Lensky, the poet, is, like Onegin, part of Pushkin himself, writing the kind of elegiac poetry that his creator had written in an earlier phase and that recurs in the digressions. But there is also an exalted strain in him that belongs, on the one hand, to the civic Romanticism associated with the Decembrists and, on the other, to the libertarian ideals brought back from his studies in Göttingen. In the text Pushkin chooses a more prosaic future for Lensky, had he lived – that of the gouty, cuckolded landowner. It is unlikely that this Lensky could be added to Edmund Wilson’s list of poets unable survive in a world of ‘prose’, since he is not of their mould, and his alternative future – to become another Ryleyev, Nelson, Kutuzov – is left tongue-in-cheek in the omitted stanza. Among the epithets attaching to Lensky are: ‘virginal’, ‘pure’, ‘sweet’, ‘tender’, ‘rapturous’, ‘exalted’, ‘enthusiastic’, ‘inspired’, ‘ardent’, simple’. The words ‘vague’, ‘obscure’, ‘limp’, ‘ideal’, ‘tearful’ apply to his poetry. The subjects of his verse are ‘love’, ‘despond’, ‘parting’, ‘graves’, even ‘Romantic roses’. The last image of him is his own grave. He and Tatiana share to some extent a similar sensibility. Not for nothing does she refer to Onegin as ‘the slayer of her brother’ (Chapter VII, stanza 14).
Olga, too, has her linguistic aura, more limited than those of the main characters. These vocabularies have their counterparts in European literature. Tatiana’s and Onegin’s reading are entirely European. The comic Russian debate on the merits of the ode and elegy contextualize Lensky’s poetry in Chapter IV (stanzas 32–4). These ramifications extend the range of the characters, turning them from individuals into types. Nor is it just a linguistic matter. Pushkin is quite serious about the ‘immorality’ of contemporary Western literature and its baleful effect upon vulnerable young female readers in Russia. In testing the characters against these influences Pushkin creates a clearing-house for a new, as yet undefined literature. But this clearing-house was to become its greatest monument. In his novel-in-verse Pushkin takes the same path of ‘lost illusions’ as Balzac was to do. Lensky is pointlessly killed without becoming either a hero or a cuckold; Onegin is left stranded at the end of the novel. Tatiana alone adapts herself sorrowfully to the high society she loathes, unlike the heroines of her favourite novels who die in order to save their integrity.
4
The Romantic narratives that Pushkin wrote in the first four years of his exile throw more light on the place that the novel-inverse occupies in Pushkin’s life and work. Written under the influence of Byron’s early ‘Southern’ poems (Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, The Corsair, The Giaour – all referred to in Onegin), each bears the imprint of exile. A fortuitous holiday took Pushkin away from Kishinev at the beginning of his exile to the Caucasus and the Crimea in the company of a friendly family, the Rayevskys. From them he discovered Byron and was helped by the English governess and the sons and daughters of the family to read him in English, of which he had no previous knowledge. However, he never developed sufficient mastery of English to read Byron satisfactorily in the original and depended on French prose translations. Two of his Romantic poems, The Captive of the Caucasus (1820–21) and The Fountain at Bakhchisaray (1821–3), germinated in this exotic environment. The first directly anticipates Onegin in its aim ‘to depict that indifference to life and its pleasures, that premature ageing of the soul, which are the distinctive features of the youth of the nineteenth century’.10 A nameless nobleman, fleeing into nature from the constraints of civilization, falls captive to a Caucasian tribe among whom he languishes amid the splendours of the mountain scenery. Emotionally dead, he cannot respond to the local girl who helps him to escape across a river and drowns herself while he looks on without response. He is an early Onegin, lethal to himself and others, yet elegiac rather than demonic in disposition. Just as he bears no name, so he is hardly a character, which Pushkin was the first to admit. The poem is more a series of lyrical and descriptive fragments. One of these is an invocation to freedom by the Prisoner that appealed to the young Decembrists:
Ah freedom! It was you alone
He sought still in the desert world;
With feeling driven out by passions,
Grown cool to dreams and to the lyre,
He listened with excitement to
The songs inspired by you, and full
Of faith, of fiery supplication,
Your august idol he embraced.11
If Onegin did join the Decembrists in the fragmentary Chapter X, as some scholars suppose, then this passage anticipates how he might have felt on the rebound of his disappointed love for Tatiana.
