousness that surprises those around her. In a moment of bold honesty, she reaches beyond etiquette to confide her feelings, hoping to bridge the distance she senses. Onegin’s response, framed as worldly counsel, avoids cruelty yet denies the prospect of romance, preferring to prevent illusions he believes would end in pain. The exchange reveals their opposing codes: her candor and faith in inward truth, his caution and distrust of emotional display. The narrator reflects on sincerity, the theater of manners, and the difficulty of separating genuine sentiment from social performance.
Community celebrations soon bring tensions to a head. At Tatyana’s name day, the lively crowd, gossip, and formal dances press in on Onegin’s aversion to provincial spectacle. Irritated at being drawn into the event by Lensky, he chooses a pointed flirtation with Olga to express his displeasure. What begins as a gesture of pique stirs jealousy and wounded pride. Words harden; the era’s code of honor offers ritual avenues for redress. A challenge is issued, and, at dawn, forms are observed with grim precision. The episode, steeped in ceremony and youthful stubbornness, moves toward consequences that prove irreversible for all involved.
In the aftermath, silence and distance replace earlier sociability. Onegin departs to travel, while the narrator turns reflective, sketching scenes of fashionable Europe and meditating on time, remorse, and the thinness of diversion. Back in the countryside, Tatyana’s path leads her to Onegin’s library, where she reads his books and notes, piecing together an image of the man behind his manner. The shelves reveal influences and poses, prompting her to weigh the difference between adopted attitudes and lived character. This quiet inquiry becomes a turning point in her growth, less a romantic reverie than a sober recognition of self and other.
Years pass, and the setting returns to St. Petersburg, rendered with glittering detail: receptions, minuets of rank, and the rituals of presentation. Onegin, older and more detached than before, moves through this world as a familiar stranger. In a striking reversal, he encounters Tatyana transformed—dignified, composed, and firmly situated within high society. The impression unsettles him. Where once he cautioned against ardor, he now feels its pull, composing letters with urgency and searching for meetings under the strict eyes of decorum. The poem’s central conflict pivots from refusal to pursuit, reframing desire against duty and reputation.
An interview at last brings the two into private conversation, where past and present press with insistent force. Onegin speaks from a new vulnerability; Tatyana answers with a clarity shaped by experience and social responsibility. Their dialogue revisits youthful impulses under the shadow of consequence, raising questions about constancy, self-mastery, and the claims of conscience. The narrator, never far away, measures the scene with poised restraint, avoiding melodrama while intensifying its moral resonance. The outcome, contingent on character as much as circumstance, remains a test of what each has learned about themselves, and about the costs exacted by time.
Eugene Onegin endures for its fusion of narrative verve, social portraiture, and self-aware poetic craft. It depicts a society where etiquette can both refine and imprison, and where timing turns sincerity into loss or redemption. The poem inaugurates a distinctively Russian figure—the cultivated yet aimless observer—while honoring the gravity of those who grow into their convictions. Its narrator’s ironic warmth, the blend of satire and elegy, and the precise attention to ordinary moments give the work lasting breadth. Without fixing a single moral, it invites reflection on freedom, responsibility, and the difficult art of becoming fully oneself.
Historical Context
Eugene Onegin unfolds within the Russian Empire of the 1810s–1820s, moving between St. Petersburg, Moscow, and the provincial countryside. The dominant institutions are autocracy, the hereditary nobility, and serfdom, underwritten by the Table of Ranks and the Orthodox Church. Court etiquette, salons, and state service shape elite life, while censorship and police surveillance define public discourse. The imperial capital’s theaters, clubs, and embankments contrast with the rhythms of rural estates, where landowners rely on bound peasants. Dueling is illegal yet tolerated among gentlemen, and French remains the prestige language in high society. This social and institutional framework directs expectations, duties, and desires in the narrative’s world.
Pushkin composed Eugene Onegin between roughly 1823 and 1831, publishing it serially in separate parts from 1825 to 1832, with a first complete book edition in 1833. The novel in verse thus spans the later years of Alexander I’s reign and the beginning of Nicholas I’s rule after 1825. Its temporal texture blends recent memory with contemporary observation, allowing Pushkin to register shifts in mood and manners over the decade. St. Petersburg functions as the political and cultural center, Moscow as a bastion of old noble families, and the provinces as an arena of estate management and gentry custom. The poem’s digressive narrator foregrounds this living, evolving milieu.
The Napoleonic invasion of 1812 and the subsequent campaigns of 1813–1814 were formative for Russia’s elite. Officers returned from Paris and other European capitals exposed to constitutional debates, salons, and new fashions. Patriotic pride coexisted with skepticism toward domestic stagnation. Eugene Onegin reflects this afterglow: cosmopolitan tastes, French phrases, and European manners mingle with a sense of fatigue and disillusion. The social circles depicted, from St. Petersburg balls to provincial gatherings, bear the imprint of postwar confidence and anxiety. The work’s ironic tone toward empty ritual and fashion mirrors the generation’s crossroads: victorious abroad, yet uncertain about reform at home.
Serfdom remained the empire’s socioeconomic foundation, binding millions of peasants to noble estates. Landowners extracted labor through corvée (barshchina) or monetary payments (obrok), and estate stewards mediated daily exploitation. This system furnished the wealth that sustained urban leisure, country houses, and social display. Eugene Onegin portrays gentry life as dependent on such arrangements, even when peasant characters appear only at the margins. Rural customs, domestic service, and the calendar of estate obligations structure provincial existence. The novel’s attention to estate management, harvests, and peasant songs illuminates the moral dissonance of refined sensibilities resting upon coerced labor, a dissonance increasingly noted by Pushkin’s contemporaries.
