The novel "Eugene Onegin" was written by a classic of world literature. Having become the first step of Russian writers in the field of realism, the poetic work turned out to be unique for its time. The writing of "Eugene Onegin" took 8 years, from 1823 to 1831. The action covers the events of the period 1819-1925. The entire work of Pushkin was first published in 1833.
Critics and researchers compare "Eugene Onegin" with "". The main characters of the poetic work faithfully depict the images characteristic of the 19th century, and the atmosphere of this period is conveyed with incredible accuracy.
History of creation
Working on the creation of the novel, Pushkin planned to present to the public the image of a hero relevant to the new Russia. The character described by the author would easily provoke the events necessary for the development of the country, and was capable of serious deeds. The novel became for Pushkin, a fan of the ideas of the Decembrists, a kind of interpretation of Russian reality in poetic form.
The work was born during the difficult periods of the life of the famous poet: in the southern exile and after it, during unspoken imprisonment in Mikhailovsky and during the "Boldino autumn".
The characterization of the main character is carefully thought out by the creator of the image. Pushkinists find features in the description of Onegin's character, Katenin and the author himself. The hero has become a collection distinguishing features several prototypes and collectively era, as well as secular youth. A nobleman with overwhelming vigor, he becomes central figure novel, on which the fate of other characters depends.
Calling Eugene Onegin "a good friend", Pushkin emphasizes the consonance of the hero's lifestyle with the described era. The author endows the hero with a noble upbringing, a sharp mind and quick perception, which are in harmony with his principles and point of view.
Eugene's life is boring. He does not feel belonging to the world where he enters, he makes sarcastic and sarcastic remarks and ridicule of his representatives. Onegin is a new hero who is disgusted by active actions and prefers passive observation of what is happening. Researchers are still arguing over whether the hero was an “alien” and “superfluous” person in the era or was an idle thinker who lived his life happily. The actions of the character are difficult to interpret unambiguously, and his thoughts are not always fair. The goal of the hero's life is unknown: he does not voice it or does not have it at all.
Eugene is one of the people torn between the arguments of the mind and heart. He does not stand the test of noble feelings like love and friendship. The duel provoked by him is logical for secular etiquette, but becomes a game of concepts and a kind of experiment for a bored hero.
A spoiled young man, capable of subduing a secular company, is spoiled by female attention and is not bad-looking. After describing his lifestyle, the reader easily perceives the fact that he is not in love with, but the girl longs for his reciprocity. A person who is inaccessible to strong sincere feelings, weak in such concepts as love and relationships, Onegin considers himself entitled to teach the audience. But after a while, the hero becomes a hostage to his spiritual stinginess.
Plot and main characters
The plot of the poetic novel about Eugene Onegin is known to every schoolchild. The introduction describes a young nobleman whose wealthy uncle has fallen ill. Eugene is forced to go to visit a relative. The narration is conducted on behalf of the author, who describes what is happening and seems to be familiar to the protagonist.
Having success among the ladies and entertaining himself with secular amusements, Onegin came to the conclusion that he was fed up with what surrounds him. He is in a state of melancholy and blues, so a trip to his uncle starts a new stage in the character's life. After the death of a relative, the hero became the owner of a fortune and settled in the village. The longing did not pass, and the hero was looking for a way to get rid of it.
In the village, Eugene met and found an outlet in him. The ardent young man turned out to be in love with one of the Larin sisters -. The cheerful girl turned out to be the complete opposite of the eldest of the sisters - Tatyana, who interested Evgeny. Young people meet, and love for Onegin is born in the heart of the heroine. Tatyana, in a fit of feelings, writes a letter to her lover, but is rejected. On Tatyana's name day, Onegin courts Olga for fun and receives a duel challenge from Lensky. Having killed a friend during a duel, the hero leaves for St. Petersburg.
Three years later, Onegin and Tatyana meet in the capital. The girl married a general and shines in the world. Eugene is smitten with her. Onegin's letter to Tatyana reveals Eugene's feelings. The woman refuses him, confessing that, despite reciprocity, she will remain faithful to her husband. The story ends with the author's farewell to the audience.
The main characters of the work: Eugene Onegin, Vladimir Lensky and sisters Larina - and Olga.
Eugene Onegin is a nobleman who was born in St. Petersburg. His father squandered his fortune, so an inheritance from a wealthy relative was appropriate for the hero. Brought up by tutors, Onegin had a good upbringing, inherent in a young man of his origin. The lack of moral principles has led to the fact that he behaves like a snob and does not know how to appreciate the manifestations of passionate feelings. Ladies favor Eugene, gentlemen listen to his opinion. The essence of the young man is unchanged, although the hero changes throughout the novel.
Tatyana is the key female image of the work. She is modest, calm and reserved. The girl's manners emphasize her nobility. Books are her main attraction. In part, their influence leads to falling in love with Onegin. Under the pressure of feelings, Tatyana decides to take a risky step, which was considered a shame for a lady of the 19th century: to write a letter to her chosen one. Having been refused, hurting her pride, the girl pretends that nothing happened. She marries, knowing that the former feelings have not faded away, and finds the strength to refuse Eugene, who has been inflamed with love. For a reasonable and decent Tatyana, the thought of betrayal and betrayal of her husband is unacceptable.
Vladimir Lensky - a young man who became a close friend of Onegin in the village, according to art historians, was written off from a young writer. A wealthy nobleman, 18 years old, is in love with Olga and remains faithful to the windy laughter woman for more than a year. An educated handsome man cannot endure the insult caused by the courtship of a friend for his lady of the heart. Friendship with Onegin ends in a duel that becomes turning point storytelling.
Olga is the younger Larina, Tatyana's antagonist. The frivolous girl is too cheerful and loves to flirt with gentlemen. Not demonstrating talents and preferences, the girl is not inclined to think about the future. She perceives Lensky as a toy and does not share his feelings. After Vladimir's death, Olga quickly finds solace with a young officer whom she marries.
- The history of the creation of the novel "Eugene Onegin" is closely connected with the author's achievement - the Onegin stanza. The work is written in a special way, thanks to which Pushkin organized an alternative to prose chapters and easily changed the subject of the story. Readers note the author's transition from the presentation of thoughts to the description of the plot and vice versa. The novel, in the format of a confidential conversation with the audience, was translated into 19 languages.
- The legendary work has repeatedly inspired creative people to create art objects. In 1878
- In the musical field, the plot described by Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin in the novel "Eugene Onegin" was sung by the author and performer, whose pseudonym is Shura Karetny.
Quotes
The replies of the protagonist and secondary characters of the poetic novel have long become catchphrases. Many quotes from works of XIX centuries do not lose their relevance in modern conditions.
“We all learned little by little something and somehow, so by bringing up, thank God, it’s not surprising to shine with us ...”
These lines can describe more than one generation of Russians who have read Pushkin's works. Emphasizing the degree of education of the hero, the author, not without sarcasm, notes that, being able to wishful thinking, it is not difficult to create an attractive image in the world.
“You can be a smart person and think about the beauty of your nails...”
So the poet writes, explaining the frivolity of the character, sometimes characteristic of many serious people. Incompatible features are often combined in the character of outstanding personalities and those who are not able to impress with individuality.
“They got along. Wave and stone, poetry and prose, ice and fire are not so different from each other ... "
With these words, dedicated to Lensky and Onegin, Pushkin emphasizes the striking differences between the characters, describing them in the melodic manner of a Onegin stanza.
"How less woman we love, the easier she likes us"
The writer gave a testament to subsequent generations through the mouth of Onegin and forever handed over to the representatives of the stronger sex a smashing weapon against ladies in love.
The poet puts immutable truths into the novel, proclaiming:
“... We honor everyone as zeros, and ourselves as ones ...”
For no one, including Eugene, there is a personality more significant than one's own, which is logical, regardless of the era and social circle.
The action in the work takes place from 1819 to 1825. The novel opens with a dedication to Pletnev. This is followed by the first chapter, beginning with Onegin's lamentations that he had to go to the village to a seriously ill uncle in order to care for him, show participation, and think for himself: "when the devil takes you."
Onegin at the beginning of the novel is a young rake, a handsome man, a "dandy". He received a typical noble upbringing and education, studied a little of everything, spoke excellent French, "knew how to dance a mazurka and bowed at ease." The hero is especially skilled in the "science of tender passion", he skillfully flirted, attended balls, theaters, restaurants. The day was scheduled by the hour, but all the time was occupied by social events, which soon bored the young man. We continue the summary of "Eugene Onegin" by Pushkin.
Eugene Onegin in the countryside
He comes to the village, no longer finds his uncle alive and decides that nature and new look life will help dispel boredom. But after three days he gets bored with the village. Onegin mopes, reads books, does not maintain relations with neighbors, as he is tired of their "prudent conversation about haymaking, about wine, about the kennel, about his relatives."
At the same time, Vladimir Lensky, an eighteen-year-old poet, a romantic dreamer who graduated from the University of Göttingen, arrives at his estate. He believes in love, in friendship, in the happiness of life, although he composes typically romantic poems about melancholy and withering.
Onegin and Lensky became friends, while they were completely different. They often come together, argue, talk, share their thoughts. Lensky tells a friend about his beloved Olga, the daughter of a neighbor, Larina.
One day, friends go on a visit to the Larins. On the way back, Onegin tells Lensky that the older sister Tatyana is more interesting than the younger one, because Olga is beautiful, but ordinary, like an ordinary heroine of a novel. Lensky is offended. Summary of "Eugene Onegin" by Pushkin is presented by the literary portal site
The love affair gets complicated
Young people do not suspect that Tatyana is in love with Onegin. She suffers, does not sleep at night, confesses everything to an old nanny. She tells her about her fate, remembers her husband, mother-in-law and a difficult life. Tatyana decides to write to Onegin and confess her feelings. Her letter is reminiscent of romantic confessions from the sentimental novels of the XVIII, which the girl loved. The beloved appears as a kind of ideal that Tatyana was waiting for and immediately felt in her heart that it was he who was destined for her by fate. Having sent a letter, she waits a long time for an answer, she is tormented, but Onegin does not write to her.
Pushkin talks about Tatyana's unusualness, her love for solitude, reading books, and Russian nature. She especially liked winter, fortune-telling, rituals, fairy tales and terrible stories of the nanny on long winter evenings. Tatyana with her Russian soul is the author's "sweet ideal".
Finally Onegin arrives and an explanation takes place in the garden. The hero was tempted in female love, but did not want to deceive Tatyana, seeing in her letter the sincerity of first love. Therefore, he honestly admits that he is not ready to share her feelings, family life is not for him at all and gives advice to continue to be more careful, not to speak so frankly about his feelings.
Soon Tatyana has a terrible dream where she sees herself in the forest, a bear is chasing her, and then she is overtaken and carried to a hut in which monsters sit, and Onegin presides between them. He takes Tatyana, at this moment Lensky and Olga enter, Onegin does not like the appearance of uninvited guests, he kills the young poet. The dream turns out to be real.
Then the name day of the main character is depicted. Prior to this, Lensky invites Onegin to a holiday with the Larins, promising that there will be no other guests there. However, many landlord neighbors come to the house. Eugene is angry and wants to take revenge on Lensky. To do this, he several times invites Olga to dance, causing the jealousy of her lover. Vladimir decides that his friend wants to seduce Olga. In the end, in the evening, Onegin receives a challenge to a duel and accepts it.
Duel and final - a summary of "Eugene Onegin"
Before the duel, the hero thinks that it would be more correct to tell Lensky about his offense and make peace with him, but does not do this, fearing to be branded a coward. Lensky, before the fateful event, reflects on the uncertainty of the "day to come" and on Olga's love.
The next morning, Onegin comes to the duel much later than the appointed time, but the duel took place, and Lensky was killed. Shocked Onegin leaves these places.
Six months pass, Olga marries a lancer and leaves. Tatyana wanders around the surrounding fields and accidentally comes to Onegin's house. There, in his office, she reads books, sees what marks their owner left in the margins and concludes that Onegin is just an imitation of a fashionable type. Byronic hero. After a while, her mother persuades her to go to Moscow to the “bride fair”. There she is noticed by an important general, she is getting married.