A more demonic figure, this time with a name, Aleko, a perhaps conscious variant of Pushkin’s first name, appears in The Gipsies (1824), written concurrently with the first chapters of Onegin. When living in Kishinev, Pushkin had apparently spent several weeks with a roving gipsy tribe. In this poem a disaffected Russian nobleman once more seeks refuge in a more natural way of life, this time in a gipsy encampment, where he returns the attentions of a fiery young woman, Zemphira, who, through Prosper Mérimée’s translation, was to become the prototype for Bizet’s Carmen. When, after two years, Zemphira tires of him and takes a younger gipsy lover, Aleko, in a fit of jealousy, kills them both. Zemphira’s father, the Elder of the tribe, dismisses him with the sentence: ‘You want freedom for yourself alone’,12 a phrase repeated by Dostoyevsky to condemn what he diagnosed as the corrosive individualism infecting Russia from the West. Pushkin’s Tatiana, he pointed out, refused the freedom Onegin offered so as not to build her happiness on the unhappiness of her husband. Both the indifference of the captive and the possessiveness of Aleko enter into Onegin’s character – from his dismissal of Tatiana’s early love for him to his overwhelming passion for her when she is married and distinguished. Already in her dream, when he silences the monsters crying ‘mine’ to her with his own grim uptake of the word, Tatiana recognizes this egotism. As in The Gipsies possessiveness and murder go hand in hand. Tatiana sees the destroyer in Onegin. The killing of Lensky in the dream foretells the duel. Was he an angel or a tempter, she had asked Onegin in her letter. In the dream he is truly demonic. In both the Elder’s judgement on Aleko and Tatiana’s rejection of Onegin, Dostoyevsky discovered a Russian ethos, and perhaps he was right. Certainly, Pushkin’s work, from The Gipsies and Onegin onwards, may be summed up as a debate with the West and a search for Russian values. The concept of the nation, first raised by the French Revolution, was being discussed throughout Europe at this time, and not least in Russia.
The earlier poem, The Fountain of Bakhchisaray, has no relevance to the novel apart from its elegiac epigraph and a recollection of the fountain in Onegin’s Journey. The epigraph reads: ‘Many, like myself used to visit this fountain; but some are no more and the others are wandering in distant parts.’13Pushkin took the epigraph from the thirteenth-century Persian poet Sadi via a French translation of Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh, where it is included. The second half of the epigraph recurs in the final stanza of Onegin, almost certainly applying, among others, to the fallen and exiled Decembrists, as the authorities were quick to suspect. Indeed, Vyazemsky was rapped over the knuckles by the authorities for quoting these lines in an article. The Fountain recounts a Romantic tale of a Polish princess captured and loved unrequitedly by a Crimean Khan and murdered by his hitherto favourite, Zarema. Putting her to death in turn, the Khan erects a ‘fountain of tears’ in memory of the Polish princess. Pushkin on his visit to the Crimea found the once gorgeous palace of Bakhchisaray deserted and the fountain rusted over. In Onegin’s Journey he imagines it still working.