Urban aristocratic culture in St. Petersburg and Moscow revolved around salons, the theater, the opera, public promenades, and private balls. Clubs—most famously the Moscow English Club—organized dinners and card games. Fashionable men modeled themselves on the European dandy, an image shaped by English tailoring and conversational wit. Onegin’s elegance, boredom, and impeccable dress evoke this type while being subject to satire. The season’s routines governed social mobility: introductions, invitations, patronage, and strategic marriages. Grand interiors, candlelit suppers, and carriage rides across icy embankments provided the backdrop for performances of taste and status. Such rituals anchor the poem’s social scenes and its critique of cultivated idleness.
Elite education in early nineteenth-century Russia typically began at home, with foreign tutors—often French or German—followed by gymnasia or specialized institutions. Pushkin himself attended the Imperial Lyceum at Tsarskoe Selo, founded in 1811 to train enlightened administrators. Among nobles, French functioned as the language of conversation and letters, while Russian carried increasing literary prestige after reforms associated with Nikolai Karamzin. Eugene Onegin captures this bilingual world, where code-switching signals status and temperament. The characters’ reading habits—translations of Richardson or Rousseau for young women, fashionable verse and journals for men—reflect available print culture. Pushkin’s diction fuses colloquial speech with classical poise, modeling a modern literary Russian.
The book stands at the transition from European Romanticism to a Russian realism attentive to everyday detail. The “Byronic” figure—world-weary, ironic, self-absorbed—had entered Russian letters through poets like Zhukovsky and Batyushkov, and Pushkin reshapes it into Onegin’s recognizable type. At the same time, the heroine’s sentimental reading echoes the widespread popularity of moral-sentimental novels. Formally, Pushkin invents the “Onegin stanza,” a 14-line iambic tetrameter pattern with a fixed rhyme scheme, balancing narrative momentum with lyrical pause. This flexible container allows social observation, literary polemic, and intimate introspection, aligning the poem with contemporary debates about national literature and the purposes of art.
The 1810s–1820s saw rapid growth of periodicals, almanacs, and private presses, expanding literary markets among the educated elite. Yet censorship, present since the eighteenth century, tightened markedly after 1825. The 1826 Censorship Statute, often called “cast-iron” for its severity, and a revised 1828 statute set strict controls on political, religious, and moral content. Nicholas I personally oversaw Pushkin’s standing with the authorities, a fact that shaped what could be printed and when. Eugene Onegin’s serial publication navigated these constraints; select passages were altered or delayed. The poem’s oblique satire, digressive commentary, and historical masking reflect strategies for saying much under watchful eyes.
The Decembrist movement crystallized among officers and noblemen who, influenced by European ideas, formed secret societies from the mid-1810s onward. Seeking constitutional limits or the abolition of serfdom, they attempted an uprising in December 1825, which was swiftly suppressed; leaders were executed or exiled to Siberia. Pushkin knew several Decembrists from his Lyceum and literary circles, though he was in exile during the revolt. The heightened surveillance that followed informed his caution in print. Eugene Onegin registers the generation’s disquiet—ambition checked by inertia, ideals by ceremony—without overt political program, mirroring a society negotiating between remembered hopes and imposed silence.
Dueling, despite periodic bans, persisted as a mechanism for defending honor among Russian gentlemen. Informal codes governed seconds, choice of weapons, and distances, while the state condemned the practice and prosecuted fatalities unevenly. The culture of quips, slights, and reputation in salons and clubs made duels a recurring hazard. Pushkin himself fought multiple duels and would die from one in 1837, after the novel’s completion. The duel episode in Eugene Onegin reflects this social reality: etiquette, witnesses, and lethal consequences unfold within an accepted—if illicit—framework. The scene underscores how personal pride and ceremony could override law, reason, and friendship in elite society.
Women of the gentry navigated a social order that prized modesty, literacy in French, musical skill, and domestic virtue while expecting advantageous marriages. Guardianship norms, chaperonage, and name-day celebrations structured courtship. Letter writing—codified by etiquette manuals and practiced from youth—offered a socially sanctioned outlet for feeling. Eugene Onegin portrays a provincial young woman whose inner life is shaped by reading, rural routine, and family duty. The tension between private emotion and public expectation, central to early nineteenth-century gender roles, becomes a narrative engine. The depiction reflects norms that granted women cultural influence in salons but limited formal power and legal autonomy.
The novel’s milieu depends on an economy of land rents, estate produce, and urban consumption. Many nobles lived on credit, frequented gaming tables, and juggled debts with revenue from serf labor. In cities, imported fabrics, perfumes, and wines signaled rank; theater subscriptions and carriage maintenance were major expenses. In the countryside, hunting parties, name-day feasts, and seasonal visits stitched together gentry society. The poem’s catalogues—menus, costumes, book lists—record the material culture of the time while ironizing its excess. Through these details, Pushkin connects aesthetic taste to economic underpinnings, revealing how refinement and wastefulness coexisted atop a fragile fiscal and moral base.
