Think Chekhov country, beautiful spring surroundings but exceedingly dull for young Russian people. Larina and the nurse Filippyevna are sitting outside. They can hear the young girls singing, and Larina recalls her own young courtship and marriage.
The peasants who work on the estate enter singing a big harvest song that marks the first big dance of the opera. Tatyana is lost in a romance novel while her younger sister Olga wants to join the harvest festivities.
Visitors have arrived. They enter, and quickly Tatyana reveals herself attracted to Onegin. Onegin for himself questions why Lensky would choose Olga over her sister. Tatyana is unsure how to respond as they go inside for dinner. She pesters Filippyevna to tell her of her youthful loves and marriage. Tatyana states she is in love and asks to be left alone. Through her fevered passion, she writes a letter to Onegin revealing the force of her love.
Outside again, Tatyana awaits Onegin. He arrives and tells her his feelings. He tells her, not altogether unfairly or unkindly, that he is no man for marriage and would be bored by it. He is not worthy of such love and can only offer her friendship.
More icily, he suggests she not be so open in future lest other men take advantage. Three months have passed. We hear a fabulous waltz and Onegin dances with Tatyana.
Naturally, he is bored and quickly grows irritated by those gossiping around him. Blaming Lensky for bringing him, he decides to flirt with Olga. Olga cannot see what she has done wrong, and Onegin further pushes the situation by dancing with her again. As the dancing resumes, however, it all kicks off. Other editions. Enlarge cover. Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Open Preview See a Problem? Details if other :. Thanks for telling us about the problem.
Return to Book Page. Preview — Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin. Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin ,. James E. Falen Translator. Eugene Onegin is the master work of the poet whom Russians regard as the fountainhead of their literature.
Set in s Russia, Pushkin's verse novel follows the fates of three men and three women. Engaging, full of suspense, and varied in tone, it also portrays a large cast of other characters and offers the reader many literary, philosophical, and autobiographical digres Eugene Onegin is the master work of the poet whom Russians regard as the fountainhead of their literature.
Engaging, full of suspense, and varied in tone, it also portrays a large cast of other characters and offers the reader many literary, philosophical, and autobiographical digressions, often in a highly satirical vein.
Eugene Onegin was Pushkin's own favourite work, and this new translation conveys the literal sense and the poetic music of the original. Get A Copy. Paperback , Oxford World's Classics , pages. Published October 22nd by Oxford University Press first published More Details Original Title. Other Editions Friend Reviews. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. To ask other readers questions about Eugene Onegin , please sign up.
Searching for the best translation, any recommendations? Pasha Uhin James E. Falen's version is the best in my opinion I'm Russian , it keeps the flow and rhythm of the original which reads very quickly and easily. Is this a clean book? Joshua Powell Clean? If this were a hollywood movie today it would be rated PG, if that's what you mean. See all 5 questions about Eugene Onegin….
Lists with This Book. Community Reviews. Showing Average rating 4. Rating details. More filters. Sort order. Start your review of Eugene Onegin. Children read it in literature class and are made to memorize passages from it starting in elementary school. There are operas, ballets, and films. The phrases from it have become aphorisms and are still widely used in the Russian language. It even dragged the name Tatyana out of the obscurity to the heights of long-lasting popularity now the lines 'Her sister's name was Tatyana.
Yes, the familiarity of Russians with 'Evgeniy Onegin' is quite stunning. And yet I think most of us, when you get to the bottom of things, have only superficial recollections of it, the bits and pieces of storyline which may or may not feature a love story? The peasant, triumphant And this is why I embarked on a re-read - and as a result having unintentionally impressed my literature teacher mother yay, the perks of Pushkin!
I wonder - is it a coincidence that my brother and I have the names of Alexander Pushkin and his wife Natalie? I wanted to discover those gems that critics and teachers see, and which evaded me the first time I read it at seven and then at fifteen. And, reader, I found them! Did I mention before that this book is over pages of verse, rhyming in a particular stanza structure that came to be known as 'Pushkin sonnet' "aBaBccDDeFFeGG" with masculine endings in lower case and feminine endings in upper case - for you, literature buffs!
That seems like a huge feat to accomplish - and it did take Pushkin a decade to complete and publish it. And yet, despite the gargantuan effort, this novel reads so incredibly easy and effortlessly that it's almost too easy to overlook its beauty and sophistication under the deceiving cover-up of light simplicity.
These verses are two hundred years old, and yet sound very natural even to a modern Russian ear - a testament to Pushkin's amazing grasp of nuances and dynamics of living Russian language, not the stuffy official one and that, admirably, was in the era where many educated Russians could speak flawless French, English or German but were often struggling with their native 'peasant' language - just like Tatyana Larina, actually! The plot of the novel can be easily seen as a love story - if you strip it down to its most basic elements, of course.