The narrative poem Ruslan and Lyudmila (1817–20) was written, apart from its Introduction and Epilogue, before his exile and encounter with Byron’s ‘Southern’ poems. Its light-hearted tone links it much more with the later Byron of Don Juan, which prompted the writing of Onegin. Belonging to the exuberant tradition of mock-epic going back via Voltaire to Ario
sto in the Renaissance, it is set in Kievan Russia, cradle of Russian civilization, in the reign of the Grand Duke Vladimir (c. 978–1015). Yet it is shot through with ironic references to contemporary St Petersburg, echoing Pushkin’s three wild years there after leaving school. The poem ensured Pushkin’s fame. Nothing like it had ever been heard before. Essentially a fairy tale, with some historical elements, it tells of the abduction of Lyudmila from her bridal bed by the wicked dwarf magician, Chernomor, and how her bridegroom, Ruslan, outwits and defeats three rivals to rescue her. It is to this playful atmosphere that Pushkin returns after three years of exile in ‘accursed Kishinev’, putting behind him his Romantic poems (except for The Gipsies) and introducing a new hero:
Friends of Ruslan and of Lyudmila,
Let me acquaint you with this fellow,
The hero of my novel, pray,
Without preamble or delay:
My friend Onegin was begotten
By the Neva, where maybe you
Originated, reader, too
Or where your lustre’s not forgotten
(Chapter I, stanza 2)
The old Romantic hero is brought back to St Petersburg and placed in the social context he has deserted. While he bears the scars of his predecessors, he is now the subject of irony.
5
Started in 1823 in Kishinev, Onegin was completed eight years later in the village of Tsarskoye Selo, which housed both the imperial summer palace and Pushkin’s lycée. Pushkin finished Chapter I in 1824 in Odessa on the Black Sea, to which he was transferred after Kishinev, and published it separately in 1825. Chapter II he wrote in the same year in Odessa together with part of Chapter III, which he completed in the following year, 1825, on the family estate at Mikhailovskoye in north-west Russia and his last place of exile. Here, from 1825 to 1827, he wrote Chapters IV to part of VII, which he finished in St Petersburg in 1828. Chapter VIII he wrote in Boldino, his father’s estate in the province of Nizhny Novgorod, south-west of Moscow, in 1830, revising it and adding Onegin’s letter in Tsarskoye Selo in 1831. By then he was thirty-two.
It will be seen from this trajectory that the romantic involvements of the four characters largely coincide with Pushkin’s stay in Mikhailovskoye. The countryside described in these chapters – the cornfields stretching out from Onegin’s manor house, the fields, valleys and woods where Tatiana wanders – reproduce the surroundings of Pushkin’s family estate. Exile was lonely here, forbidding the dissipations enjoyed in Kishinev and Odessa, but it allowed him to write the central chapters of Onegin and the magnificent historical drama Boris Godunov. And, as happened when the Rayevskys passed through Kishinev, so here in the neighbouring estate of Trigorskoye Pushkin found a hospitable family with attractive, intelligent daughters to engage his affections and his poetry. To one of the Rayevsky daughters has been ascribed the famous digression on little feet in Chapter I. Pushkin wrote his final tragic and bitter St Petersburg chapter in Boldino, where on his engagement to Natalia Goncharova he had received 200 serfs from his father and so become a landowner. His most creative times were spent in Boldino, but his desire to settle there foundered on the demands of his wife and the Tsar, both of whom wanted him in the capital. While Pushkin was now at the height of his powers, his popularity started to wane as an indifferent, bourgeois reading public emerged and populist journalists began attacking aristocratic literature. Pushkin’s growing isolation left its tone on much of the last chapter. Even the critic Vissarion Belinsky, his champion in the next generation, called him a poet of the landowning class. Belinsky, a commoner, strove for an embattled and critical literature that would replace what he saw as Pushkin’s resigned acceptance of the status quo. Nevertheless, he described Onegin as an ‘encyclopedia of Russian life’.14 In the new intellectual world of Russia, divided into opposing camps, especially the Westernizers and Slavophiles, it was not possible to repeat Pushkin’s universality, at least not in verse, and in prose not before Tolstoy. Pushkin’s many-sidedness did indeed depend on the pivotal position of the minor nobility and the momentary hope for national unity that inspired its most remarkable members. It also required a reading public for which poetry was still the most meaningful literary idiom. Eugene Onegin generated themes and characters for subsequent writers, but as a form it remained unique. One or two poets, notably Mikhail Lermontov, attempted something similar, but without success. Pushkin himself uses the Onegin stanza again in a small fragment, Yezersky (1832), in which he laments the decline of the old nobility. The hero, descendant of an ancient lineage, is now a civil servant, so anticipating the deliberately named Eugene of The Bronze Horseman (1833), who, no longer a nobleman, is destroyed by one of the recurrent floods that invade Peter the Great’s historic city.