Transport and communication shaped both plot and social life. Russia’s imperial postal system linked cities and estates through relay stations, enabling rapid dispatch of letters and the movement of officials and travelers by carriage or sledge. Distances were measured in versts, and winter roads could be smoother than summer tracks. Visiting circuits, obligatory calls, and formal invitations depended on these logistics. The Imperial post also carried journals and books, sustaining a shared conversation across far-flung estates. Eugene Onegin’s scenes of travel, deliveries, and missed encounters rely on this infrastructure, illustrating how mobility and delay governed relationships within a vast, climatically challenging empire.
Provincial Russia preserved a dense web of folk practices alongside Orthodox ritual. Fortune-telling customs, seasonal songs, and dream lore persisted, particularly among women and household servants, despite clerical disapproval. Name-days and church feasts punctuated the calendar, organizing visits and celebrations that structured gentry social time. Eugene Onegin incorporates these elements—rural divinations, lullabies, and holiday gatherings—to contrast metropolitan polish with the imaginative resources of the countryside. The interplay of folklore and liturgy underscores a culture in which Enlightenment ideals, Christian morality, and pre-Christian survivals cohabited, giving depth to characters whose sensibilities are shaped by both books and ancestral custom.
Public health crises also framed the poem’s creation. The cholera epidemic of 1830–1831 led to quarantines, travel restrictions, and urban unrest in several regions. Pushkin, delayed by such measures at his family’s estate in Boldino in the autumn of 1830, experienced an extraordinarily productive period—later called the “Boldino Autumn”—during which he completed and revised major sections of Eugene Onegin and wrote numerous other works. The epidemic’s disruptions affected postal schedules and book markets, slowing publication and correspondence. Although cholera plays no direct role in the plot, the atmosphere of contingency and interruption colored the work’s final stages and its readers’ world.
Politically, the hopeful liberalism ascribed to early Alexander I gave way to caution, especially after 1812 and decisively after the Decembrist revolt. Nicholas I’s reign emphasized order and loyalty, culminating in the doctrine of “Official Nationality” (Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality) articulated in 1833. While formulated after most of Eugene Onegin was written, this ideology clarifies the environment in which the poem’s later parts were read and edited. Pushkin avoided explicit political argument in the novel, but his social portraiture—recording bureaucratic careers, ceremonial flattery, and private skepticism—maps a culture negotiating conformity under surveillance while maintaining a vivid private and literary life.
The work’s serial form mirrors the rhythms of contemporary reading culture. Chapters appeared as events, discussed in salons and journals, inviting readers to recognize themselves and their acquaintances in its characters and digressions. Pushkin cultivated this immediacy by naming real authors, fashions, and stage performers, though he often veils identities through allusion. Such topicality required careful navigation of the censors while satisfying an audience eager for portraits of itself. The poem thus doubled as a chronicle of the 1820s: a ledger of books read, dances danced, and roads traveled, all filtered through a narrator who oscillates between affectionate nostalgia and sharp social critique, modeling a national literature in real time.
Author Biography
Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837) is widely regarded as the founding figure of modern Russian literature. Emerging during the Romantic era yet transcending its boundaries, he forged a supple, idiomatic literary Russian that shaped poetry, prose, and drama for generations. His oeuvre ranges from narrative poems and fairy tales in verse to the novel in verse, historical fiction, short prose, and a major chronicle play. Pushkin’s synthesis of European models with Russian history, folklore, and colloquial speech set enduring standards of clarity, musicality, and psychological nuance. His works became a touchstone for national culture while remaining internationally influential, sustaining a reputation for technical innovation and thematic breadth.
In 1811 he entered the Imperial Lyceum at Tsarskoye Selo, an elite school that cultivated rhetoric, history, and modern languages. There his early talent was recognized publicly, and he absorbed Enlightenment authors and French classics alongside contemporary Romantic poetry. He read and imitated Voltaire and Rousseau, later responding to Byron’s narrative verse and to the language reforms advocated by Nikolai Karamzin. The Lyceum’s literary circle nurtured his discipline and ambition, while the school’s training in civics and history broadened his thematic horizons. By the time he moved to government service in St. Petersburg, he was already known in literary salons for confident, polished verse.
Pushkin’s debut as a major poet came with Ruslan and Ludmila (1820), a playful epic drawing on folklore and parody that challenged prevailing neoclassical taste. Political poems advocating civic liberty circulated in manuscript and attracted official scrutiny. Transferred from the capital, he spent much of the early 1820s in the south, where dramatic landscapes and new social milieus informed a series of narrative poems, including The Prisoner of the Caucasus, The Fountain of Bakhchisaray, and The Gypsies. These works consolidated his reputation, blending Romantic exoticism with sharp observation. At the same time he refined a candid, conversational idiom that would soon reshape Russian narrative art.
Placed under surveillance and later confined to his family estate at Mikhailovskoye, Pushkin turned to ambitious experiments. He began and steadily developed Eugene Onegin, a novel in verse whose stanzaic design and urbane narrator opened new possibilities for characterization and social portraiture in Russian. He also wrote Boris Godunov (completed 1825), a chronicle play that explored power and legitimacy through historical materials; its staging would be long delayed by censorship. The mid-1820s thus marked a pivot from youthful romanticism toward a poised, realist tendency, as he married colloquial diction to classical form, expanding the scope of themes Russian literature could credibly address.
The cholera quarantine of 1830 stranded him at Boldino, a period remembered for extraordinary productivity. In a few months he composed The Tales of Belkin, a pioneering cycle of short prose; the dramatic miniatures often called the Little Tragedies; and numerous lyrics and verse tales. Early 1830s publications included The Tale of Tsar Saltan, The Tale of the Fisherman and the Fish, and other narratives that refashioned folkloric motifs with crystalline style. He brought Eugene Onegin to completion around this time, confirming his mastery across genres. The new prose, concise and ironic, influenced the emerging Russian short story and broadened his readership.