A bored rich noble Evgeniy Onegin comes from the capital to a rural part of Russia, meets a young and naively passionate Tatyana Larina , a daughter of a local rural noble, and spurns her naive affections expressed in a passionate letter to him.
A misunderstanding over Tatyana's sister leads to a duel between Onegin and his younger poet friend Lensky - and leaves Lensky dead. A few years later, Onegin runs into Tatyana in St Petersburg - now a married sophisticated lady of the higher society - and is smitten; but his affections get spurned by the older and wiser Tatyana who delivers a famous line that although she still loves Evgeniy, she "belong[s] to another and will be forever faithful to him".
End of story. What this simplified version that sticks in the minds of many readers years later lacks is exactly what makes this a great novel as opposed to yet another 19th century romance.
What makes it unique is a masterful mockingly sarcastic portrayal of the entire 'cream' of Russian society so familiar to Pushkin, one of its members by birth.
From the very beginning, Pushkin assumes a conversational tone with the reader, breaking the literary fourth wall any chance he gets, emphasizing that the characters and customs he describes are well-known, contemporary and easily recognizable not only to him but also to his audience - the educated 'cream of the society' of whom he's making subtle fun.
He's reasonably good-looking, educated 'just enough' and unconsciously playing up a fashionable gothic stereotype, bored with life already at the age of twenty-six, sharply contrasted with Lensky, an eighteen-year-old poet ready to fall in love and sing it endless dithyrambs.
Evgeniy does seem fake in his boredom and despicable in his feeling of superiority and self-righteousness , and therefore his disappointment in pursuit of older, more interesting Tatyana's love comes as a deserved punishment, readers agree. And let's face it - despite the novel being named after Onegin, he in the hearts of the readers plays second fiddle to the one he first rejected and then hopelessly pursued - Tatyana Larina. Tatyana Larina, in contrast to Evgeniy, has always been the darling of Russian literature.
She is viewed as uniquely Russian the fact that Pushkin himself emphasizes, even when he acknowledges that like many of the Russian nobles of that time, Tatyana had a hard time speaking Russian , the embodiment of what a perfect Russian woman should be - sincere, idealistic and passionate, and yet strong, resilient and faithful to her partner despite the temptations.
She can be easily seen as an inspiration to all those noble Decemberists' wives who were willing to leave everything behind and follow their duty and obligation to the depths of Siberia, if need be. Her rejection of Evgeniy is viewed as undeniable integrity and strength of character, and the unwavering ability to self-sacrifice for what is right. That's how I was taught to think about Tatyana, in any case. She steals the stage from Evgeniy so effortlessly and naturally to become a heroine and not just the girl in love.
And yet, as I was reading this novel now, likely at least a decade older than Tatyana when she falls in love, I could not help but notice the bits in her character that made me question her place on the pedestal of ultimate Russian womanhood - and because of that actually made her more dear and more relatable to me. You see, the sincerity and passion with which Tatyana embraced her young love on this read-through did not really pass my scrutiny.
Let's be honest - she does not fall in love with Onegin; instead, raised on cheap romances, she falls in love with an imagined ideal of him, having glimpsed him only during a single evening he spends in her home. She falls in love with this mysterious handsome haughty stranger because, as the stories have taught her, she's supposed to. She's young and impressionable her age is never stated, but at some point there's a mention of a thirteen-year-old girl, which to me feels a bit too young to be Tatyana - and so I tend to imagine her about seventeen or eighteen, making her younger sister Olga a 'marriageable material' as well.
She plays the role of a typical quiet, introspective, shy, pale and dreamy young woman very well, having internalized the idea of a romantic heroine. Her love is likely no more real than Onegin's trendy disappointment with life. Her passionate letter, written in French, is open and brave - but yet, on a closer reading, full of cliches that are clearly taken out of romance novels that kept her company throughout adolescence.
So basically what I see here is the meeting of two people both of whom are instinctively and therefore very sincerely playing the exact roles society and culture expect them to play - the world-weary Evgeniy and the romantically passionate Tatyana. None of them is the ultimate Russian hero, let's face it. The conventions they both pander to is what does not allow them to be happy.
Tatyana three years later, having turned into a refined Petersburg married lady commanding respect and admiration, appears a much more interesting character - to Onegin as well, unsurprisingly. But her astounding transformation really seems to be just another role she tries on and fulfills with the same aptitude as she did the role of a romantic provincial young woman in love.
Tatyana wears her new expectations as a glove - and so does Evgeniy, madly falling in love with her just as would be expected for a young dandy meeting a refined alluring woman of higher society. Once again both of them play a part that's expected for them, and play it well.
And even Tatyana's ultimate rejection of Onegin may not be so much the strength of her character as the expected behavior of a woman in such a situation as portrayed in the romance novels with which she grew up the alternative to Tatyana's decision decades later was described by Tolstoy in 'Anna Karenina' with all the tragic consequences that followed.