A few years later, Onegin returns from a trip to St. Petersburg. At the ball, he meets Tatyana and does not immediately recognize: she has changed, has become a majestic, calm secular lady, causing universal respect and reverence. The author notes that Tatyana's unusual charm conquers Onegin, he falls in love and confesses his feelings to her in a letter. Having received no answer, he sends two more messages, but in vain. Then Onegin comes to Tatyana and finds the crying heroine reading a letter. Tatyana says that she loves Onegin, but "she has been given to another" and will be "faithful to him for a century."
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The young nobleman Eugene Onegin travels from St. Petersburg to the village to his dying rich uncle, annoyed at the impending boredom. Twenty-four-year-old Eugene was educated at home as a child, he was brought up by French tutors. He spoke French fluently, danced easily, knew a little Latin, in conversation he knew how to keep silent in time or flash an epigram - this was enough for the world to react favorably to him.
Onegin leads a life full of secular amusements and love affairs. Every day he receives several invitations to the evening, goes for a walk on the boulevard, then dine with a restaurateur, and from there goes to the theater. At home, Eugene spends a lot of time in front of the mirror behind the toilet. In his office there are all fashionable decorations and devices: perfumes, combs, nail files, scissors, brushes.
You can be a good person
And think about the beauty of nails.
Onegin is in a hurry again - now to the ball. The holiday is in full swing, music is playing, “the legs of lovely ladies are flying” ...
Returning from the ball, Eugene goes to bed early in the morning, when Petersburg is already waking up. "Tomorrow is the same as yesterday." But is Eugene happy? No, everything bored him: friends, beauties, light, spectacles. Like Byron's Childe Harold, he is gloomy and disappointed, Onegin, having locked himself at home, tries to read a lot, tries to write himself - but all to no avail. The blues takes over again.
After the death of his father, who lived in debt and eventually went bankrupt, Onegin, not wanting to engage in litigation, gives the family fortune to lenders. He hopes to inherit his uncle's property. And indeed, having arrived at a relative, Eugene learns that he died, leaving his nephew an estate, factories, forests and lands.
Eugene settles in the village - life has somehow changed. At first, the new position amuses him, but he soon becomes convinced that it is just as boring here as in St. Petersburg.
Easing the fate of the peasants, Eugene replaced the corvée with dues. Because of such innovations, as well as insufficient courtesy, Onegin was known among the neighbors as "the most dangerous eccentric."
At the same time, eighteen-year-old Vladimir Lensky, "an admirer of Kant and a poet," returns from Germany to a neighboring estate. His soul is not yet corrupted by the light, he believes in love, glory, the highest and mysterious goal of life. With sweet innocence, he sings of "something, and a foggy distance" in sublime verses. A handsome, profitable groom, Lensky does not want to embarrass himself either by marriage, or even by participating in everyday conversations of neighbors.
Completely different people, Lensky and Onegin nevertheless converge and often spend time together. Eugene listens with a smile to Lensky's "young nonsense". Believing that over the years the delusions themselves will disappear, Onegin is in no hurry to disappoint the poet, the ardor of Lensky's feelings nevertheless arouses respect in him. Lensky tells a friend about his extraordinary love for Olga, whom he has known since childhood and whom he has long been predicted to be a bride.
On ruddy, blond, always cheerful Olga her older sister, Tatyana, is not at all like her. Thoughtful and sad, she prefers loneliness and reading foreign novels to noisy games.
The mother of Tatyana and Olga was once married against her will. In the village where she was taken away, at first she cried, but then she got used to it, got used to it, began to "autocratically" manage the household and her husband. Dmitry Larin sincerely loved his wife, trusting her in everything. The family revered ancient customs and rituals: fasting was fasting, pancakes were baked on Shrove Tuesday. Their life went on so calmly until the “simple and kind gentleman” died.
Lensky visits Larin's grave. Life goes on, one generation is replaced by another. The time will come, "... our grandchildren in a good hour / They will also push us out of the world!".
One evening Lensky is going to visit the Larins. Onegin finds such a pastime boring, but then he decides to join a friend to look at the object of his love. On the way back, Eugene frankly shares his impressions: Olga, in his opinion, is ordinary, in the place of a young poet, he would rather choose an older sister.
Meanwhile, the unexpected visit of friends gave rise to gossip about the future wedding of Eugene and Tatyana. Tatyana herself secretly thinks about Onegin: "The time has come, she fell in love." Immersed in reading novels, Tatyana imagines herself to be their heroine, and Onegin as a hero. At night, she cannot sleep and starts a conversation about love with the nanny. She tells how she was married at the age of thirteen, and cannot understand the young lady. Suddenly Tatyana asks for a pen and paper and starts writing a letter to Onegin. In him, trusting, obedient to the attraction of feelings, Tatyana is frank. She, in her sweet simplicity, does not know about the danger, does not observe the caution inherent in the "inaccessible" cold St. Petersburg beauties and cunning coquettes, luring fans into their networks. The letter was written in French, since the ladies at that time were much more accustomed to expressing themselves in this language. Tatyana believes that Evgeny was “sent to her by God”, that she cannot entrust her fate to anyone else. She is waiting for Onegin's decision and answer.
In the morning, Tatyana, in agitation, asks Nanny Filipyevna to send a letter to a neighbor. An agonizing wait sets in. Lensky arrives, finally, for him - Onegin. Tatyana quickly runs into the garden, where the servant girls sing while picking berries. Tatyana cannot calm down, and suddenly - Evgeny appears in front of her ...
The sincerity and simplicity of Tatyana's letter touched Onegin. Not wanting to deceive the gullible Tanya, Evgeny turns to her with a “confession”: if he were looking for a calm family life, then I would choose Tatyana as my friend, but he was not created for bliss. Gradually, "confession" becomes a "sermon": Onegin advises Tatyana to restrain her feelings, otherwise inexperience will bring her to trouble. The girl listens to him in tears.
We have to admit that Onegin treated Tanya quite nobly, no matter how honored his enemies and friends. In our life we cannot rely on friends, relatives, or loved ones. What remains? "Love yourself..."
After an explanation with Onegin, Tatyana "fades, turns pale, goes out and is silent." Lensky and Olga, on the contrary, are cheerful. They are together all the time. Lensky decorates Holguin's album with drawings and elegies.
And Onegin, meanwhile, indulges in a calm village life: "walking, reading, deep sleep." The northern summer passes quickly, the boring autumn time comes, and after it - and frosts. On winter days, Onegin sits at home, Lensky comes to visit him. Friends drink wine, talk by the fireplace, and remember their neighbors. Lensky gives Yevgeny an invitation to Tatiana's name day, talking enthusiastically about Olga. The wedding is already scheduled, Lensky has no doubt that he is loved, so he is happy. His faith is naive, but is it better for someone in whom "experience has cooled the heart"?
Tatyana loves the Russian winter: sleigh rides, sunny frosty days and dark evenings. The holidays are coming. Fortune-telling, ancient legends, dreams and signs - Tatyana believes in all this. At night, she is going to tell fortunes, but she becomes scared. Tatyana goes to bed, taking off her silk belt. She has a strange dream.
She walks alone in the snow, a stream rustles ahead, above it is a thin footbridge. Suddenly, a huge bear appears, which helps Tatiana to cross to the other side, and then pursues her. Tatyana tries to run, but collapses in exhaustion. The bear brings her to some kind of hut and disappears. Coming to her senses, Tatyana hears screams and noise, and through a crack in the door she sees incredible monsters, among them, as the owner, Onegin! Suddenly, from a breath of wind, the door opens, and the whole gang of infernal ghosts, laughing wildly, approaches it. Hearing Onegin's formidable word, everyone disappears. Eugene attracts Tatiana to him, but then Olga and Lensky appear. An argument erupts. Onegin, dissatisfied uninvited guests, grabs a knife and kills Lensky. Darkness, a scream... Tatyana wakes up and immediately tries to unravel the dream, leafing through Martyn Zadeki's dream book.
The name day is coming. Guests are coming: Pustyakov, Skotinins, Buyanov, Monsieur Triquet and other funny figures. The arrival of Onegin makes Tanya excited, and this annoys Eugene. He is indignant at Lensky, who called him here. After dinner, the ball begins. Onegin finds an excuse to take revenge on Lensky: he is kind to Olga, constantly dancing with her. Lensky is amazed. He wants to invite Olga to the next dance, but his fiancee has already given the floor to Onegin. Insulted, Lensky retires: only a duel can now decide his fate.
The next morning, Onegin receives a note from Lensky challenging him to a duel. The letter is brought by the second Zaretsky, a cynical but not stupid person, in the past a brawler, a card thief, an avid duelist who knew how to quarrel and reconcile friends. Now he is a peaceful landowner. Onegin accepts the challenge calmly, but in his heart he remains dissatisfied with himself: there was no need to joke so evilly about the love of a friend.
Lensky is looking forward to an answer, he is glad that Onegin did not avoid the duel. After some hesitation, Vladimir nevertheless goes to the Larins. Olga greets him cheerfully as if nothing had happened. Embarrassed, touched, happy Lensky is no longer jealous, but he is still obliged to save his beloved from the "corruptor". If Tatyana knew about everything, she might have prevented the upcoming duel. But both Onegin and Lensky remain silent.
In the evening, the young poet, in a lyrical fever, composes farewell verses. Lensky, who is a little dozing, is awakened by a neighbor. Eugene, having overslept, is late for the meeting. They have been waiting for him at the mill for a long time. Onegin introduces his servant Guillot as a second, which causes Zaretsky's displeasure.
As if in a nightmare, the "enemies" are cold-bloodedly preparing each other's death. They could reconcile, but they have to pay tribute to secular customs: a sincere impulse would be mistaken for cowardice. Finished preparations. Opponents on the team converge, aim - Eugene manages to shoot first. Lensky is killed. Onegin runs up, calls him - all in vain.
Perhaps eternal glory awaited the young poet, or perhaps an ordinary boring life. But be that as it may, the young dreamer is dead. Zaretsky takes the frozen corpse home.
Spring came. By the stream, in the shade of two pines, there is a simple monument: the poet Vladimir Lensky rests here. Once Larina's sisters often came here to mourn, now this place is forgotten by people.
After the death of Lensky, Olga did not cry for long - having fallen in love with the lancer, she got married, and soon left with him. Tatyana was left alone. She still thinks of Onegin, although she should have hated him for killing Lensky. Walking one evening, Tatyana comes to the deserted estate of Onegin. The housekeeper leads her into the house. Tatyana looks at the "fashionable cell" with emotion. Since then, she often comes here to read books from Evgeny's library. Tatyana carefully examines the marks in the margins, with their help she begins to understand more clearly the one whom she adored so much. Who is he: an angel or a demon, “isn’t he a parody”?
Tatyana's mother is worried: her daughter refuses all suitors. Following the advice of her neighbors, she decides to go to Moscow, "to the bride's fair." Tatyana says goodbye to her beloved forests, meadows, to freedom, which she will have to exchange for the vanity of the world.
In winter, the Larins finally finish their noisy gatherings, say goodbye to the servants, get into the wagon and go to long way. In Moscow, they stay with an aged cousin, Alina. All days are busy with visits to numerous relatives. The girls surround Tanya, confide their heart secrets to her, but she does not tell them anything about her love. Vulgar nonsense, indifferent speeches, Tatyana hears gossip in secular living rooms. In the meeting, among the noise, the roar of music, Tatyana is carried away by a dream to her village, to flowers and alleys, to memories of him. She does not see anyone around, but some important general does not take her eyes off her ...
After more than two years in St. Petersburg, the lonely and silent Onegin appears at a social event. Again, he remains a stranger to society. People are ready to condemn everything strange and unusual, only mediocrity is up to them. And the one who, having got rid of unnecessary dreams, achieves fame, money and ranks in time, everyone recognizes " wonderful person". But it is sad to look at life as a ritual and obediently follow everyone. Onegin, having lived "without service, without a wife, without work" to the age of twenty-six, does not know what to do. He left the village, but he was tired of traveling. And now, having returned, he gets "from the ship to the ball."
Everyone's attention is attracted by the lady who appeared, accompanied by an important general. Although she can not be called beautiful, everything about her is sweet and simple, without the slightest bit of vulgarity. Evgeny's vague guesses are confirmed: this is the same Tatiana, now a princess. The prince introduces his friend Onegin to his wife. Eugene is embarrassed, Tatyana is completely calm.