In the mid-1830s Pushkin deepened his engagement with history and contemporary society. He researched and published The History of Pugachev, and transformed the same materials into the novel The Captain’s Daughter, notable for moral economy and narrative restraint. He wrote The Queen of Spades, a seminal tale of obsession and chance, and composed The Bronze Horseman, a St. Petersburg poem whose publication encountered censorship and appeared posthumously. Seeking a forum less dependent on court patronage, he founded the journal Sovremennik (The Contemporary) in 1836. Throughout, he balanced early liberal sympathies with pragmatic caution under surveillance, refining themes of freedom, authority, responsibility, and fate.
Pushkin died in 1837 from wounds sustained in a duel in St. Petersburg, an event that shocked readers and consolidated his stature as a central cultural figure. His language—at once flexible, precise, and musical—became a foundation for later Russian prose and poetry, shaping writers from Gogol and Turgenev to Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Akhmatova, and Mandelstam. His dramas and narratives inspired composers and artists, yielding operas by Glinka, Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Mussorgsky. Translations have kept his influence global, while scholarly and public commemoration remains lively. Pushkin endures as a writer who united national tradition with cosmopolitan art, illuminating human character with economy and grace.
Eugene Onegin
Preface
Eugene Oneguine, the chief poetical work of Russia’s greatest poet, having been translated into all the principal languages of Europe except our own, I hope that this version may prove an acceptable contribution to literature. Tastes are various in matters of poetry, but the present work possesses a more solid claim to attention in the series of faithful pictures it offers of Russian life and manners. If these be compared with Mr. Wallace’s book on Russia, it will be seen that social life in that empire still preserves many of the characteristics which distinguished it half a century ago — the period of the first publication of the latter cantos of this poem.
Many references will be found in it to our own country and its literature. Russian poets have carefully plagiarized the English — notably Joukovski[1]. Pushkin, however, was no plagiarist, though undoubtedly his mind was greatly influenced by the genius of Byron — more especially in the earliest part of his career. Indeed, as will be remarked in the following pages, he scarcely makes an effort to disguise this fact.
The biographical sketch is of course a mere outline. I did not think a longer one advisable, as memoirs do not usually excite much interest till the subjects of them are pretty well known. In the “notes” I have endeavored to elucidate a somewhat obscure subject. Some of the poet’s allusions remain enigmatical to the present day[1q]. The point of each sarcasm naturally passed out of mind together with the society against which it was levelled. If some of the versification is rough and wanting in “go,” I must plead in excuse the difficult form of the stanza, and in many instances the inelastic nature of the subject matter to be versified. Stanza XXXV Canto II forms a good example of the latter difficulty, and is omitted in the German and French versions to which I have had access. The translation of foreign verse is comparatively easy so long as it is confined to conventional poetic subjects, but when it embraces abrupt scraps of conversation and the description of local customs it becomes a much more arduous affair. I think I may say that I have adhered closely to the text of the original.
The following foreign translations of this poem have appeared:
French prose. Oeuvres choisis de Pouchekine. H. Dupont. Paris, 1847. German verse. A. Puschkin’s poetische Werke. F. Bodenstedt. Berlin, 1854. Polish verse. Eugeniusz Oniegin. Roman Aleksandra Puszkina. A. Sikorski. Vilnius, 1847. Italian prose. Racconti poetici di A. Puschkin, tradotti da A. Delatre. Firenze, 1856.London, May 1881.
Note: Russian proper names to be pronounced as in French (the nasal sound of m and n excepted) in the following translation. The accent, which is very arbitrary in the Russian language, is indicated unmistakably in a rhythmical composition.
Mon Portrait
Written by the poet at the age of 15.
Vous me demandez mon portrait,
Mais peint d’apres nature:
Mon cher, il sera bientot fait,
Quoique en miniature.
Je suis un jeune polisson
Encore dans les classes;
Point sot, je le dis sans facon,
Et sans fades grimaces.
Oui! il ne fut babillard
Ni docteur de Sorbonne,
Plus ennuyeux et plus braillard
Que moi-meme en personne.
Ma taille, a celle des plus longs,
Elle n’est point egalee;
J’ai le teint frais, les cheveux blonds,
Et la tete bouclee.
J’aime et le monde et son fracas,
Je hais la solitude;
J’abhorre et noises et debats,
Et tant soit peu l’etude.
Spectacles, bals, me plaisent fort,
Et d’apres ma pensee,
Je dirais ce que j’aime encore,
Si je n’etais au Lycee.
Apres cela, mon cher ami,
L’on peut me reconnaitre,
Oui! tel que le bon Dieu me fit,
Je veux toujours paraitre.
Vrai demon, par l’espieglerie,
Vrai singe par sa mine,
Beaucoup et trop d’etourderie,
Ma foi! voila Pouchekine.
A Short Biographical Notice of Alexander Pushkin.
Alexander Sergevitch Pushkin was born in 1799 at Pskoff, and was a scion of an ancient Russian family. In one of his letters it is recorded that no less than six Pushkins signed the Charta declaratory of the election of the Romanoff family to the throne of Russia, and that two more affixed their marks from inability to write.
