Was such my habit in my heyday?
O fountain of Bakhchisaray,14 say!
Were such the thoughts your endless sound
Communicated to my mind,
When, watching you in silent wonder,
Zarema first appeared to me
Midst empty halls of luxury?…
Three years since then, and who should wander
Along my tracks, if not Eugene,
Recalling me, though long unseen.
11
I lived in dust-submerged Odessa…
There for a long time skies are clear,
Abundant trade that knows no leisure
Readies its sails for every sphere;
By Europe all things are invaded,
The South shines out in variegated
And lively multiformity.
The tongue of golden Italy
Resounds along the merry pavement,
Where our imperious Slav walks cheek-
By-jowl with Frenchman, Spaniard, Greek,
Armenian, ponderous Moldavian
And son of Egypt, Morali,15
Corsair, retired now from the sea.
12
Our friend Tumansky16 has depicted
Odessa in resounding rhyme,
But partiality restricted
His observations at the time.
Arriving in the town, our poet,
Armed with lorgnette, set off to know it,
Alone, above the sea – and then,
Employing an enchanting pen,
Extolled the gardens of Odessa.
All that is well and good, except
That round about is naked steppe;
In some few spots a recent measure
Has forced young boughs on sultry days
To mitigate the solar rays.
13
But where now is my rambling story?
Inside Odessa’s dust bowl, I
Might well have said its ‘dirty quarry’,
And that would not have been a lie.
For five, six weeks a year Odessa,
At Zeus’s tempest-bringing pleasure,
Is flooded, blocked, its conduits burst,
Into the thickest mud immersed,
With houses sinking two feet under;
Only pedestrians on stilts
Dare breach the cumulative silts;
The coaches and the people flounder,
And oxen, horns inclined, replace
The horses with their feeble pace.
14
But hammers are already cracking
The stones, and soon the sunken town
Will have acquired a novel backing
As if with armour plated down.
However, in this moist Odessa
There’s something missing to refresh her;
Why, water! What would you have thought?
Some reconstruction must be wrought…17
But really, this is no great sorrow,
Particularly, you’ll agree,
When wine’s imported duty-free.
There’s Southern sun and sea tomorrow…
Where better, friends, to spend your time
Or find a more propitious clime?
15
Time was, no sooner had day risen,
Marked by the naval cannonry,
Than, running down with expedition,
I’d leave the steep shore for the sea.
Then, by the briny breakers freshened,
Smoking a pipe near incandescent,
Like Muslims in their paradise,
Coffee with Eastern grounds I’d prize,
And leave then for a stroll. Already,
The generous casino18 hums;
Cups clash; the sleepy marker comes
On to the balcony, unsteady,
With broom in hand, while at the hall
Two merchants, meeting, make their call.
16
Look now – the square has put on motley.
All is alive: the people there,
On business or without, run hotly,
But most of them with some affair.
The merchant, child of cautious daring,
Tells from the ensigns how he’s faring,
Whether he’s favoured by the skies
With sails that he can recognize.
What novel wares from sundry nations
Have entered into quarantine?
Where are the promised casks of wine?
What news of plague and conflagrations?
Of famine or another war,
Or something new, but similar?
17
But we, young fellows, blithely standing
Alongside anxious merchants, had
Eyes only for the vessel landing,
That brought us oysters from Tsargrad.
Has it arrived? What joy, what pleasure!
Youth, avaricious beyond measure,
Flies off to swallow from the shell
The cloistered molluscs, live and well,
Besprinkling them with lemon lightly.
Noise, arguments – light wine is brought
Straight from the cellars to our board,
Where good Oton19 serves us politely.
The hours fly by, while the account
Reaches unseen a grim amount.
18
But evening’s blue already thickens,
The opera now calls to us,
Rossini, Europe’s darling, beckons –
Th’ intoxicating Orpheus.
To criticism inattentive,
Selfsame as ever, new, inventive,
He pours out tunes that effervesce,
Cascade and flow and incandesce,
They burn like youthful lovers’ kisses
In flames of love, in luxury,
Or like the spurt and golden spray
Of an Aí when out it fizzes…
But, gentlemen, who can define
Do-re-mi-sol in terms of wine?
19
But are these all its delectations?
What of the quizzical lorgnette?
What of the backstage assignations?
The prima donna, the ballet?
The box where, in her beauty shining,
A trader’s youthful wife,20 reclining,
Disdainful and in languid pose,
Whom pressing throngs of slaves enclose?