The next day, having received an invitation from the prince, Onegin is looking forward to the evening in order to see Tatyana as soon as possible. But alone with her, he again feels awkward. Guests arrive. Onegin is occupied only by Tatyana. All people are like that: they are attracted only by the forbidden fruit. Not appreciating at one time the charm of the “gentle girl”, Eugene falls in love with the impregnable and majestic “legislator” of high society. He relentlessly follows the princess, but cannot get attention from her. In desperation, he writes a passionate message to Tatyana, where he justifies himself for his former coldness and begs for reciprocity. But Onegin does not receive an answer either to this or to other letters. When they meet, Tatyana is cold and does not notice him. Onegin locks himself in his office and begins to read, but his thoughts constantly take him to the past.
One spring morning, Onegin leaves his confinement and goes to Tatiana. The princess is alone reading a letter and quietly crying. Now you can recognize the former poor Tanya in her. Onegin falls at her feet. Tatyana, after a long silence, turns to Yevgeny: it is his turn to listen. Once he rejected the love of a humble girl. Why pursue her now? Is it because she is rich and noble that her disgrace would bring Onegin "seductive honor"? Tatyana is alien to splendor, brilliance secular life. She would be glad to give all this for a poor dwelling, for a garden where she first met Onegin. But her fate is sealed. She had to yield to her mother's entreaties to get married. Tatyana confesses that she loves Onegin. And yet he must leave her. “But I am given to another; I will be faithful to him for a century, ”she leaves with these words. Eugene is amazed. Suddenly, Tatiana's husband appears ...
And here is my hero
In a bad moment for him,
Reader, we will now leave,
For a long time... forever.
Eugene Onegin. Pushkin's illustration. With a few strokes of the pen, the type, character is conveyed and a hint of Byron is made. Only a person with all the makings of a professional artist can draw like that.
"Eugene Onegin", Pushkin's main work, is a poem about nothing. A young nobleman goes to the estate, the daughter of a neighbor landowner falls in love with him. The nobleman is indifferent to her. Out of boredom, he kills a friend in a duel and leaves for the city. After a few years, he meets a rejected girl, this is now a young wife wealthy man. The hero tries to court her, but is refused. All.
It is not interesting. Not just uninteresting, but mockingly uninteresting. This is the plot of "Count Nulin" and "The House in Kolomna" - elegant jokes, from the point of view of the content of the components with "Eugene Onegin" a kind of triptych. "Vanka is at home - Manka is not, Manka is at home - Vanka is not." But "Onegin" is a whole book, and "Nulin" and "House" together do not make even one chapter of the poem.
Even such an empty plot in Pushkin falls apart. The duel scene is unmotivated, it is the same insertion as the battle scene in Poltava, and even worse - the murder of Lensky should lead to the development of Onegin's character (the positive hero turns into a negative one), but this is not to tears. The author continues to admire "his Eugene".
Byron as a romantic poet. The real Byron resembled him just as Pushkin resembled Eugene Onegin.
Obviously, "Eugene Onegin" was written in imitation of Byron's "Don Juan", and from the point of view of the author's "I", the ironic style of narration and numerous digressions, this is undoubtedly true. But try to compare the content of two poems and you will start laughing in two minutes.
The action of Don Juan begins in Spain in the mid-18th century. The protagonist, almost a child, becomes the mother's friend's lover, and, caught by her husband in the bedroom, flees on a ship to Italy. The ship is wrecked, the passengers and crew perish, and the young Don Juan is thrown onto the deserted coast. He is found there by the beautiful Hyde, the daughter of a Greek pirate, and falls in love. But soon their father discovers them, captivates Don Juan and takes them to Constantinople to the slave market. The girl is dying of boredom. In Constantinople, the hero of the poem changes into a woman's dress and ends up in the Sultan's harem, where he falls in love with the beautiful Georgian woman Duda. Exposed, he, together with a fellow sufferer, an English officer, fled to Izmail, where Suvorov was conducting military operations against the Turks. Don Juan shows miracles of heroism, saves a five-year-old Turkish girl from the clutches of angry Cossacks, receives a Russian order and is sent by Suvorov to St. Petersburg with a victorious report. Here he, it was, becomes Catherine's favorite, but soon leaves for London as a Russian envoy.
Illustration for "Don Juan". Favorite scene of the English: decide who is.
A young man is found on the shore by charming Greek women. Somewhere about it already wrote, and for a long time.
By the absence of events, "Eugene Onegin" is similar to Byron's comic poem "Beppo". The action of the poem takes place in Venice, a noble townswoman's husband disappears without a trace, she finds herself a permanent lover. But many years pass, and the husband appears in the form of a Turkish merchant. It turns out he was kidnapped by pirates, he converted to Islam, got rich and fled. As if nothing had happened, his wife begins to flirt with him, asking if he has a harem, if an oriental robe interferes with him, etc. The "merchant" shaves off his beard and becomes her husband again. And a friend of a lover. At the same time, all adventures remain behind the scenes. Tru-la-la.
But “Beppo”, like “The House in Kolomna”, is a very small thing, and Byron never attached serious importance to it (which would be strange).
There is a whole trend among Pushkin's illustrators that imitates the poet's sketches. The beginning of this tradition was laid by the artist Nikolai Vasilyevich Kuzmin, whose illustrations for "Eugene Onegin" were awarded a gold medal at the world exhibition in Paris in 1937.
Some consolation to the literary criticism of "Eugene Onegin" could serve as a satirical orientation of the poem. But neither is she. Also to tears. Byron's Don Juan, as it was written, began to degenerate into satirical work- when the story reached the shores of the foggy homeland of the author. That is, at the moment at which I stopped the retelling of the content of the poem above. After that, the development of the plot slows down, and the author begins to itch:
“There were two talented lawyers here,
Irish and Scottish by birth, -
Very learned and very eloquent.
Tweed's son was Cato by courtesy;
Erin's son - with the soul of an idealist:
Like a brave horse, in a fit of inspiration
He reared up and "carried" something,
When the potato question came up.
The Scot spoke wisely and decorously;
The Irishman was dreamy and wild:
Sublime, whimsical, picturesque
His enthusiastic language sounded.
The Scot was like harpsichords;
The Irishman is like a rushing spring,
It rang, always disturbing and beautiful,
Aeolian harp sweet-voiced.
There is no "potato question" and polemics between the Baltic Germans and crests in "Eugene Onegin". Even at the very beginning of work on the poem, Pushkin wrote to one of his correspondents:
“No one respects Don Juan more than me… but it has nothing in common with Onegin. You talk about the satire of the Englishman Byron and compare it with mine, and demand the same from me! No, my soul, you want a lot. Where is my satire? there is no mention of her in "Eugene Onegin". My embankment would crackle if I touched satire. The very word "satirical" should not be in the preface.
("Embankment" is the center of St. Petersburg, that is Winter Palace and the government. The word "satirical" is present in the preface, anonymously written by Pushkin himself, but in quotation marks of irony - see below.)
In this context, Belinsky declared (8 years after Pushkin's death) that "Eugene Onegin" is an "encyclopedia of Russian life":
“In his poem, he was able to touch on so many things, to hint about so many things, that he belongs exclusively to the world of Russian nature, to the world of Russian society! "Onegin" can be called an encyclopedia of Russian life and in the highest degree folk art».
"Encyclopedia of hints" - strong word! The famous "eleven articles on the writings of Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin" are very detailed and endlessly fragmented philosophies of a village teacher. It is not clear “why and who needs this”, because the vocation of village teachers is to teach village children, and manuals for village teachers are written by city professors, but Belinsky is not such a fool. In his articles one can find (if desired) some common sense, especially when he writes about his own, rural. But the long-winded and childishly meticulous author does not confirm his thesis “about the encyclopedia”.
However, the "encyclopedia" was very liked by the Russian "critical mass" and went into growth like a dough.
Another amazing fragment from Belinsky's articles:
“Pushkin’s great feat was that he was the first in his novel to poetically reproduce the Russian society of that time and, in the person of Onegin and Lensky, showed its main, that is, the male side; but the feat of our poet is almost higher in that he was the first to poetically reproduce, in the person of Tatyana, a Russian woman.
Such monumentality is reminiscent of the beginning of the “Green Book” of the tragically deceased Arab enlightener: “A man is a man. A woman is also a person.
In fact, there is not only little action in Onegin, but the descriptions of this action are conditional and literary. Not only does the "encyclopedia" consist of five pages, not only are these pages filled not with articles, but with "hints", it is also "non-Russian".
Nabokov, in his commentary on Eugene Onegin, writes:
“We have before us not at all a “picture of Russian life”, at best, it is a picture depicting small group Russian people living in the second decade of the 19th century, having similarities with the more obvious characters of Western European novels and placed in a stylized Russia, which will immediately fall apart if the French props are removed and if the French scribes of English and German authors stop suggesting words to Russian-speaking heroes and heroines. Paradoxically, from the point of view of the translator, the only essential Russian element of the novel is precisely the speech, the language of Pushkin, flowing in waves and breaking through the poetic melody, the like of which Russia has not yet known.
And elsewhere in the same comments:
“Russian critics… over a century have accumulated the most boring heap of comments in the history of civilized mankind… thousands of pages were devoted to Onegin as a representative of something (he is both a typical “extra person”, and a metaphysical “dandy”, etc.)… And here is an image borrowed from books, but brilliantly rethought by a great poet, for whom life and a book were one, and placed by this poet in a brilliantly recreated environment, and played by this poet in a whole series of compositional situations - lyrical reincarnations, brilliant foolishness, literary parodies and etc., - is given out by Russian pedants (Nabokov probably wanted to say "gelerters") for sociological and historical phenomenon characteristic of the reign of Alexander I".
The problem (PROBLEM) of Belinsky is that he is not a writer. The basis of national literary criticism is the opinions of writers about each other, and, above all, the opinions of outstanding writers about each other. This is also followed by memoir literature (15%) and 15% of the work of textual critics and historians (which, at the very least, critics can be). As soon as critics close in on each other, they replace meaningful conversation with the production of ideological constructs. It's not that unnecessary, but simply "not there."
In the Russian history of literature, you will see many statements by Belinsky, Pisarev, Dobrolyubov, and so on, about writers, but very few statements by Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and so on. about each other. Obviously, this is not about that.
To this we can add that a much more interesting fact is not the statements of critics about professionals, but the statements of professionals about critics. Regarding Belinsky, Pushkin remarked through his teeth:
“If with independence of opinion and with his wit he would combine more learning, more erudition, more respect for tradition, more circumspection - in a word, more maturity, then we would have a very remarkable criticism in him.”
Belinsky, not being a writer, did not understand the compositional and stylistic tasks facing professional writers. For example, the fact that the “spleen”, “spleen” of the protagonist is a very beneficial literary device that allows you to make arbitrary movements of the character across the space of the work. Why did Chichikov travel around the province and meet with the landowners? He had a business - he bought up dead souls. But the simplest "case" is idleness and boredom. Chichikov could meet with Nozdrev, Sobakevich and Plyushkin (and thus give the reader the same periodic system of human types) "just like that." Not much would have changed.
Under the boredom of Onegin, the basis was summed up " extra person”, which did not find a worthy application in tsarist Russia. And why did you miss the "London dandy"? After all, England had a constitutional monarchy and a parliament.
Maybe it's just a "bored male", which, in fact, is conveyed by the then euphemisms "secular lion" and "secular tiger". And a Russian proverb about a cat and eggs.
It must be said that Nabokov talks quite a lot in his comments about the shortcomings of Pushkin's "hallocentrism", which leads to the fact that our poet looked at Byron's work through the cloudy glasses of mediocre translations.
But Pushkin's shortcoming in this case was also a virtue. Nabokov's Anglocentrism was normal in the era of the Anglo-French interwar, and provided a bonus in the era of post-war Anglo-Saxon dominance. But the world of Pushkin AND BYRON is equally gallocentric. If Nabokov sneers at Pushkin's ignorance of German and English, which forced him to read French translations, then the English and German authors of that time themselves, in turn, were colossally dependent on French literature.
Mentioning the "spleen" in his "Don Juan", Byron immediately refers to French origin term.
“So the men went hunting.
Hunting at a young age is ecstasy
And later - a sure remedy for spleen,
Idleness made it easier more than once.
French "ennui" ("boredom" - approx.) Not without a reason
So it took root in Britain with us;
Found a name in France
The yawns of our boring suffering.
So, what is the famous English spleen? Nothing but a PHYSICAL imitation of the insufficiently cultured islanders of the LITERARY RECEPTION of the developed French civilization.
Byron as a character in a French novel.