In 1811 he entered the Lyceum[2], an aristocratic educational establishment at Tsarskoe Selo, near St. Petersburg, where he was the friend and schoolmate of Prince Gortchakoff the Russian Chancellor. As a scholar he displayed no remarkable amount of capacity, but was fond of general reading and much given to versification. Whilst yet a schoolboy he wrote many lyrical compositions and commenced Ruslan and Liudmila, his first poem of any magnitude, and, it is asserted, the first readable one ever produced in the Russian language. During his boyhood he came much into contact with the poets Dmitrieff and Joukovski, who were intimate with his father, and his uncle, Vassili Pushkin, himself an author of no mean repute. The friendship of the historian Karamzine must have exercised a still more beneficial influence upon him.
In 1817 he quitted the Lyceum and obtained an appointment in the Foreign Office at St. Petersburg. Three years of reckless dissipation in the capital, where his lyrical talent made him universally popular, resulted in 1818 in a putrid fever which was near carrying him off. At this period of his life he scarcely slept at all; worked all day and dissipated at night. Society was open to him from the palace of the prince to the officers’ quarters of the Imperial Guard. The reflection of this mode of life may be noted in the first canto of Eugene Oneguine and the early dissipations of the “Philosopher just turned eighteen,”— the exact age of Pushkin when he commenced his career in the Russian capital.
In 1820 he was transferred to the bureau of Lieutenant–General Inzoff, at Kishineff in Bessarabia[3]. This event was probably due to his composing and privately circulating an “Ode to Liberty,” though the attendant circumstances have never yet been thoroughly brought to light. An indiscreet admiration for Byron most likely involved the young poet in this scrape. The tenor of this production, especially its audacious allusion to the murder of the emperor Paul, father of the then reigning Tsar, assuredly deserved, according to aristocratic ideas, the deportation to Siberia which was said to have been prepared for the author. The intercession of Karamzine and Joukovski procured a commutation of his sentence. Strangely enough, Pushkin appeared anxious to deceive the public as to the real cause of his sudden disappearance from the capital; for in an Ode to Ovid composed about this time he styles himself a “voluntary exile.” (See Note 4 to this volume.)
During the four succeeding years he made numerous excursions amid the beautiful countries which from the basin of the Euxine — and amongst these the Crimea and the Caucasus. A nomad life passed amid the beauties of nature acted powerfully in developing his poetical genius. To this period he refers in the final canto of Eugene Oneguine (st. v.), when enumerating the various influences which had contributed to the formation of his Muse:
Then, the far capital forgot[2q],
Its splendour and its blandishments,
In poor Moldavia cast her lot,
She visited the humble tents
Of migratory gipsy hordes.
During these pleasant years of youth he penned some of his most delightful poetical works: amongst these, The Prisoner of the Caucasus, The Fountain of Baktchiserai, and the Gipsies. Of the two former it may be said that they are in the true style of the Giaour and the Corsair. In fact, just at that point of time Byron’s fame — like the setting sun — shone out with dazzling lustre and irresistibly charmed the mind of Pushkin amongst many others. The Gipsies is more original; indeed the poet himself has been identified with Aleko, the hero of the tale, which may well be founded on his own personal adventures without involving the guilt of a double murder. His undisguised admiration for Byron doubtless exposed him to imputations similar to those commonly levelled against that poet. But Pushkin’s talent was too genuine for him to remain long subservient to that of another, and in a later period of his career he broke loose from all trammels and selected a line peculiarly his own. Before leaving this stage in our narrative we may point out the fact that during the whole of this period of comparative seclusion the poet was indefatigably occupied in study. Not only were the standard works of European literature perused, but two more languages — namely Italian and Spanish — were added to his original stock: French, English, Latin and German having been acquired at the Lyceum. To this happy union of literary research with the study of nature we must attribute the sudden bound by which he soon afterwards attained the pinnacle of poetic fame amongst his own countrymen.
In 1824 he once more fell under the imperial displeasure. A letter seized in the post, and expressive of atheistical sentiments (possibly but a transient vagary of his youth) was the ostensible cause of his banishment from Odessa to his paternal estate of Mikhailovskoe in the province of Pskoff. Some, however, aver that personal pique on the part of Count Vorontsoff, the Governor of Odessa, played a part in the transaction. Be this as it may, the consequences were serious for the poet, who was not only placed under the surveillance of the police, but expelled from the Foreign Office by express order of the Tsar “for bad conduct.” A letter on this subject, addressed by Count Vorontsoff to Count Nesselrode, is an amusing instance of the arrogance with which stolid mediocrity frequently passes judgment on rising genius. I transcribe a portion thereof:
Odessa, 28th March (7th April) 1824
Count — Your Excellency is aware of the reasons for which, some time ago, young Pushkin was sent with a letter from Count Capo d’Istria to General Inzoff. I found him already here when I arrived, the General having placed him at my disposal, though he himself was at Kishineff. I have no reason to complain about him. On the contrary, he is much steadier than formerly. But a desire for the welfare of the young man himself, who is not wanting in ability, and whose faults proceed more from the head than from the heart, impels me to urge upon you his removal from Odessa. Pushkin’s chief failing is ambition. He spent the bathing season here, and has gathered round him a crowd of adulators who praise his genius. This maintains in him a baneful delusion which seems to turn his head — namely, that he is a “distinguished writer;” whereas, in reality he is but a feeble imitator of an author in whose favour very little can be said (Byron). This it is which keeps him from a serious study of the great classical poets, which might exercise a beneficial effect upon his talents — which cannot be denied him — and which might make of him in course of time a “distinguished writer.”
The best thing that can be done for him is to remove him hence. . . .