She hears, hears not the cavatina,
Nor the entreaties or the jests,
Halfway with flattery expressed…
While just behind her in a corner
Her husband dozes, shouts ‘encore’,
Yawns – and begins again to snore.
20
At last there thunders the finale;
The noisy audience greets the night;
The square to which the people rally
Is lit by stars and lantern light.
Ausonia’s21 sons are gently singing
A playful tune that goes on ringing
Inside their heads and will not leave,
While we roar out the recitative.
But it is late. Odessa’s sleeping;
The night is warm and mute and still.
The moon has risen, and a veil,
Diaphanously light, is draping
The sky. All’s silent; save the roar
Of Black Sea waves upon the shore…
21
And so I lived then in Odessa…
CHAPTER X1
1
A ruler, timorous and wily,
A balding fop, of toil a foe,
Minion of Fame by chance entirely,
Reigned over us those years ago.2
…………………………………
2
We knew him not at all so regal,
When cooks, who were not ours, were sent
To pluck our double-headed eagle,
Where Bonaparte had pitched his tent.3
�
�………………………………………
3
The storm of 1812 descended –
Who was our rock here, who our rod?
Was it the rage the people vented?
Winter, Barcláy4 or Russia’s God?
……………………………………
4
But God did help – murmurs abated,
And, shortly, by the force of things,
In Paris we had congregated
And Russia’s Tsar was king of kings.5
………………………………………
5
And as he fattened,6 life grew heavier,
O you, our stupid Russian folk,
Say, why for God’s sake did you ever
………………………………………
6
Maybe, O shibboleth of the nation,
I’ll dedicate an ode to you,
It seems, though, in anticipation
A high-born rhymester’s done it, too.7
………………………………………
To Albion the seas are granted8
………………………………………
7
Maybe the fraud,9 his rents forgetting,
Will move into a monastery,
Maybe Tsar Nicholas, regretting,
Will set Siberia’s captives free10
………………………………………
Maybe they will repair the highways
………………………………………
8
This man of fate, through wars progressing,
Before whom Europe’s kings would fawn,
This horseman, crowned with papal blessing,
Gone like a shadow of the dawn,
………………………………………
Exhausted on the rack of leisure11
9
The Pyrenees shook with foreboding,
Naples’ volcano was astir,
The one-armed prince was up and nodding
From Kishinev to the Morea.
………………………………………
L’s dagger… B’s shadow12
10
I’ll curb all comers with my people. –
Our Tsar said in the congress hall,
………………………………………
And does not give a damn about you,
You’re Alexander’s menial.13
11
Toy regiment of Peter-Titan,
A guard of old mustachios,
Whose fake protection of a tyrant
Betrayed him to his deadly foes.14
12
Russia again returned to quietness,
Still more the Tsar went revelling,
But sparks of quite another brightness,
Perhaps a long time smouldering,15
………………………………………
13
Foregathering at private meetings,
Over a Russian vodka, wine,
They would, reciprocating greetings,16
………………………………………
14
Grandiloquent and trenchant pleaders,
This group of friends would congregate
At either turbulent Nikita’s
Or cautious Ilya’s to debate.17
………………………………………
15
Mars, Bacchus, Venus were his pleasures:
Here Lunin with audacity
Put forward his decisive measures,18
And muttered in a reverie.
Noëls were brought and read by Pushkin,19
While melancholical Yakushkin,20
Had silently, it seemed, laid bare
A dagger meant to slay the Tsar.
With only Russia in his vision,
Pursuing his ideal, the lame
Turgenev21 hearkened to their aim
And, hating slavery’s oppression,
Predicted that this noble folk
Would free the peasants from their yoke.
1622
All this on the Neva, iced over;
But where much sooner shines the spring
On Kamenka23 in shady cover
And on the hilltops of Tul’chin,24
Where Wittgenstein’s detachments quartered,
On plains by the Dnieper watered
And on the steppeland of the Bug,
These things took on a different look.
There Pestel25… for the tyrants,
And a cool-headed general26
Gathered supporters to his call,
And Muryavyov,27 to him inclining,
Hastened with strength and boldness to
See the uprising carried through.
17
At first, these plots, initiated
‘Twixt a Lafitte and a Cliquot28
Were in a friendly tone debated
And the rebellious science was slow
To kindle a defiant passion,
All this was mere ennui and fashion,
The idleness of youthful minds,
Games that a grown-up scamp designs,
It seemed…
But gradually…
From cell to cell…
And soon… by a secret network
Russia…
Our Tsar was dozing…
Notes
Pushkin added a series of notes to his edition of Eugene Onegin. I have referred to several of these in the Notes below, but have not translated them as a whole because they include long quotations, often from secondary poets, which themselves would require further annotation, and would, I think, interest only a tiny minority of readers.