Or, - why be trifles, - Apollo. Oh, those little peoples! (In 1800, there were less than 9 million English people and they grew by leaps and bounds.)
But this is closer to the topic. Although here the red-faced esquire still tried to maintain an interesting pallor, and the features of obvious alcohol degradation were softened as much as possible.
In his youth, before the period of alcoholic maturity, Byron was a lame-footed, absent-minded student with a somewhat stupid face. Which, of course, does not detract from his poetic gift, as well as the miserable appearance of Alexander Sergeevich.
If the Georgians have been world champions in women's chess for a long time, the British have won their place among the trendsetters - for men. At the same time, the English "Coco Chanel" Handsome Brummel, whom the British still admire, was a syphilitic with a sunken nose and cleaned his boots with champagne.
In the same way, Byron's personal life is an imitation of the highly talented but also undereducated English botanist of the adventures of the main characters of contemporary French novels. But Benjamin Constant, for all his declared autobiography, did not look like the protagonist of his "Adolf", and in the same way Chateaubriand did not look like the hero of "Rene". The writer very rarely dances naked in the moonlight, although he constantly describes such dances in his works. Pushkin, following Byron, began to dance the hips, but quickly stopped - because he was more cultured, that is, in this case, he knew the culture of France better and felt it better.
Village teachers, in general, say the right things. Once such a teacher invented bis logarithmic tables. Eugene Onegin really was an "extra person", being the alter ego of an "extra poet" - Alexander Pushkin.
What is the reason for writing this work? What did the author mean by this? Nabokov believes that the reason is in the immanent properties of Pushkin's genius - but this is not a cause, but a consequence. Pushkin solved the artistic problem in the way he could solve it. The question is why this task was set.
With "Eugene Onegin" Pushkin sat on the floor and began to run his finger over his lips: blah blah, blah blah.
And it was done on purpose. Pushkin began to write specifically about nothing. The “House in Kolomna” and “Count Nulin” were written in the same way, and with the same IDEOLOGICAL pathos.
The meaning of "Onegin" is revealed in a rough draft of the preface to the first chapter. Pushkin writes:
“Let us be allowed to draw the attention of the most respectable public and gentlemen of journalists to a dignity that is still new in a satirical writer: the observation of strict decency in a comic description of morals. Juvenal, Petronius, Voltaire and Byron - not infrequently did not retain due respect for the reader and for the fair sex. They say that our ladies are beginning to read Russian. - We boldly offer them a work where they will find true and entertaining observations under a light veil of satirical gaiety. Another merit, almost equally important, which brings no small credit to our author's gentleness of heart, is the complete absence of offensive transition to personalities. For this should not be attributed solely to the paternal vigilance of our censorship, the guardian of morals, state tranquility, no matter how carefully guarding citizens from the attack of the ingenuous slander of mocking frivolity ... "
“Several songs or chapters of “Eugene Onegin” are already ready. Written under the influence of favorable circumstances, they bear the imprint of cheerfulness ... "
"Favorable Circumstances" is a reference that had an excellent effect on the good-naturedness of the author, who wrote a light, decent work that can be safely recommended to wives and daughters (a paraphrase of Piron's remark, made by him sincerely, but sounding mockingly in the mouth of a pornographic poet, about which Pushkin later wrote in one of the notes).
In other words, "Eugene Onegin" is a trifle for censorship, which is the only one able to allow such things to go into print, as well as a harsh and shrill, but still an apology from a teenager. This is a "correction" of Pushkin, who was exiled to the South for political epigrams, about which he speaks with foolishness in the draft of the preface.
Men's fashion of the Pushkin era. Its legislators were of course not the British, but the French. The British at the beginning of the 19th century carved out only a certain sector for themselves, and so far they have not advanced further than this ghetto. Which is also not bad - Russians or Germans do not have this either.
Probably in such a case, everything would have been limited to one or two or three chapters, but Pushkin (and the public) liked it, and he wrote great work. In general, the best of what they wrote.
And it didn't happen by accident either. Pushkin felt that the storyline was not very important for his poem. Moreover, due to the imitative nature of the work, it only interferes, for it turns free variations into dull rewriting (INEVITABLE at that level of Russian literary culture).
Oddly enough, it is the lack of action that makes Onegin so interesting to read. Imagine that the whole poem is written in the style of the destroyed "tenth chapter" (preserved in fragments). There it is smartly, witty and boldly written about history and politics, but this is mortal longing. (I believe that Alexander Sergeevich fully understood that the British humor of Byron and Stern would inevitably be replaced on Russian soil by furious rhymes.)
"Uninteresting plot" only enhances the true interest of Pushkin's main work. These are "cubes of the Russian language." Only these are not cubes for children, consisting of letters and syllables, but cubes for teenagers and even adults - cubes of phrases, feelings, comparisons, rhymes. "Eugene Onegin" is the Iliad of the Russian literary language, what the modern Russian language is made of. Reading "Onegin", memorizing it by heart is a real pleasure.
"More cupids, devils, snakes
They jump and make noise on the stage;
More tired lackeys
They sleep on fur coats at the entrance;
Haven't stopped stomping yet
Blow your nose, cough, hiss, clap;
Still outside and inside
Lanterns are shining everywhere;
Still, vegetating, the horses are fighting,
Bored with your harness,
And the coachmen, around the lights,
Scold the gentlemen and beat in the palm -
And Onegin went out;
He's going home to get dressed."
All this is spoken, thought through, felt, seen and heard (correct the mistake in the verb yourself). Imagine that you do not know the Russian language and suddenly you are given an injection of its perfect knowledge. And you begin to speak Russian, hear and understand Russian speech. Feel its phonetics, rhythm, style. Or some mind was given a human body, and it starts hissing, clapping, jumping, stomping and jumping on one leg - everything is so cool, dexterous and unusual. That is why the study of "Eugene Onegin" is the pinnacle of foreign knowledge of the Russian language, and that is why foreigners who have mastered the Russian language rejoice in "Eugene Onegin" so much.
There are a lot of illustrations for "Eugene Onegin", and what happens quite rarely, there are many successful ones among them. This is a drawing by Samokish-Sudkovskaya, an artist of the late 19th century. She was reproached for "excessive prettiness", but after all, "Onegin" is largely REAL female romance and female illustrations are quite appropriate here. A thought that would have driven Nabokov (a teacher of literature at a women's college) into a frenzy.
And of course, why "Eugene Onegin" in translation is completely incomprehensible. This should be asked of the eccentric Nabokov. Of course, it was very interesting for a bilingual prose writer and poet to translate, this is clear. But then ... Nobody read the Nabokov translation - like everyone else.
But there is something else in Onegin. Otherwise, Russian culture would be bent and torn to Croatia or Poland. This is the "other" quality that I drew attention to when speaking about the structure of Pushkin's "Monument": PHILOLOGICAL EXCESSENCE.
Even the first lines of "Eugene Onegin" for a complete understanding require comments on several pages.
"My uncle of the most honest rules,
When I fell ill in earnest,
He forced himself to respect
And I couldn't think of a better one."
The first line is a hidden quote from Krylov's fable "The Donkey and the Man": "The donkey had the most honest rules." The donkey, hired to guard the cabbage in the garden, did not touch it, but chasing the crows, crushed it with its hooves. That is, uncle is an honest fool, a simpleton.
(Sometimes it is believed that the expression “I forced myself to respect” is not only Gallicism, but also a euphemism meaning death: “I forced everyone to stand up”, “I forced me to take off my hat”, “I forced me to honor my memory.” This is not true, since at the end of the chapter indicates that Onegin is going to a dying, but not yet dead relative.)
In addition, the entire quatrain is a direct imitation of the first chapter of Don Juan, which refers to the protagonist's uncle:
“The late Don José was a nice fellow…
He died without leaving a will
And Juan became the heir to everything ... "
The beginning of "Eugene Onegin" is zakovykanny, this is a transfer not even of words, but of the thoughts of the protagonist:
"Thus thought the young rake,
Flying in the dust on postage,
By the will of Zeus
Heir to all his relatives."
But a strange thing, if you do not know the philological context of the first quatrain, it will of course be read incorrectly, but this still will not affect the general meaning.
If you know the context, Pushkin wrote: “Yevgeny believes that his uncle is a straightforward fool, who foolishly (that is, suddenly) fell ill with a fatal illness and gave hope for an early inheritance.
If you don’t know the context, then the following is written: “Eugene considers his uncle a highly moral person who demands the same high qualities from relatives and makes them take care of their health.”
The continuation of the stanza puts everything in its place in both cases:
“His example to others is science;
But my god, what a bore
With the sick to sit day and night,
Not leaving a single step away!
What low deceit
Amuse the half-dead
Fix his pillows
Sad to give medicine
Sigh and think to yourself:
When will the devil take you!
Both the "bad uncle" and the "good uncle" infuriate the nephew equally.
And here is an illustration that Alexander Sergeevich would undoubtedly like very much. After all, this is his 3D sketch of Onegin.
The first stanza of "Eugene Onegin" imitates Byron's poems, but at the same time relies on national tradition(still very frail). It is also ambiguous, but this ambiguity spares the inattentive reader.
The whole poem is written in a similar vein. Commentaries (underlined incomplete) Nabokov to this work amounted to a thousand pages. This piece is intricate and very well thought out. Dreams and predictions of Tatyana foresee the further development of the plot, the scene of the murder of Lensky and last meeting Onegin and Tatyana occur as if in a dream (in parallel reality). Tatyana's firm "no" does not look at all as firm as it seems, and of course, in general, "Onegin" is the same super-literary work as Cervantes' "Don Quixote", all built on allusions to a huge layer of chivalric novels. In this case, these are love stories of the 18th and early 19th centuries.
From the point of view of a literary critic, "Eugene Onegin" is an unthinkable synthesis of borrowings and originality. This is the devil's box...
"Eugene Onegin" creates the illusion of a huge literary tradition. Starting from THIS starting point, the Russians AS LIKE began their serious literature not from the beginning of the 19th century, but at least a hundred years earlier. Pushkin destroyed the cultural odds of the Europeans. Whereas the real tradition - and "tradition" is primarily a living fabric of literary controversy - arose after the death of Pushkin.
Thanks to this strange circumstance, Russian culture turns out to be autonomous (circular). She can grow on her own. At the beginning of the 20th century, it was brushed off the planet, and at the end of the 20th, the crumbs also disappeared - as if it were not there. What has changed in the world? Nothing. In eternity, everything that was Russian, of course, remained. But living life...
And what would have happened if in 1917 the entire Western civilization had been wiped off the planet? And also nothing - the Russians would have had enough of themselves to continue to exist. There would be no degeneration. Even the destruction after 1917 took the Russians three generations of humiliation and murder to finally shut up.
Such completeness and autonomy is already contained in Pushkin (of course, in a potential form). By the way, some segments of his world did not turn around further, having dried up.
In conclusion of this chapter, I would advise reading "Eugene Onegin" to those who did not read it in adulthood or did not learn at least a few stanzas in childhood.
First, you will see the language you speak in its virginal purity. This language was created by Pushkin, and "Eugene Onegin" is the main work of the poet and a work in maximum degree which served as the basis of modern Russian vocabulary.
Secondly, - especially for people prone to intellectual abstractions - you will see how easily and how perfectly in our language it is possible to speak two-, three- and even four-meanings, revealing gradually, and maybe never, but at the same time disrupting the general train of thought.
Comparing La Fontaine (a fabulist, not a prose writer) with Krylov, Pushkin noted that despite the fact that, of course, Krylov imitates the famous Frenchman, there is a significant difference between them. La Fontaine, like all Frenchmen, is simple-hearted (straightforward, clear), and Krylov, like all Russians, has a "merry cunning of the mind."
Or, as the seminarian Klyuchevsky rudely said, both Great Russians and Ukrainians are deceivers. Only Ukrainians like to pretend to be smart, and Russians are fools.
In the end, the first graduation of the Alexander Lyceum produced two great people: the great poet Alexander Pushkin and the great diplomat Alexander Gorchakov.
Gorchakov. Pushkin's drawing.
The first Russian novel in verse. A new model of literature as an easy conversation about everything. Gallery of eternal Russian characters. Revolutionary for its era, a love story that has become the archetype of romantic relationships for many generations to come. Encyclopedia of Russian life. Our everything.
comments: Igor Pilshchikov
What is this book about?