The Emperor Nicholas on his accession pardoned Pushkin and received him once more into favour. During an interview which took place it is said that the Tsar promised the poet that he alone would in future be the censor of his productions. Pushkin was restored to his position in the Foreign Office and received the appointment of Court Historian. In 1828 he published one of his finest poems, Poltava, which is founded on incidents familiar to English readers in Byron’s Mazeppa. In 1829 the hardy poet accompanied the Russian army which under Paskevitch captured Erzeroum. In 1831 he married a beautiful lady of the Gontchareff family and settled in the neighbourhood of St. Petersburg, where he remained for the remainder of his life, only occasionally visiting Moscow and Mikhailovskoe. During this period his chief occupation consisted in collecting and investigating materials for a projected history of Peter the Great, which was undertaken at the express desire of the Emperor. He likewise completed a history of the revolt of Pougatchoff, which occurred in the reign of Catherine II. (This individual having personated Peter III, the deceased husband of the Empress, raised the Orenburg Cossacks in revolt. This revolt was not suppressed without extensive destruction of life and property.) In 1833 the poet visited Orenburg, the scene of the dreadful excesses he recorded; the fruit of his journey being one of the most charming tales ever written, The Captain’s Daughter.
The remaining years of Pushkin’s life, spent in the midst of domestic bliss and grateful literary occupation, were what lookers-on style “years of unclouded happiness.” They were, however, drawing rapidly to a close. Unrivalled distinction rarely fails to arouse bitter animosity amongst the envious, and Pushkin’s existence had latterly been embittered by groundless insinuations against his wife’s reputation in the shape of anonymous letters addressed to himself and couched in very insulting language. He fancied he had traced them to one Georges d’Anthes, a Frenchman in the Cavalier Guard, who had been adopted by the Dutch envoy Heeckeren. D’Anthes, though he had espoused Madame Pushkin’s sister, had conducted himself with impropriety towards the former lady. The poet displayed in this affair a fierce hostility quite characteristic of his African origin but which drove him to his destruction. D’Anthes, it was subsequently admitted, was not the author of the anonymous letters; but as usual when a duel is proposed, an appeal to reason was thought to smack of cowardice. The encounter took place in February 1837 on one of the islands of the Neva. The weapons used were pistols, and the combat was of a determined, nay ferocious character. Pushkin was shot before he had time to fire, and, in his fall, the barrel of his pistol became clogged with snow which lay deep upon the ground at the time. Raising himself on his elbow, the wounded man called for another pistol, crying, “I’ve strength left to fire my shot!” He fired, and slightly wounded his opponent, shouting “Bravo!” when he heard him exclaim that he was hit. D’Anthes was, however, but slightly contused whilst Pushkin was shot through the abdomen. He was transported to his residence and expired after several days passed in extreme agony. Thus perished in the thirty-eighth year of his age this distinguished poet, in a manner and amid surroundings which make the duel scene in the sixth canto of this poem seem almost prophetic. His reflections on the premature death of Lenski appear indeed strangely applicable to his own fate, as generally to the premature extinction of genius.
Pushkin was endowed with a powerful physical organisation. He was fond of long walks, unlike the generality of his countrymen, and at one time of his career used daily to foot it into St. Petersburg and back, from his residence in the suburbs, to conduct his investigations in the Government archives when employed on the History of Peter the Great. He was a good swordsman, rode well, and at one time aspired to enter the cavalry; but his father not being able to furnish the necessary funds he declined serving in the less romantic infantry. Latterly he was regular in his habits; rose early, retired late, and managed to get along with but very little sleep. On rising he betook himself forthwith to his literary occupations, which were continued till afternoon, when they gave place to physical exercise. Strange as it will appear to many, he preferred the autumn months, especially when rainy, chill and misty, for the production of his literary compositions, and was proportionally depressed by the approach of spring. (Cf. Canto VII st. ii.)
Mournful is thine approach to me[3q],
O Spring, thou chosen time of love
He usually left St. Petersburg about the middle of September and remained in the country till December. In this space of time it was his custom to develop and perfect the inspirations of the remaining portion of the year. He was of an impetuous yet affectionate nature and much beloved by a numerous circle of friends. An attractive feature in his character was his unalterable attachment to his aged nurse, a sentiment which we find reflected in the pages of Eugene Oneguine and elsewhere.
The preponderating influence which Byron exercised in the formation of his genius has already been noticed. It is indeed probable that we owe Oneguine to the combined impressions of Childe Harold and Don Juan upon his mind. Yet the Russian poem excels these masterpieces of Byron in a single particular — namely, in completeness of narrative, the plots of the latter being mere vehicles for the development of the poet’s general reflections. There is ground for believing that Pushkin likewise made this poem the record of his own experience. This has doubtless been the practice of many distinguished authors of fiction whose names will readily occur to the reader. Indeed, as we are never cognizant of the real motives which actuate others, it follows that nowhere can the secret springs of human action be studied to such advantage as within our own breasts. Thus romance is sometimes but the reflection of the writer’s own individuality, and he adopts the counsel of the American poet:
Look then into thine heart and write!
But a further consideration of this subject would here be out of place. Perhaps I cannot more suitably conclude this sketch than by quoting from his Ode to the Sea the poet’s tribute of admiration to the genius of Napoleon and Byron, who of all contemporaries seem the most to have swayed his imagination.
Farewell, thou pathway of the free,
For the last time thy waves I view
Before me roll disdainfully,
Brilliantly beautiful and blue.