I am indebted to the commentaries on Onegin by Vladimir Nabokov, Yuri Lotman and N. L. Brodsky.
1. ‘Steeped in vanity, he had even more the kind of pride that will accept good and bad actions with the same indifference – the result of a feeling of superiority, perhaps imaginary. (From a private letter.)’ There is no known source for this quotation.
DEDICATION
1. Addressed to P. A. Pletnyov (1792–1865), man of letters and minor poet, in later years academician and rector of St Petersburg University. He met Pushkin in 1817 and remained one of his closest friends. From 1825 he was his principal publisher and, after the poet’s death, his first biographer.
CHAPTER 1
1. And it hurries… Prince Vyazemsky: The epigraph is from ‘The First Snow’ (1819), a poem by Pushkin’s close friend Prince Pyotr Vyazemsky (1792–1878), mentioned several times in Onegin and appearing in person in Chapter VIII. The ‘it’ is ‘youthful ardour’, compared to the intoxication of a sleigh ride.
2. Zeus: Supreme god of the ancient Greek pantheon.
3. Ruslan and Lyudmila:(1820) A mock-epic and Pushkin’s first major work. Pushkin signals his return to a light-hearted manner after a series of impassioned Romantic poems.
4. But now the North’s unsafe for me: Pushkin’s note 1 to the chapter reads: ‘Written in Bessarabia’, his initial place of exile.
5. Madame… passed on her trust: Refugees from revolutionary France were employed as tutors by aristocratic families.
6. the Summer Park: The Summer Gardens, a fashionable park in St Petersburg.
7. Juvenal:(c. 42–c. 125 AD), Roman satirical poet, popular with the Decembrists (see Introduction) for his denunciations of despotism and depravity.
8. the Aeneid: Epic poem by Roman poet Virgil (70–19 BC).
9. Homer: Ancient Greek poet, somewhere between the twelfth and seventh centuries BC, supposed author of the Iliad and the Odyssey.
10. Theocritus: Ancient Greek poet of idylls, third century BC. Russian pre-Romantics, seeking a national alternative to Russian rococo, drew on Homer and Theocritus. Decembrist economists, on the other hand, dismissed the entire classical poetic tradition as of no practical use.
11. Adam Smith: Scottish economist (17
23–90) who influenced the Decembrists.
12. in the land… The simple product: A principal tenet of physiocrat economic theory, originating in eighteenth-century France, according to which national wealth was based on the ‘produit net’ of agriculture.
13. Ovid: Roman poet (43 BC-16 AD), author of Metamorphoses and The Art of Love, with whom Pushkin felt a kinship during his exile. Ovid died in exile on the Black Sea.
14. [9]: The omitted stanzas are of three kinds: those written and dropped; those which Pushkin intended to write but never got round to; and fictitious ones in the ironic manner of Sterne, Byron and Hoffmann. Together they constitute an invisible subtext.
15. Faublas: A sixteen-year-old seducer of young wives in a picaresque novel by Louvet de Couvrai (1760–97). But none of the husbands in the novel can be described as ‘cunning’.
16. bolivar: A silk hat with a wide, upturned brim, named after Simon Bolivar (1783–1830), the Latin American liberator and idol of European liberals in the 1820s and of Latin American revolutionaries today.
17. Bréguet: A repeater watch, invented by Parisian watchmaker Abraham Louis Bréguet (1747–1823). A spring mechanism allowed the watch, while shut, to strike the hour or minute. A real dandy would not have carried one.
18. ‘Away, away’: The postilion’s cry to pedestrians.
19. Talon’s: A restaurant on the Nevsky Prospekt owned by a Frenchman until 1825.
20. Kaverin: Pyotr Kaverin (1794–1855), hussar and duellist, school friend and companion of Pushkin during his early Petersburg years, student at Göttingen (1810–11) and Decembrist.
21. comet wine: Champagne of vintage comet year 1811.
22. bloody roast beef: Fashionable in the early decades of the nineteenth century.
23. Strasbourg pie, that keeps for ever: Made from goose liver and imported in tins, therefore ‘kept for ever’. Tinned food was invented during the Napoleonic wars.
Eugene Onegin Page 20