The capital's rake Eugene Onegin, having received an inheritance, leaves for the village, where he meets the poet Lensky, his bride Olga and her sister Tatyana. Tatyana falls in love with Onegin, but he does not reciprocate her feelings. Lensky, jealous of the bride for a friend, challenges Onegin to a duel and dies. Tatyana marries and becomes a high society lady. Now Eugene falls in love with her, but Tatyana remains faithful to her husband. At this point, the author interrupts the narrative - "the novel ends nothing» 1 Belinsky V. G. complete collection compositions. In 13 volumes. M., L.: Publishing House of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, 1953-1959. IV. C. 425. .
Although the plot of "Eugene Onegin" is not rich in events, the novel had a huge impact on Russian literature. Pushkin brought socio-psychological characters to the forefront of literature, which will occupy readers and writers of several subsequent generations. This is an “extra person”, an (anti)hero of his time, hiding his true face behind the mask of a cold egoist (Onegin); a naive provincial girl, honest and open, ready for self-sacrifice (Tatiana at the beginning of the novel); a poet-dreamer who perishes at the first encounter with reality (Lensky); Russian woman, the embodiment of grace, intelligence and aristocratic dignity (Tatiana at the end of the novel). This, finally, is a whole gallery of characterological portraits representing Russian noble society in all its diversity (the cynic Zaretsky, Larina's "old men", provincial landowners, Moscow bars, metropolitan dandies and many, many others).
Alexander Pushkin. Around 1830
Hulton Archive/Getty Images
When was it written?
The first two chapters and the beginning of the third were written in the "southern exile" (in Chisinau and Odessa) from May 1823 to July 1824. Pushkin is skeptical and critical of the existing order of things. The first chapter is a satire on the modern nobility; at the same time, Pushkin himself, like Onegin, behaves provocatively and dresses like a dandy. Odessa and (to a lesser extent) Moldovan impressions are reflected in the first chapter of the novel and in Onegin's Journey.
The central chapters of the novel (from the third to the sixth) ended in the "northern exile" (in the Pskov family estate- the village of Mikhailovsky) from August 1824 to November 1826. Pushkin experienced (and described in chapter four) the boredom of life in the countryside, where in winter there is no entertainment other than books, drinking and sleigh rides. The main pleasure is communication with neighbors (for Pushkin, this is the Osipov-Wulf family, who lived in the Trigorskoye estate not far from Mikhailovsky). The heroes of the novel spend their time in the same way.
The new Emperor Nicholas I returned the poet from exile. Now Pushkin constantly visits Moscow and St. Petersburg. He is a "superstar", the most fashionable poet in Russia. The seventh (Moscow) chapter, begun in August-September 1827, was completed and rewritten on November 4, 1828.
But the age of fashion is short-lived, and by 1830 Pushkin's popularity is coming to naught. Having lost the attention of his contemporaries, in the three months of the Boldin autumn (September - November 1830) he wrote dozens of works that made him famous among his descendants. Among other things, in the Nizhny Novgorod family estate of the Pushkins, Boldin, Onegin's Journey and the eighth chapter of the novel were completed, and the so-called tenth chapter of Eugene Onegin was partially written and burned.
Almost a year later, on October 5, 1831, Onegin's letter was written in Tsarskoye Selo. The book is ready. In the future, Pushkin only rearranges the text and edits individual stanzas.
Pushkin's office in the museum-estate "Mikhailovskoe"
How is it written?
"Eugene Onegin" concentrates the main thematic and stylistic finds of the previous creative decade: the type of a disappointed hero is reminiscent of romantic elegies and the poem "Prisoner of the Caucasus", a fragmentary plot - about it and other "southern" ("Byronic") Pushkin's poems, stylistic contrasts and the author's irony - about the poem "Ruslan and Lyudmila", colloquial intonation - about friendly poetic messages Arzamas poets "Arzamas" - a literary circle that existed in St. Petersburg in 1815-1818. Its members were both poets and writers (Pushkin, Zhukovsky, Batyushkov, Vyazemsky, Kavelin) and politicians. Arzamas opposed conservative politics and archaic literary traditions. Relations within the circle were friendly, and the meetings were like fun gatherings. For Arzamas poets, the favorite genre was a friendly message, an ironic poem full of allusions understandable only to the recipients. .
For all that, the novel is absolutely anti-traditional. The text has neither a beginning (the ironic "introduction" is at the end of the seventh chapter), nor an end: the open ending is followed by excerpts from Onegin's Journey, returning the reader first to the middle of the plot, and then, in the last line, to the moment the work began. the author over the text (“So I lived then in Odessa...”). The novel lacks the traditional features of a novel plot and familiar characters: “All types and forms of literature are naked, openly revealed to the reader and ironically compared with each other, the conventionality of any mode of expression is mockingly demonstrated. author" 2 Lotman Yu. M. Pushkin: Biography of the writer. Articles and notes (1960-1990). "Eugene Onegin": Commentary. St. Petersburg: Art-SPb, 1995. C. 195. . The question "how to write?" excites Pushkin no less than the question "what to write about?". The answer to both questions is "Eugene Onegin". This is not only a novel, but also a metanovel (a novel about how a novel is written).
Now I'm not writing a novel, but a novel in verse - a diabolical difference
Alexander Pushkin
The poetic form helps Pushkin to do without an exciting plot ("... now I am not writing a novel, but a novel in verse - a diabolical difference" 3 Pushkin A.S. Complete Works. In 16 volumes. M., L.: Publishing House of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, 1937-1949. T.13. C. 73. ). A special role in the construction of the text is acquired by the narrator, who, with his constant presence, motivates countless deviations from the main intrigue. It is customary to call such digressions lyrical, but in reality they turn out to be very different - lyrical, satirical, literary-polemical, whatever. The author talks about everything he sees fit (“The novel requires chatter" 4 Pushkin A.S. Complete Works. In 16 volumes. M., L.: Publishing House of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, 1937-1949. T. 13. C. 180. ) - and the narrative moves with an almost motionless plot.
Pushkin's text is characterized by a plurality of points of view expressed by the narrator and characters, and a stereoscopic combination of contradictions that arise during a collision. different views for the same subject. Is Eugene original or imitative? What future awaited Lensky - great or mediocre? All these questions in the novel are given different, and mutually exclusive answers. “Behind such a construction of the text lay the idea of the fundamental incompatibility of life in literature,” and the open ending symbolized “the inexhaustibility of possibilities and endless variability reality" 5 Lotman Yu. M. Pushkin: Biography of the writer. Articles and notes (1960-1990). "Eugene Onegin": Commentary. St. Petersburg: Art-SPb, 1995. C. 196. . This was an innovation: romantic era the points of view of the author and the narrator usually merged into a single lyrical "I", while other points of view were corrected by the author's.
Onegin is a radically innovative work not only in terms of composition but also in style. In his poetics, Pushkin synthesized the fundamental features of two antagonistic literary movements of the early 19th century - Young Karamzinism and Young Archaism. The first direction focused on the average style and colloquial speech of an educated society, was open to new European borrowings. The second united high and low styles, relied, on the one hand, on book-church literature and odic literature. tradition XVIII century, on the other hand, on folk literature. Giving preference to one or another linguistic means, the mature Pushkin was not guided by external aesthetic standards, but made his choice based on how these means work within the framework of a specific plan. The novelty and unusualness of Pushkin's style struck contemporaries - and we have become accustomed to it since childhood and often do not feel stylistic contrasts, and even more so stylistic nuances. Rejecting the a priori division of stylistic registers into "low" and "high", Pushkin not only created a fundamentally new aesthetics, but also solved the most important cultural task - the synthesis language styles and the creation of a new national literary language.
Joshua Reynolds. Lawrence Stern. 1760. National portrait gallery, London. Pushkin borrowed the tradition of long lyrical digressions from Stern and Byron.
Calderdale Metropolitan Borough Council
Richard Westall. George Gordon Byron. 1813 National Portrait Gallery, London
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What influenced her?
"Eugene Onegin" relied on the broadest European cultural tradition from French psychological prose of the 17th-18th centuries to contemporary Pushkin romantic poem, including the experiments of parody literature, "deleting" Detachment is a literary technique that turns familiar things and events into strange ones, as if seen for the first time. Detachment allows you to perceive what is described not automatically, but more consciously. The term was introduced by literary critic Viktor Shklovsky. literary style (from French and Russian iroikocomic Heroic poetry is a parody of epic poetry: everyday life with drinking parties and fights is described in a high calm. Among the characteristic examples of Russian heroic poems are Elisha, or the Irritated Bacchus by Vasily Maikov, Dangerous Neighbor by Vasily Pushkin. And burlesque In burlesque poetry comic effect is based on the fact that epic heroes and gods speak in a rude and vulgar language. If initially iroikomic poetry, where the low was spoken of in a high style, was opposed to burlesque, then to XVIII century both types of poetry were perceived as one humorous genre. poetry to Byron's "Don Juan") and storytelling (from Stern to Hoffmann and the same Byron). Eugene Onegin inherited the playful clash of styles and parody of elements from irocomics. heroic epic(such, for example, is the “introduction”, imitating the beginning of the classical epic). From Stern and Sternians Laurence Sterne (1713-1768), English writer of the novels sentimental journey in France and Italy, and The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. They call it sternianism literary tradition, which his novels laid down: in Stern's texts, lyricism is combined with ironic skepticism, the chronology of the narrative and its coherence are violated. In Russian literature, the most famous Sternian work is Karamzin's Letters from a Russian Traveler. rearranged chapters and omitted stanzas, incessant distraction from the main plot thread, a game with a traditional plot structure are inherited: there is no outset and denouement, and the Sternian-style ironic “introduction” is transferred to chapter seven. From Stern and from Byron - lyrical digressions, occupying almost half of the novel's text.
Initially, the novel was published serially, chapter by chapter - from 1825 to 1832. In addition to entire chapters that were published as separate books, teasers, as we would say now, appeared in almanacs, magazines and newspapers - small fragments of the novel (from several stanzas to a dozen pages).
The first consolidated edition of Eugene Onegin was published in 1833. The last lifetime edition (“Eugene Onegin, a novel in verse. Composition by Alexander Pushkin. Third edition”) was published in January 1837, a week and a half before the death of the poet.
"Eugene Onegin", second edition of the 1st chapter. St. Petersburg, printing house of the Department of Public Education, 1829
"Onegin" ("Onegin"). Directed by Martha Fiennes. USA, UK, 1999
How was it received?
In different ways, including in the immediate environment of the poet. In 1828, Baratynsky wrote to Pushkin: “We have published two more Onegin songs. Everyone talks about them in his own way: some praise, others scold, and everyone reads. I am very fond of the extensive plan of your Onegin; but most do not understand it. The best critics wrote about the "emptiness of the content" of the novel ( Ivan Kireevsky Ivan Vasilyevich Kireevsky (1806-1856) was a religious philosopher and literary critic. In 1832, he published the journal European, which was banned by the authorities because of an article by Kireevsky himself. Gradually departs from Westernist views to Slavophilism, however, the conflict with the authorities is repeated - in 1852, because of his article, the Slavophile edition of the Moscow Collection was closed. Kireevsky's philosophy is based on the doctrine of "integral thinking", which surpasses the incompleteness of rational logic: it is achieved primarily by faith and asceticism. ), declared that this “brilliant toy” could not have “claims either to the unity of content, or to the integrity of the composition, or to the harmony of presentation” (Nikolai Nadezhdin), found in the novel “lack of connection and plan” ( Boris Fedorov Boris Mikhailovich Fedorov (1794-1875) - poet, playwright, children's writer. He worked as a theater censor, wrote literary reviews. His own poems and dramas were not successful. He often became the hero of epigrams, a mention of him can be found in Pushkin: “Perhaps, Fedorov, don’t come to me, / Don’t put me to sleep - or don’t wake me up later.” It's funny that one of Fedorov's quatrains was mistakenly attributed to Pushkin until the 1960s. ), “a lot of continuous deviations from the main subject” was considered “tedious” (aka) in it, and, finally, they came to the conclusion that the poet “repeats himself” (Nikolay Polevoy) Nikolai Alekseevich Polevoy (1796-1846) - literary critic, publisher, writer. It is considered the ideologist of the "third estate". Introduced the term "journalism". From 1825 to 1834 he published the Moscow Telegraph magazine, after the magazine was closed by the authorities Political Views Field become more conservative. Since 1841 he has been publishing the journal Russkiy vestnik. , and the last chapters mark the "perfect fall" of Pushkin's talent (Faddeus Bulgarin) Faddey Venediktovich Bulgarin (1789-1859) - critic, writer and publisher, the most odious figure in the literary process of the first half of XIX century. In his youth, Bulgarin fought in the Napoleonic detachment and even participated in the campaign against Russia, but by the mid-1820s he became an ultra-conservative and, in addition, an agent of the Third Section. He published the journal "Northern Archive", the first private newspaper with a political department "Northern Bee" and the first theatrical almanac "Russian Thalia". Bulgarin's novel "Ivan Vyzhigin" - one of the first Russian picaresque novels - was a resounding success at the time of publication. .