Why vain regret? Wherever now
My heedless course I may pursue
One object on thy desert brow
I everlastingly shall view —
A rock, the sepulchre of Fame!
The poor remains of greatness gone
A cold remembrance there became,
There perished great Napoleon.
In torment dire to sleep he lay;
Then, as a tempest echoing rolls,
Another genius whirled away,
Another sovereign of our souls.
He perished. Freedom wept her child,
He left the world his garland bright.
Wail, Ocean, surge in tumult wild,
To sing of thee was his delight.
Impressed upon him was thy mark,
His genius moulded was by thee;
Like thee, he was unfathomed, dark
And untamed in his majesty.
Note: It may interest some to know that Georges d’Anthes was tried by court-martial for his participation in the duel in which Pushkin fell, found guilty, and reduced to the ranks; but, not being a Russian subject, he was conducted by a gendarme across the frontier and then set at liberty.
Eugene Oneguine
Petri de vanite, il avait encore plus de cette espece d’orgueil, qui fait avouer avec la meme indifference les bonnes comme les mauvaises actions, suite d’un sentiment de superiorite, peut-etre imaginaire. — Tire d’une lettre particuliere.
(Written in 1823 at Kishineff and Odessa.)
Canto the First‘The Spleen’
‘He rushes at life and exhausts the passions.’
— Prince Viazemski
I
“My uncle’s goodness is extreme,
If seriously he hath disease;
He hath acquired the world’s esteem
And nothing more important sees;
A paragon of virtue he!
But what a nuisance it will be,
Chained to his bedside night and day
Without a chance to slip away.
Ye need dissimulation base
A dying man with art to soothe,
Beneath his head the pillow smooth,
And physic bring with mournful face,
To sigh and meditate alone:
When will the devil take his own!”
II
Thus mused a madcap young, who drove
Through clouds of dust at postal pace,
By the decree of Mighty Jove,
Inheritor of all his race.
Friends of Liudmila and Ruslan,1
Let me present ye to the man,
Who without more prevarication
The hero is of my narration!
Oneguine, O my gentle readers,
Was born beside the Neva, where
It may be ye were born, or there
Have shone as one of fashion’s leaders.
I also wandered there of old,
But cannot stand the northern cold.2
1Ruslan and Liudmila, the title of Pushkin’s first important work, written 1817–20. It is a tale relating the adventures of the knight-errant Ruslan in search of his fair lady Liudmila, who has been carried off by a kaldoon, or magician.
2 Written in Bessarabia.
III
Having performed his service truly,
Deep into debt his father ran;
Three balls a year he gave ye duly,
At last became a ruined man.
But Eugene was by fate preserved,
For first “madame” his wants observed,
And then “monsieur” supplied her place;3
The boy was wild but full of grace.
“Monsieur l’Abbe,” a starving Gaul,
Fearing his pupil to annoy,
Instructed jestingly the boy,
Morality taught scarce at all;
Gently for pranks he would reprove
And in the Summer Garden rove.
3 In Russia foreign tutors and governesses are commonly styled “monsieur” or “madame.”
IV
When youth’s rebellious hour drew near
And my Eugene the path must trace —
The path of hope and tender fear —
Monsieur clean out of doors they chase.
Lo! my Oneguine free as air,
Cropped in the latest style his hair,
Dressed like a London dandy he
The giddy world at last shall see.
He wrote and spoke, so all allowed,
In the French language perfectly,
Danced the mazurka gracefully,
Without the least constraint he bowed.
What more’s required? The world replies,
He is a charming youth and wise.
V
We all of us of education
A something somehow have obtained,
Thus, praised be God! a reputation
With us is easily attained.
Oneguine was — so many deemed
(Unerring critics self-esteemed),
Pedantic although scholar like,
In truth he had the happy trick
Without constraint in conversation
Of touching lightly every theme.
Silent, oracular ye’d see him
Amid a serious disputation,
Then suddenly discharge a joke
The ladies’ laughter to provoke.
VI
Latin is just now not in vogue,
But if the truth I must relate,
Oneguine knew enough, the rogue
A mild quotation to translate,
A little Juvenal to spout,
With “vale” finish off a note;
Two verses he could recollect
Of the Aeneid, but incorrect.
In history he took no pleasure,
The dusty chronicles of earth
For him were but of little worth,
Yet still of anecdotes a treasure
Within his memory there lay,
From Romulus unto our day.
VII
For empty sound the rascal swore he
Existence would not make a curse,
Knew not an iamb from a choree,
Although we read him heaps of verse.
Homer, Theocritus, he jeered,
But Adam Smith to read appeared,
And at economy was great;
That is, he could elucidate
How empires store of wealth unfold,
How flourish, why and wherefore less
If the raw product they possess
The medium is required of gold.
The father scarcely understands
His son and mortgages his lands.
VIII
But upon all that Eugene knew[4q]
I have no leisure here to dwell,
But say he was a genius who
In one thing really did excel.
It occupied him from a boy,
A labour, torment, yet a joy,
It whiled his idle hours away
And wholly occupied his day —
The amatory science warm,
Which Ovid once immortalized,
For which the poet agonized
Laid down his life of sun and storm
On the steppes of Moldavia lone,
Far from his Italy — his own.4
4 Referring to Tomi[4], the reputed place of exile of Ovid. Pushkin, then residing in Bessarabia, was in the same predicament as his predecessor in song, though he certainly did not plead guilty to the fact, since he remarks in his ode to Ovid:
To exile self-consigned,
With self, society, existence, discontent,
I visit in these days, with melancholy mind,
The country whereunto a mournful age thee sent.