An ideal Russian woman? Perhaps not. A young woman tragically caught in the web of societal and cultural expectations in her youth and now in her adulthood? Perhaps so. And in this, I think, is the strength and the tragedy of this story. Pushkin seems to have felt the societal conventions very well to so exquisitely poke fun at them while showing very subtly the pain they can lead to.
He shows the tragedy of yet another societal convention of establishing masculinity and honor - the duels. Onegin kills his friend Lensky in a duel that both of them know is not necessary but yet expected by the society - and Pushkin is not subtle about showing the wasteful unnecessity of such an act.
And this is why neither me nor my literature teacher mother can even fathom how, in winter of , year-old Alexander Pushkin himself allowed ridiculous societal convention to take his life, losing his life in a duel which supposedly happened over a woman - the duel he described so aptly years prior in his masterpiece.
Bookworm buffs - check this out. The second greatest Russian poet, young Mikhail Lermontov , who wrote a famous and angry poem upon Pushkin's death in that ill-fated duel, proceeded to write a death-duel scene himself which almost exactly predicted his own death - also in a duel - a few years later.
What was going on with Russian literary geniuses recognizing the futility and tragedy of conventions leading to duels and then dying in the same manner that they described and mocked? There was more to Onegin's story than we got to see in the finished version. As Pushkin wrote it when he has fallen out of favor, when he was in his Southern exile, he had Onegin travel all over Russia coming in contact with events and sights that the poet had eventually prudently decided were not risking his freedom over publishing and so destroyed those parts.
How much do I wish those chapters had survived intact! There may have been some added depth to the character of the ultimate Russian world-weary dandy had they survived. View all 50 comments. Aug 16, Ahmad Sharabiani rated it it was amazing Shelves: 19th-century , poetry , culture , fiction , romance , classics , literature , pdfs , novels , russia. Onegin is considered a classic of Russian literature, and its eponymous protagonist has served as the model for a number of Russian literary heroes so-called superfluous men.
It was published in serial form between and The first complete edition was published in , and the currently accepted version is based on the publication.
In the 's, Eugene Onegin is a bored St. Petersburg dandy, whose life consists of balls, concerts, parties, and nothing more. Upon the death of a wealthy uncle, he inherits a substantial fortune and a landed estate. When he moves to the country, he strikes up a friendship with his neighbor, a starry-eyed young poet named Vladimir Lensky.
At this meeting, he also catches a glimpse of Olga's sister Tatyana. A quiet, precocious romantic, and the exact opposite of Olga, Tatyana becomes intensely drawn to Onegin. Soon after, she bares her soul to Onegin in a letter professing her love.
Contrary to her expectations, Onegin does not write back. When they meet in person, he rejects her advances politely but dismissively and condescendingly. This famous speech is often referred to as Onegin's Sermon: he admits that the letter was touching, but says that he would quickly grow bored with marriage and can only offer Tatyana friendship; he coldly advises more emotional control in the future, lest another man take advantage of her innocence.
Later, Lensky mischievously invites Onegin to Tatyana's name day celebration, promising a small gathering with just Tatyana, Olga, and their parents.
When Onegin arrives, he finds instead a boisterous country ball, a rural parody of and contrast to the society balls of St. Petersburg of which he has grown tired.
Onegin is irritated with the guests who gossip about him and Tatyana, and with Lensky for persuading him to come. He decides to avenge himself by dancing and flirting with Olga. Earnest and inexperienced, Lensky is wounded to the core and challenges Onegin to fight a duel; Onegin reluctantly accepts, feeling compelled by social convention.
During the duel, Onegin unwillingly kills Lensky. Afterwards, he quits his country estate, traveling abroad to deaden his feelings of remorse. Tatyana visits Onegin's mansion, where she looks through his books and his notes in the margins, and begins to question whether Onegin's character is merely a collage of different literary heroes, and if there is, in fact, no "real Onegin".
Tatyana, still brokenhearted by the loss of Onegin, is convinced by her parents to live with her aunt in Moscow in order to find a suitor. Several years pass, and the scene shifts to St. Onegin has come to attend the most prominent balls and interact with the leaders of old Russian society. He sees the most beautiful woman, who captures the attention of all and is central to society's whirl, and he realizes that it is the same Tatyana whose love he had once spurned.
Now she is married to an aged prince a general. Upon seeing Tatyana again, he becomes obsessed with winning her affection, despite the fact that she is married. However, his attempts are rebuffed.
He writes her several letters, but receives no reply. Eventually Onegin manages to see Tatyana and offers her the opportunity to finally elope after they have become reacquainted. She recalls the days when they might have been happy, but concludes that that time has passed. Onegin repeats his love for her. Faltering for a moment, she admits that she still loves him, but she will not allow him to ruin her and declares her determination to remain faithful to her husband.