In general, “Onegin” was received in such a way that Pushkin abandoned the idea of continuing the novel: he “rolled up the rest of it to one chapter, and responded to the claims of the Zoils with “The House in Kolomna”, the whole pathos of which lies in the assertion of the absolute freedom of the creative will" 6 Shapir M. I. Articles about Pushkin. M.: Languages of Slavic cultures, 2009. S. 192. .
One of the first "tremendous historical and social significance" of "Eugene Onegin" realized Belinsky 7 Belinsky VG Complete Works. In 13 volumes. M., L.: Publishing House of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, 1953-1959. T. 7. C. 431. . In the 8th and 9th articles (1844-1845) of the so-called Pushkin cycle (formally, it was a very detailed review of the first posthumous edition of Pushkin's works), he puts forward and substantiates the thesis that "Onegin" is a picture poetically true to reality. Russian society into a well-known era" 8 Belinsky VG Complete Works. In 13 volumes. M., L.: Publishing House of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, 1953-1959. T. 7. C. 445. , and therefore "Onegin" can be called an encyclopedia of Russian life and highly popular work" 9 Belinsky VG Complete Works. In 13 volumes. M., L.: Publishing House of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, 1953-1959. C. 503. .
Twenty years later, the ultra-left radical Dmitry Pisarev in his article “Pushkin and Belinsky” (1865) called for a radical revision of this concept: according to Pisarev, Lensky is a meaningless “idealist and romantic”, Onegin “remains the most insignificant vulgarity” from the beginning to the end of the novel, Tatyana - just a fool (in her head, “the amount of brain was very small” and “this small amount was in the most deplorable condition" 10 Pisarev D. I. Complete collection of works and letters in 12 volumes. M.: Nauka, 2003. T. 7. C. 225, 230, 252. ). Conclusion: instead of working, the heroes of the novel are engaged in nonsense. Pisarevskoe reading of "Onegin" ridiculed Dmitry Minaev Dmitry Dmitrievich Minaev (1835-1889) - satirist poet, translator of Byron, Heine, Hugo, Molière. Minaev gained fame thanks to his parodies and feuilletons, was the leading author of the popular satirical magazines Iskra and Alarm Clock. In 1866, due to cooperation with the magazines Sovremennik and Russkoye Slovo, he spent four months in the Peter and Paul Fortress. in the brilliant parody "Eugene Onegin of Our Time" (1865), where the protagonist is presented as a bearded nihilist - something like Turgenev's Bazarov.
A decade and a half later, Dostoevsky, in his "Pushkin's speech" Dostoevsky delivers a speech about Pushkin in 1880 at a meeting of the Society of Lovers of Russian Literature, her main thesis was the idea of the poet’s nationality: “And never before, not a single Russian writer, either before or after him, has united so sincerely and kindly with his people, like Pushkin. With a preface and additions, the speech was published in the Writer's Diary. (1880) put forward a third (conditionally "soil") interpretation of the novel. Dostoevsky agrees with Belinsky that in "Eugene Onegin" "real Russian life is embodied with such creative power and with such completeness, which has not happened before Pushkin" 11 Dostoevsky F. M. Writer's Diary. 1880, August. Chapter two. Pushkin (essay). Pronounced on June 8 at a meeting of the Society of Lovers of Russian Literature // Dostoevsky F. M. Collected Works in 15 volumes. St. Petersburg: Nauka, 1995, vol. 14, p. 429. . Just as for Belinsky, who believed that Tatyana embodies "the type of Russian women" 12 Belinsky VG Complete Works. In 13 volumes. M., L.: Publishing House of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, 1953-1959. T. 4. C. 503. , Tatyana for Dostoevsky - “this is a positive type, not a negative one, this is a type of positive beauty, this is the apotheosis of a Russian woman”, “this is a solid type, standing firmly on its own soil. She is deeper than Onegin and, of course, smarter. his" 13 . Unlike Belinsky, Dostoevsky believed that Onegin was not suitable for heroes at all: “Maybe Pushkin would have done even better if he had called his poem after Tatyana, and not Onegin, for it is undeniable that she main character poems" 14 Dostoevsky F. M. Writer's Diary. 1880, August. Chapter two. Pushkin (essay). Pronounced on June 8 at a meeting of the Society of Lovers of Russian Literature // Dostoevsky F. M. Collected Works in 15 volumes. St. Petersburg: Nauka, 1995, vol. 14, p. 430. .
Excerpts from "Onegin" began to be included in educational anthologies as early as 1843 of the year 15 Vdovin A. V., Leibov R. G. Pushkin at school: curriculum and literary canon in the 19th century // Lotman collection 4. M .: OGI, 2014. P. 251. . By the end of the 19th century, a gymnasium canon was formed that singled out the “main” works of art of the 1820s and 1840s: Woe from Wit, Eugene Onegin, A Hero of Our Time and Dead Souls occupy an obligatory place in this series. Soviet school programs in this regard, they continue the pre-revolutionary tradition - only the interpretation varies, but it is ultimately based one way or another on the concept of Belinsky. And the landscape-calendar fragments of "Onegin" are memorized from the elementary grades as actually independent, ideologically neutral and aesthetically exemplary works ("Winter! The peasant, triumphant ...", "Chased by spring rays ...", "Already the sky breathed autumn. .." and etc.).
How did Onegin influence Russian literature?
"Eugene Onegin" is quickly becoming one of the key texts of Russian literature. The problematics, plot moves and narrative devices of many Russian novels and short stories directly go back to Pushkin's novel: the protagonist as an "extra person" who does not have the opportunity to find application in life for his remarkable talents; a heroine morally superior to the protagonist; contrasting "pairing" of characters; even the duel in which the hero gets involved. This is all the more striking because "Eugene Onegin" is a "novel in verse", and in Russia since the mid-1840s a half-century era of prose has begun.
Belinsky also noted that “Eugene Onegin” had “a huge influence both on modern ... and on subsequent Russian literature" 16 Belinsky VG Complete Works. In 13 volumes. M., L.: Publishing House of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, 1953-1959. T. 4. S. 501. . Onegin, like Lermontov's Pechorin, is "a hero of our time", and vice versa, Pechorin is "this is the Onegin of our time" 17 Belinsky VG Complete Works. In 13 volumes. M., L.: Publishing House of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, 1953-1959. T. 4. C. 265. . Lermontov openly points to this continuity with the help of anthroponymy: the name Pechorin is formed from the name of the northern river Pechora, just like the names of the antipodes Onegin and Lensky - from the names of the northern rivers Onega and Lena located very far from one another.
Behind this construction of the text lay the idea of the fundamental incompatibility of life in literature.
Yuri Lotman
Moreover, the plot of "Eugene Onegin" clearly influenced Lermontov's "Princess Mary". According to Viktor Vinogradov, “Pushkin's heroes were replaced by the heroes of modern times.<...>A descendant of Onegin - Pechorin is corroded by reflection. He is no longer able to surrender even to a belated feeling of love for a woman with that immediate passion, like Onegin. Pushkin's Tanya was replaced by Vera, who nevertheless cheated on her husband, indulging in Pechorin" 18 Vinogradov VV Style of Lermontov's prose // Literary heritage. M.: Publishing House of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, 1941. T. 43/44. S. 598. . Two pairs of heroes and heroines (Onegin and Lensky; Tatyana and Olga) correspond to two similar pairs (Pechorin and Grushnitsky; Vera and Princess Mary); there is a duel between the characters. Turgenev reproduces a somewhat similar set of characters in Fathers and Sons (antagonists Pavel Kirsanov and Yevgeny Bazarov; sisters Katerina Lokteva and Anna Odintsova), but the duel acquires an openly travesty character. Raised in "Eugene Onegin" the theme of "superfluous man" runs through all the most important works Turgenev, who, in fact, owns this term (“The Diary of a Superfluous Man”, 1850).
"Eugene Onegin" is the first Russian metanovel that created a special tradition. In the novel "What to do?" Chernyshevsky discusses how to find a plot for a novel and build its composition, and Chernyshevsky's parodic "insightful reader" vividly resembles Pushkin's "noble reader", to whom the author-narrator ironically addresses. Nabokov's "Gift" is a novel about the poet Godunov-Cherdyntsev, who composes poetry, wanting to write like Pushkin, whom he idolizes, and at the same time is forced to work on a biography of Chernyshevsky, whom he hates. In Nabokov, just as later in Pasternak's novel Doctor Zhivago, poetry is written by a hero who is not equal to the author - a prose writer and a poet. Similarly, in Eugene Onegin, Pushkin writes a poem by Lensky: it is a parody poem written in the poetics of Lensky (the character) and not Pushkin (the author).
What is the "Onegin stanza"?
All Pushkin's poems written before 1830 were written astronomical iambic Not divided into stanzas. . The exception is Onegin, the first major work in which the poet tried a strict strophic form.
Each stanza "remembers" its previous uses: the octave inevitably refers to the Italian poetic tradition, Spenserian stanza A nine-line stanza: eight verses in it are written in iambic pentameter, and the ninth - in six-meter. It is named after the English poet Edmund Spenser, who introduced this stanza into poetic practice. - to English. Apparently, therefore, Pushkin did not want to use the ready-made strophic structure: unusual content requires an unusual form.
For his main work, Pushkin invented a unique stanza that had no direct precedents in world poetry. Here is the formula written down by the author himself: “4 croisés, 4 de suite, 1.2.1. et deux". That is: quatrain cross rhyming, The most used type of rhyme in quatrains, lines rhyme through one (abab). quatrain adjacent rhyme, Here adjacent lines rhyme: the first with the second, the third with the fourth (aabb). This type of rhyming is most common in Russian folk poetry. quatrain encircling rhyme In this case, the first line rhymes with the fourth, and the second with the third (abba). The first and fourth lines, as it were, encircle the quatrain. and the final couplet. Possible strophic patterns: one of the varieties odic A stanza of ten lines, the lines are divided into three parts: in the first - four lines, in the second and third - three each. The way of rhyming is abab ccd eed. As the name implies, in Russian poetry it was used primarily for writing odes. stanzas 19 Sperantov VV Miscellanea poetologica: 1. Was there a book. Shalikov the inventor of the "Onegin stanza"? // Philologica. 1996. Vol. 3. No. 5/7. pp. 125-131. C. 126-128. And sonnet 20 Grossman L.P. Onegin stanza // Pushkin / Ed. N. K. Piksanova. Moscow: Gosizdat, 1924. Sat. 1. S. 125-131. .
The novel requires chatter
Alexander Pushkin
The first rhyme of the stanza female Rhyme with stress on the penultimate syllable. , final - male Rhyme with stress on the last syllable. . Female rhyming pairs do not follow female ones, male rhyming pairs do not follow male ones (alternance rule). Size - iambic tetrameter, the most common metric form in the poetic culture of Pushkin's time.
Formal rigor only sets off the expressiveness and flexibility of poetic speech: “Often the first quatrain sets the theme of the stanza, the second develops it, the third forms a thematic turn, and the couplet gives a clearly formulated resolution. Topics" 21 . The final couplets often contain witticisms and thus resemble brief epigrams. At the same time, you can follow the development of the plot by reading only the first quatrains 22 Tomashevsky B.V. The tenth chapter of "Eugene Onegin": The history of the solution // Literary heritage. M.: Zhur.-gaz. Association, 1934. T. 16/18. pp. 379-420. C. 386. .
Against the backdrop of such strict regulation, retreats stand out effectively. Firstly, these are interspersed with other metrical forms: the characters' letters to each other, written in iambic tetrameter astrophic, and the girls' song, written in trochaic trimeter with dactylic endings Rhyme with stress on the third syllable from the end. . Secondly, these are the rarest (and therefore very expressive) pairs of stanzas, where a phrase that begins in one stanza ends in the next. For example, in chapter three:
Tatyana jumped into another hallway,
From the porch to the yard, and straight to the garden,
Flying, flying; look back
Don't dare; immediately ran around
Curtains, bridges, meadow,
Alley to the lake, forest,
I broke the bushes of sirens,
Flying through the flower beds to the stream
And panting, on the benchXXXIX.