The original Chapter VIII was meant to describe Onegin’s journey between leaving his estate and returning to St Petersburg. Chapter IX would have been the present Chapter VIII. In 1853, Pavel Katenin, writing to Pavel Annenkov, Pushkin’s biographer, suggested a political reason for the chapter’s exclusion:
Concerning the eighth chapter of Onegin, I heard from the late poet in 1832 that besides the Nizhny market and the Odessa port, Eugene saw the military settlements organized by Count Arakcheyev, and here occurred remarks, judgements, expressions that were too violent for publication and he decided were best assigned to eternal oblivion. Therefore, he discarded the whole chapter from his tale – a chapter that after cancellation has become too short and, so to speak, impoverished.15
The aim of these military establishments, established by Alexei Arakcheyev in 1817, was to reduce the cost of a standing army during peacetime by dragooning government peasants into labour camps, where they would combine military service with working on the land under punitive discipline. One of these settlements outside Odessa might have attracted the attention of Onegin as it did that of the Decembrist leader, Pavel Pestel, who hoped to break into it at the time of the planned revolt and incite the detainees to mutiny. As it stands, the published Fragment resembles a travelogue punctuated by the hero’s cries of ‘ennui’, as he moves restlessly from one place to another. Critics have noticed a similarity with Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, which continued to fascinate Pushkin and which he attempted to translate as late as 1836.
He wrote and burned Chapter X in Boldino shortly after finishing the present Chapter VIII and Onegin’s Journey, but left a coded copy of the stanzas published in this volume, which have been the subject of different readings and orderings. Only two of the stanzas are almost complete. I have followed the presentation by Boris Tomashevsky, the leading Pushkin textologist of the Soviet era. While using the same stanzaic form, the chapter is entirely different from the rest of the novel, reading more like a chronicle. The content of the chapter is politically explosive, starting with a scathing satire on Alexander I and ending with an ironic history of the Decembrist movement. It also includes a sceptical hope in stanza 7, where every other line begins with ‘maybe’, that Nicholas I will reunite the Siberian exiles with their families. None of the characters in the previous chapters makes an appearance here. However, a Captain Yuzefovich reported Pushkin saying to him: ‘Onegin will either perish in the Caucasus or join the Decembrist movement.’16
The internal chronology of the novel varies from between four and seven years’ distance from the occasions of writing it. This temporal proximity emphasizes Pushkin’s closeness to his characters, in particular Onegin. The time-frame of the story (1819–24) is only just out of kilter with the length of Pushkin’s exile (1820–25). From internal evidence we can work out the ages of the characters. Pushkin himself is twenty-one when he meets Onegin, Onegin is twenty-six, Lensky eighteen, Olga sixteen, Tatiana seventeen, and nineteen when she rejects Onegin. The poem is an epitaph to youth, including Pushkin’s. Tatiana marries, but after two years she is childless. ‘It is sad to think we’re given/Our youth to be enjoyed in vain’, Pushkin reflects in his last chapter (stanza 11).
The passage of the seasons sha
pes this chronology, forming the backdrop not only of the novel, but of Pushkin’s generation and life as such:
Alas! each generation must
By Providence’s dispensation
Rise, ripen, fall, in quick succession,
Upon life’s furrows
(Chapter II, stanza 38)
The seasons intertwine with the characters. Tatiana naturally falls in love in spring, while Onegin’s belated passion is compared with the ‘cold and ruthless’ storms of autumn. Pushkin balances Tatiana’s heady feelings as she waits for Onegin at the end of Chapter III with down-to-earth similes from nature:
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