She leaves him regretting his bitter destiny. View all 3 comments. That's what comes of reading Pushkin, Late nights spent with his Onegin. Scanning lines til eyelids droop, And all your thoughts are in a loop. Counting, counting, metres, feet, Endless tapping, then repeat.
What if this poem, she can't finish, In her eyes she will diminish. But with practice, she gained speed, And Pushkin's verses, learned to read, Til soon she saw with failing heart That she and Eugene soon must part. The end loomed near, mere pages left, She knew full well she'd be bereft. The story, yes, she knows that is. The verse form too, most likely, yes. But oh, how far the language strides From his chosen words, miles and miles. Sing us another song! Let's meet the hero of the day.
We've heard the narrator, Mitchell style, So now with Onegin we'll while A little time away in verse, and See him just as Pushkin planned: Childe Harold to a T, Onegin Lapsed into pensive indolence Brooding, brooding, among his books, Shunning, shunning, other folks, Guards his heart from all soft feeling, Tho teaching lessons, not resisting, False love to his friend revealing, And keen, harsh truths to introduce To one whom truth loves far too much.
We'll let the narrator have his say: A wayward, silent, sad young maiden, Shy as a doe, in forest hidden, She seemed inside her family A stranger, an anomaly. And so we have our brooding pair Both, loving books and winter's air, And we know Pushkin will indeed His Eugene and his Tanya lead Where truth will love so harshly slay, And love for truth, drive love away. View all comments. Between the lines before him, printed His inward eye saw others hinted. On these he concentrated most, In their decipherment engrossed.
Alexander Pushkin has paid A visit to my heart's sweet door. I wish to keep you both forever, In that place always together. And in your words I seek to find Questions in which your words are rife. Of what is love, and what is life, The quarries of a sleepless mind. You have the answers, I can tell. Carolyn Castagna View all 5 comments. Shelves: russian , poetry , favorites , pushkinism. And then, from all a heart finds tender I tore my own; an alien soul, Without allegiances, I vanished, Thinking that liberty and peace Could take the place of happiness.
We are made of dreams and contradictions. Soon he died and Lenksy went to his grave. He reminisced about him and remembered how he wanted him and Olga to be together. Lensky and Onegin talk about Tatyana and Olga again. Lensky wanted to visit her family and after a short discussion, Onegin goes with him. After the visit, Onegin had questions about Tatyana because he found her interesting.
Tatyana thought about them and realized that Onegin was everything she ever looked for in a man. After that, the storyteller reveals what will happen later on in the novel.
He tells us about the conversation between Tatyana and her nanny where she tells her that she has feelings for Onegin. She also asked her for a piece of paper to write him a letter. Two days passed by and Onegin had no response.
Lensky visited Olga and she asked about Onegin. He also told her that her letter did not leave him indifferent and mentions that she would be a perfect wife for him if he ever decided to get married. He confessed that he loved her in a brother-sister way and maybe a little bit more than that but that he will fall in love again and that she should not feel bad about the situation.
Tatyana became sadder as the days passed by while Lensky and Olga got happier. They spent more and more time together and wrote each other love letters. Winter came and Onegin spent his days enjoying the laziness. He and Olga will be getting married.
Tatyana enjoyed the Russian winter and snow. The snow fell before her name day in January. She had a terrible nightmare in which Onegin killed Lensky. It kept her stressed for days. She felt that something bad was about to happen. Tatyana had many guests including Lensky and Onegin. Onegin was feeling uncomfortable for sitting next to Tatyana.
She was also concerned about that but when he congratulated her on her name day she felt relieved. Onegin wanted to get back at Lensky for bringing him her into this inconvenience.
He did it by grabbing Olga into his arms and dancing with her. They danced for a very long time and it made Lensky furious. The chapter ends with him going home to get the guns. Onegin was pleased with his revenge. The plot moves to Zaretsky. He was an honest man and Onegin friends who visited him one morning.
He brought him a message with which Lensky invited him to confront him. Onegin accepts the challenge and Zaretsky leaves. Onegin then thinks that he was not supposed to get himself involved in this mess. The morning arrived and both of them were headed to the mill. The guns were ready and they had to be 16 feet away from each other.
When they got the distance right they turned to each other and aimed at each other. The character of Onegin has even inspired many other literary heroes in works by other notable Russian writers and poets. Tchaikovsky's libretto is mostly taken directly from Pushkin, retaining the complexity of his verse while letting the beautifully subtle words shine through. We're glad you asked. In this particular scene, Tatyana, here sang by soprano Asmik Grigorian, pours her heart out in a letter to Onegin, expressing her feelings for him.
Have a listen…. We know!
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