Fell...
Interstrophic transfer metaphorically depicts the fall of the heroine on the bench after a long running 23 Shapir M. I. Articles about Pushkin. M.: Languages of Slavic cultures, 2009. C. 82-83. . The same technique is used in the description of the death of Lensky, who falls, killed by Onegin's shot.
In addition to numerous parodies of Onegin, later examples of the Onegin stanza include original works. However, this stanza turned out to be impossible to use without direct references to Pushkin's text. Lermontov in the very first stanza of The Tambov Treasurer (1838) declares: “I am writing Onegin in size.” Vyacheslav Ivanov in the poetic introduction to the poem "Infancy" (1913-1918) stipulates: "The size of the cherished stanzas is pleasant", and the first line of the first stanza begins with the words "My father was from the unsociable ..." (as in "Onegin": "My uncle of the most honest rules..."). Igor Severyanin composes a "novel in stanzas" (!) under the title "Leander's Piano" (1925) and explains in the poetic introduction: "I am writing in a Onegin stanza."
There were attempts to vary Pushkin's discovery: “In the order of rivalry, other stanzas were invented, similar to Onegin's. Almost immediately after Pushkin, Baratynsky wrote his poem "Ball" also in fourteen lines, but of a different structure ... And in 1927, V. Nabokov wrote the "University Poem", turning the rhyming order of the Onegin stanza from the end to beginning" 24 Gasparov M. L. Onegin stanza // Gasparov M. L. Russian verse at the beginning of the 20th century in the comments. M.: Fortuna Limited, 2001. S. 178. . Nabokov did not stop there: the last paragraph of Nabokov's "The Gift" only looks prosaic, but in fact it is a Onegin stanza written in a line.
"Onegin" (Onegin). Directed by Martha Fiennes. USA, UK, 1999
Mstislav Dobuzhinsky. Illustration for "Eugene Onegin". 1931–1936
Russian State Library
What are the secondary characters in the novel about?
The scenes of the novel change from chapter to chapter: St. Petersburg (new European capital) - village - Moscow (national-traditional patriarchal center) - South of Russia and the Caucasus. The characters surprisingly vary according to toponymy.
Philologist Maxim Shapir, having analyzed the character naming system in Pushkin's novel, showed that they are divided into several categories. "Steppe" landlords - satirical characters - are endowed with speaking names(Petushkov, Petushkov, Buyanov, etc.). The author calls Moscow bars without surnames, only by their first and patronymic names (Lukerya Lvovna, Lyubov Petrovna, Ivan Petrovich, Semyon Petrovich, etc.). Representatives of the Petersburg high society - real faces from Pushkin's environment - are described in semi-hints, but readers easily recognized in these anonymous portraits real people: “The old man, joking in the old way: / Superbly subtle and clever, / Which is somewhat funny today” - His Excellency Ivan Ivanovich Dmitriev, and “Avid for epigrams, / An angry gentleman at everything” - His Excellency Count Gabriel Frantsevich Moden 25 Shapir M. I. Articles about Pushkin. M.: Languages of Slavic cultures, 2009. C. 285-287; Vatsuro V. E. Comments: I. I. Dmitriev // Russian Letters writers of the XVIII century. L.: Nauka, 1980. S. 445; Proskurin O. A. / o-proskurin.livejournal.com/59236.html . .
Other contemporaries of the poet are called by their full names when it comes to the public side of their activities. For example, “The Singer of Feasts and languid sadness” is Baratynsky, as Pushkin himself explains in the 22nd note to “Eugene Onegin” (one of the most famous works of early Baratynsky is the poem “Feasts”). “Another poet” who “with a luxurious style / Depicted the first snow for us” is Prince Vyazemsky, the author of the elegy “The First Snow”, Pushkin explains in the 27th note. But if the same contemporary "appears on the pages of the novel as a private person, the poet resorts to asterisks and cuts" 26 Shapir M. I. Articles about Pushkin. M.: Languages of Slavic cultures, 2009. C. 282. . Therefore, when Tatyana meets Prince Vyazemsky, Pushkin reports: “V. somehow got hooked on her” (and not “Vyazemsky somehow got hooked on her,” as modern publications print). The famous passage: “Du comme il faut (Shishkov, I’m sorry: / I don’t know how to translate)” did not appear in this form during Pushkin’s lifetime. At first, the poet intended to use the initial "Sh.", but then replaced it with three asterisks Typographic sign in the form of an asterisk. . A friend of Pushkin and Baratynsky, Wilhelm Kuchelbecker, believed that these lines were addressed to him, and read them: “Forgive me, Wilhelm: / I don’t know how translate" 27 Lotman Yu. M. Pushkin: Biography of the writer. Articles and notes (1960-1990). "Eugene Onegin": Commentary. St. Petersburg: Art-SPb, 1995. C. 715. . Shapir concludes that by adding names for the author that are only a hint in the text, modern editors, Shapir concludes, simultaneously violate the norms of Pushkin's ethics and poetics.
Francois Chevalier. Evgeny Baratynsky. 1830s. State Museum fine arts them. A. S. Pushkin. Baratynsky is mentioned in the novel as "The Singer of Feasts and languid sadness"
Carl Reichel. Pyotr Vyazemsky. 1817 years. All-Russian Museum of A. S. Pushkin, St. Petersburg. In the lines “Another poet with a luxurious style / Depicted the first snow for us,” Pushkin meant Vyazemsky, the author of the elegy “The First Snow”
Ivan Matyushin (engraving from an unknown original). Wilhelm Küchelbecker. 1820s. All-Russian Museum of A. S. Pushkin, St. Petersburg. During the life of Pushkin, in the passage “Du comme il faut (Shishkov, sorry: / I don’t know how to translate), asterisks were printed instead of a surname. Küchelbecker believed that they were hiding the name "Wilhelm" under them.
When do the events described in the novel take place and how old are the characters?
The internal chronology of "Eugene Onegin" has long intrigued readers and researchers. What year does the action take place? How old are the characters at the beginning of the novel and at the end? Pushkin himself wrote without hesitation (and not just anywhere, but in the notes included in the text of Onegin): “We dare to assure you that in our novel time is calculated according to the calendar” (note 17). But does Roman time coincide with historical time? Let's see what we know from the text.
During the duel, Onegin is 26 years old ("... Having lived without a goal, without labor / Until the age of twenty-six ..."). Onegin broke up with the Author a year before. If the biography of the Author repeats Pushkin's, then this parting took place in 1820 (in May Pushkin was exiled to the south), and the duel took place in 1821. Here the first problem arises. The duel took place two days after Tatiana's name day, and the name day - Tatiana's day - is January 12 (according to the old style). According to the text, name days were celebrated on Saturday (in drafts - on Thursday). However, in 1821 January 12 fell on a Wednesday. However, perhaps the celebration of the name day was postponed to one of the next days (Saturday).
If the main events (from Onegin's arrival in the village to the duel) still take place between the summer of 1820 and January 1821, then Onegin was born in 1795 or 1796 (he is three or four years younger than Vyazemsky and three or four years older than Pushkin), and began to shine in St. Petersburg when he was "almost eighteen years old" - in 1813. However, in the preface to the first edition of the first chapter, it is directly stated that “it contains a description of the secular life of a St. Petersburg young man at the end of 1819 of the year" 28 Pushkin A.S. Complete Works. In 16 volumes. M., L.: Publishing House of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, 1937-1949. T. 6. C. 638. . Of course, we can ignore this circumstance: this date was not included in the final text (editions of 1833 and 1837). However, the description metropolitan life in the first chapter clearly refers to the end of the 1810s, and not to 1813, when the Patriotic War had just ended and the foreign campaign against Napoleon was in full swing. The ballerina Istomina, whose performance Onegin watches in the theater, had not yet danced in 1813; hussar Kaverin, with whom Onegin is hanging out at the Talon restaurant, has not yet returned to St. borders 29 Baevsky V.S. Time in "Eugene Onegin" // Pushkin: Research and Materials. L.: Nauka, 1983. T. XI. pp. 115-130. C. 117. .
"Onegin" is a poetically true picture of Russian society in a certain era
Vissarion Belinsky
In spite of everything, we continue to count from 1821. When Lensky died in January 1821, he was "eighteen years old", so he was born in 1803. When Tatyana was born, the text of the novel does not say, but Pushkin informed Vyazemsky that Tatyana's letter to Onegin, written in the summer of 1820, is "a letter from a woman, moreover, 17 years old, and also in love." Then Tatyana was also born in 1803, and Olga was a year younger than her, a maximum of two (since she was already a bride, she could not be less than fifteen). By the way, when Tatyana was born, her mother was hardly more than 25 years old, so the “old woman” Larina was about forty at the time she met Onegin. However, there is no indication of Tatyana's age in the final text of the novel, so it is possible that all Larins were a couple of years older.
Tatiana arrives in Moscow at the end of January or February 1822 and (in the autumn?) gets married. Meanwhile, Eugene wanders. According to the printed "Excerpts from Onegin's Journey", he arrives in Bakhchisaray three years after the Author. Pushkin was there in 1820, Onegin, therefore, in 1823. In stanzas not included in the printed text of the Journey, the Author and Onegin meet in Odessa in 1823 or 1824 and part ways: Pushkin goes to Mikhailovskoye (this happened in the last days of July 1824), Onegin goes to St. Petersburg. At a reception in the autumn of 1824, he meets Tatyana, who has been married "for about two years." It seems that everything fits together, but in 1824 Tatyana could not speak with the Spanish ambassador at this event, since Russia did not yet have diplomatic relations with Spain 30 Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse by Aleksandr Pushkin / Translated from the Russian, with a Commentary, by Vladimir Nabokov. In 4 vols. N.Y.: Bollingen, 1964. Vol. 3. P. 83; Lotman Yu. M. Pushkin: Biography of the writer. Articles and notes (1960-1990). "Eugene Onegin": Commentary. St. Petersburg: Art-SPb, 1995. C. 718. . Onegin's letter to Tatyana, followed by their explanation, is dated spring (March?) 1825. But is this noble lady really only 22 years old at the time of the final meeting?
There are many such minor inconsistencies in the text of the novel. At one time, literary critic Iosif Toybin came to the conclusion that in the 17th note, the poet had in mind not historical, but seasonal chronology (the timely change of seasons within the novel time) 31 Toybin I. M. "Eugene Onegin": poetry and history // Pushkin: Research and materials. L.: Nauka, 1979. T. IX. S. 93. . Apparently, he was right.
"Eugene Onegin". Directed by Roman Tikhomirov. USSR, 1958
Mstislav Dobuzhinsky. Illustration for "Eugene Onegin". 1931–1936
Russian State Library
How does the text of Onegin that we know today compare with the one read by Pushkin's contemporaries?
Contemporaries managed to read several versions of Onegin. In the editions of individual chapters, the poems were accompanied by all sorts of additional texts, of which not all of them were included in the consolidated edition. So, the preface to a separate edition of the first chapter (1825) was the note "Here is the beginning of a great poem, which will probably not be finished ..." and a dramatic scene in verse "A conversation between a bookseller and a poet."
Initially, Pushkin conceived a longer work, perhaps even in twelve chapters (at the end of a separate edition of chapter six, we read: "The end of the first part"). However, after 1830, the attitude of the author to the forms of narration changed (Pushkin is now more interested in prose), readers to the author (Pushkin is losing popularity, the public believes that he has "written his name"), the author to the public (he becomes disappointed in her - I want to say " mental abilities" - aesthetic readiness to accept "Onegin"). Therefore, Pushkin broke off the novel in mid-sentence, former ninth published the chapter as the eighth, the former eighth ("Onegin's Journey") published in excerpts, placing at the end of the text after the notes. The novel acquired an open ending, slightly camouflaged with a closed mirror composition(it is formed by the exchange of letters between the heroes and the return to the Odessa impressions of the first chapter at the end of the Journey).