Ovid thus enumerates the causes which brought about his banishment:
“Perdiderint quum me duo crimina, carmen et error,
Alterius facti culpa silenda mihi est.”
Ovidii Nasonis Tristium, lib. ii. 207.
IX
How soon he learnt deception’s art,
Hope to conceal and jealousy,
False confidence or doubt to impart,
Sombre or glad in turn to be,
Haughty appear, subservient,
Obsequious or indifferent!
What languor would his silence show,
How full of fire his speech would glow!
How artless was the note which spoke
Of love again, and yet again;
How deftly could he transport feign!
How bright and tender was his look,
Modest yet daring! And a tear
Would at the proper time appear.
X
How well he played the greenhorn’s part
To cheat the inexperienced fair,
Sometimes by pleasing flattery’s art,
Sometimes by ready-made despair;
The feeble moment would espy
Of tender years the modesty
Conquer by passion and address,
Await the long-delayed caress.
Avowal then ’twas time to pray,
Attentive to the heart’s first beating,
Follow up love — a secret meeting
Arrange without the least delay —
Then, then — well, in some solitude
Lessons to give he understood!
XI
How soon he learnt to titillate
The heart of the inveterate flirt!
Desirous to annihilate
His own antagonists expert,
How bitterly he would malign,
With many a snare their pathway line!
But ye, O happy husbands, ye
With him were friends eternally:
The crafty spouse caressed him, who
By Faublas in his youth was schooled,5
And the suspicious veteran old,
The pompous, swaggering cuckold too,
Who floats contentedly through life,
Proud of his dinners and his wife!
5Les Aventures du Chevalier de Faublas, a romance of a loose character by Jean Baptiste Louvet de Couvray, b. 1760, d. 1797, famous for his bold oration denouncing Robespierre, Marat and Danton.
XII
One morn whilst yet in bed he lay,
His valet brings him letters three.
What, invitations? The same day
As many entertainments be!
A ball here, there a children’s treat,
Whither shall my rapscallion flit?
Whither shall he go first? He’ll see,
Perchance he will to all the three.
Meantime in matutinal dress
And hat surnamed a “Bolivar”6
He hies unto the “Boulevard,”
To loiter there in idleness
Until the sleepless Breguet chime7
Announcing to him dinner-time.
6 A la “Bolivar,” from the founder of Bolivian independence.
7 M. Breguet, a celebrated Parisian watchmaker — hence a slang term for a watch.
XIII
’Tis dark. He seats him in a sleigh,
“Drive on!” the cheerful cry goes forth,
His furs are powdered on the way
By the fine silver of the north.
He bends his course to Talon’s, where8
He knows Kaverine will repair.9
He enters. High the cork arose
And Comet champagne foaming flows.
Before him red roast beef is seen
And truffles, dear to youthful eyes,
Flanked by immortal Strasbourg pies,
The choicest flowers of French cuisine,
And Limburg cheese alive and old
Is seen next pine-apples of gold.
8 Talon, a famous St. Petersburg restaurateur.
9 Paul Petrovitch Kaverine, a friend for whom Pushkin in his youth appears to have entertained great respect and admiration. He was an officer in the Hussars of the Guard, and a noted “dandy” and man about town. The poet on one occasion addressed the following impromptu to his friend’s portrait:
“Within him daily see the the fires of punch and war,
Upon the fields of Mars a gallant warrior,
A faithful friend to friends, of ladies torturer,
But ever the Hussar.”
XIV
Still thirst fresh draughts of wine compels
To cool the cutlets’ seething grease,
When the sonorous Breguet tells
Of the commencement of the piece.
A critic of the stage malicious,
A slave of actresses capricious,
Oneguine was a citizen
Of the domains of the side-scene.
To the theatre he repairs
Where each young critic ready stands,
Capers applauds with clap of hands,
With hisses Cleopatra scares,
Moina recalls for this alone
That all may hear his voice’s tone.
XV
Thou fairy-land! Where formerly[5q]
Shone pungent Satire’s dauntless king,
Von Wisine, friend of liberty,
And Kniajnine, apt at copying.
The young Simeonova too there
With Ozeroff was wont to share
Applause, the people’s donative.
There our Katenine did revive
Corneille’s majestic genius,
Sarcastic Shakhovskoi brought out
His comedies, a noisy rout,
There Didelot became glorious,
There, there, beneath the side-scene’s shade
The drama of my youth was played.10
10Denis Von Wisine[5] (1741–92), a favourite Russian dramatist. His first comedy “The Brigadier,” procured him the favour of the second Catherine. His best, however, is the “Minor” (Niedorosl). Prince Potemkin, after witnessing it, summoned the author, and greeted him with the exclamation, “Die now, Denis!” In fact, his subsequent performances were not of equal merit.
Jacob Borissovitch Kniajnine (1742–91), a clever adapter of French tragedy.
Simeonova, a celebrated tragic actress, who retired from the stage in early life and married a Prince Gagarine.
Ozeroff, one of the best-known Russian dramatists of the period; he possessed more originality than Kniajnine. “Oedipus in Athens,” “Fingal,” “Demetrius Donskoi,” and “Polyxena,” are the best known of his tragedies.
Katenine translated Corneille’s tragedies into Russian.
Didelot, sometime Director of the ballet at the Opera at St. Petersburg.