From the text of the first consolidated edition (1833) are excluded: an introductory note to the first chapter, "A conversation between a bookseller and a poet" and some stanzas that were printed in editions of individual chapters. Notes to all chapters are placed in a special section. The dedication to Pletnev, originally prefaced with a double edition of chapters four and five (1828), is placed in note 23. Only in the last lifetime edition (1837) do we find the usual architectonics: The general form of the structure of the text and the relationship of its parts. The concept of a larger order than composition - understood as the arrangement and relationships of details within large parts of the text. the dedication to Pletnev becomes the dedication of the entire novel.
In 1922 Modest Hoffman Modest Ludvigovich Hoffman (1887-1959) - philologist, poet and Pushkinist. Fame brought him "The book of Russian poets last decade» - an anthology of articles about Russian symbolism. From 1920 Hoffmann worked in Pushkin House, published a book about Pushkin. In 1922, Hoffmann went on a business trip to France and did not return. In exile he continued to study Pushkin. published the monograph "Missed stanzas of "Eugene Onegin". The study of draft editions of the novel began. In 1937, on the centenary of the poet's death, all known printed and handwritten versions of Onegin were published in the sixth volume of Pushkin's Academic Complete Works (volume editor Boris Tomashevsky). This edition implements the principle of "layered" reading and submission of draft and white manuscripts (from final readings to early versions).
The main text of the novel in the same collection is printed “according to the edition of 1833 with the location of the text according to the edition of 1837; censorship and typographical distortions of the 1833 edition have been corrected according to autographs and previous editions (individual chapters and excerpts)" 32 Pushkin A.S. Complete Works. In 16 volumes. M., L.: Publishing House of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, 1937-1949. T. 6. C. 660. . In the future, in scientific and mass publications, with the rarest exceptions and with some spelling variations, this particular text was reprinted. In other words, the critical text of "Eugene Onegin", to which we are accustomed, does not coincide with any of the publications that came out during Pushkin's lifetime.
Joseph Charlemagne. Set design for Pyotr Tchaikovsky's opera "Eugene Onegin". 1940
Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images
No: they are a dynamic "equivalent" text 33 Tynyanov Yu. N. On the composition of "Eugene Onegin" // Tynyanov Yu. N. Poetics. History of literature. Movie. M.: Nauka, 1977. S. 60. , the reader is free to substitute anything in their place (compare with the role of improvisation in some musical genres). Moreover, it is impossible to fill in successive stops: some stanzas or parts of stanzas have been abridged, while others have never been written.
Further, some stanzas are present in the manuscripts but not in the printed text. There are stanzas that were in the editions of individual chapters, but excluded from the consolidated edition (for example, a detailed comparison of "Eugene Onegin" with Homer's "Iliad" at the end of chapter four). There are stanzas printed separately as excerpts from "Eugene Onegin", but not included either in a separate edition of the corresponding chapter, or in a consolidated edition. Such, for example, is the passage “Women” published in 1827 in the Moskovsky Vestnik - the initial stanzas of chapter four, which in separate edition chapters four and five are replaced by a series of numbers without text.
This "inconsistency" is not an accidental oversight, but a principle. The novel is filled with paradoxes that turn the story of the creation of the text into an artistic technique. The author plays with the text, not only excluding fragments, but, on the contrary, including them “under special conditions”. So, in the author's notes, the beginning of a stanza that was not included in the novel (“It's time: the pen asks for rest ...”) is given, and the two final stanzas of chapter six in the main text and in the notes are given by the author in different editions.
Manuscript "Eugene Onegin". 1828
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"Eugene Onegin". Directed by Roman Tikhomirov. USSR, 1958
Was there a so-called tenth chapter in "Eugene Onegin"?
Pushkin wrote his novel, not yet knowing how he would finish it. The tenth chapter is a continuation option rejected by the author. Because of its content (a political chronicle of the turn of the 1810s-20s, including a description of the Decembrist conspirators), the tenth chapter of Onegin, even if it had been completed, could hardly have been printed during Pushkin's lifetime, although there is evidence that he gave it to Nicholas to read I 34 Lotman Yu. M. Pushkin: Biography of the writer. Articles and notes (1960-1990). "Eugene Onegin": Commentary. St. Petersburg: Art-SPb, 1995. C. 745. .
The chapter was written in Boldin and was burned by the author on October 18 or 19, 1830 (there is a Pushkin note about this in one of the Boldin workbooks). However, the writing was not completely destroyed. Part of the text has been preserved in the form of the author's cipher, which in 1910 was deciphered by Pushkinist Pyotr Morozov. The cryptography hides only the first quatrains of 16 stanzas, but does not fix the remaining 10 lines of each stanza in any way. In addition, several stanzas survived in a separate draft and in the messages of the poet's friends.
As a result, a passage of 17 stanzas has come down to us from the entire chapter, none of which is known to us in its completed form. Of these, only two have full squad(14 verses), and only one is reliably rhymed according to the scheme of the Onegin stanza. The order of the surviving stanzas is also not entirely clear. In many places the text is parsed hypothetically. Even the first, perhaps the most famous line of the tenth chapter (“The ruler is weak and crafty”, about Alexander I) is read only presumably: Pushkin writes “Vl.” in the cipher, which Nabokov, for example, deciphered as "Lord" 35 Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse by Aleksandr Pushkin / Translated from the Russian, with a Commentary, by Vladimir Nabokov. In 4 vols. N.Y.: Bollingen, 1964. Vol. 1.Pp. 318-319. . . On the other hand, the short English haircut is opposed to the romantic German à la Schiller. This is the hairstyle of Lensky, a recent Göttingen student: The University of Göttingen was one of the most advanced educational institutions of that time. Among Pushkin's acquaintances there were several Göttingen graduates, and all of them were free-thinking: the Decembrist Nikolai Turgenev and his brother Alexander, Pushkin's lyceum teacher Alexander Kunitsyn. "curls black to shoulders" 38 Muryanov M.F. Portrait of Lensky // Questions of Literature. 1997. No. 6. S. 102-122. . Thus, Onegin and Lensky, in everything opposite to each other, differ even in hairstyles.
At a social event, Tatyana "in a raspberry beret / Speaks with the Spanish ambassador." What does this famous detail indicate? Is it really about the fact that the heroine forgot to take off her headdress? Of course not. Thanks to this detail, Onegin understands that in front of him - noble lady and that she is married. A modern historian of European costume explains that the beret “appeared in Russia only at the beginning of the 19th century, simultaneously with other Western European headdresses that tightly covered the head: wigs and powdered hairstyles in the 18th century excluded their use. In the first half of the 19th century, the beret was only a women's headdress, and, moreover, only for married ladies. Being part of the front toilet, he was not filmed either at balls, or in the theater, or at evenings" 39 Kirsanova R. M. Costume in Russian artistic culture of the 18th - first half of the 20th centuries. (Experience encyclopedia). M.: BSE, 1995. C. 37. . Berets were made from satin, velvet or other fabrics. They could be decorated with plumes or flowers. They were worn obliquely, so that one edge could even touch the shoulder.
In the Talon restaurant, Onegin and Kaverin drink “comet wine”. What's the wine? This is le vin de la Comète, an 1811 vintage champagne whose superlative quality was attributed to the influence of a comet now called C/1811 F1, which was clearly visible in the Northern Hemisphere from August to December 1811. of the year 40 Kuznetsov N. N. Wine of the comet // Pushkin and his contemporaries: Materials and research. L.: Publishing House of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, 1930. Issue. XXXVIII/XXXIX. pp. 71-75. .
Maybe Pushkin would have done even better if he called his poem after Tatyana, and not Onegin, for she is undoubtedly the main character of the poem.
Fedor Dostoevsky
In addition, in the novel, which seems to be written in the same language as we speak, in reality there are many obsolete words and expressions. Why do they become obsolete? First, because the language is changing; secondly, because the world that he describes is changing.
Here, during the duel, Onegin's servant Guillo "stands for the near stump." How to interpret such behavior? All illustrators depict Guillot nestled not far away near a small stump. All translators use words that mean "the lower part of a felled, sawn or broken tree." The Dictionary of the Language of Pushkin interprets this place in the same way. However, if Guillot is afraid of dying from a random bullet and hopes to hide from it, then why does he need a stump? No one thought about this until the linguist Alexander Penkovsky showed in a variety of texts from the Pushkin era that at that time the word "stump" had another meaning, in addition to the one it has today - this is the meaning of "tree trunk" (not necessarily " felled, sawn or broken") 41 Penkovsky A. B. Research poetic language Pushkin era. M.: Znak, 2012. C. 533-546. .
Other large group words are outdated vocabulary denoting outdated realities. In particular, horse-drawn transport has become exotic today - its economic role has been leveled, the terminology associated with it has left the common language and is mostly unclear today. Let's remember how the Larins are going to Moscow. “On a skinny and shaggy nag / A bearded postilion sits.” The postilion (from German Vorreiter - the one who rides in front, on the front horse) was usually a teenager or even a small boy, so that it would be easier for the horse to carry him. The postilion should be a boy, but the Larins have it “bearded”: they didn’t leave for so long and sat in the village in the village that they already have a postilion grown old 42 Dobrodomov I. G., Pilshchikov I. A. Vocabulary and phraseology of "Eugene Onegin": Hermeneutic essays. M.: Languages of Slavic cultures, 2008. C. 160-169.
What comments on "Eugene Onegin" are the most famous?
The first experience of scientific commenting on "Eugene Onegin" was undertaken as early as the century before last: in 1877, the writer Anna Lachinova (1832-1914) published under the pseudonym A. Volsky two issues of "Explanations and Notes to the novel by A. S. Pushkin" Eugene Onegin ". Of the monographic commentaries on Onegin published in the 20th century, three are of the greatest importance: Brodsky, Nabokov, and Lotman.
The most famous of these is the commentary by Yuri Lotman (1922-1993), first published as a separate book in 1980. The book consists of two parts. The first - "Essay on the noble life of the Onegin era" - is a coherent presentation of the norms and rules that regulated the worldview and everyday behavior of the nobleman of Pushkin's time. The second part is the actual commentary, following the text from stanza to stanza and from chapter to chapter. In addition to explaining incomprehensible words and realities, Lotman pays attention to the literary background of the novel (the metaliterary polemics spilling onto its pages and the various quotations with which it is permeated), and also interprets the behavior of the characters, revealing in their words and actions a dramatic clash of points of view and behavioral norms. .
So, Lotman shows that Tatyana's conversation with the nanny is a comic qui pro quo, "Who instead of whom." latin expression denoting confusion, misunderstanding, when one is taken for another. In the theater, this technique is used to create a comic situation. in which the interlocutors belonging to two different socio-cultural groups use the words "love" and "passion" in a completely different meanings(for the nanny "love" is adultery, for Tatiana it is a romantic feeling). The commentator convincingly demonstrates that, according to the author's intention, Onegin killed Lensky unintentionally, and readers familiar with dueling practice understand this from the details of the story. If Onegin wanted to shoot his friend, he would have chosen a completely different dueling strategy (Lotman tells which one).
How did Onegin end? - The fact that Pushkin got married. The married Pushkin could still write a letter to Onegin, but he could not continue the affair.
Anna Akhmatova
Lotman's immediate predecessor in the field under discussion was Nikolai Brodsky (1881-1951). The first, trial edition of his commentary was published in 1932, the last lifetime edition in 1950, then the book was published posthumously several times, remaining the main guide for the study of Onegin in universities and pedagogical institutes until the release of Lotman's commentary.
Brodsky's text bears deep traces vulgar sociologism Within the framework of Marxist methodology, a simplified, dogmatic interpretation of the text, which is understood as a literal illustration of political and economic ideas. . What is the only explanation for the word “bolívar”: “A hat (with large brim, a top-hat expanding) in honor of a leader of the national liberation movement in South America, Simona Bolivar (1783-1830), was fashionable in an environment that followed political events, which sympathized with the struggle for the independence of a small people" 43 Brodsky N. L. "Eugene Onegin": A novel by A. S. Pushkin. A guide for the teacher. M.: Education, 1964. C. 68-69. . Sometimes Brodsky's commentary suffers from an overly straightforward interpretation of certain passages. For example, about the line "Jealous whisper of fashionable wives," he seriously writes: fashionable wife» Pushkin emphasized the decay of family foundations in ... secular circle" 44 Brodsky N. L. "Eugene Onegin": A novel by A. S. Pushkin. A guide for the teacher. M.: Education, 1964. C. 90. .
Nevertheless, Nabokov, who made fun of Brodsky's forced interpretations and depressingly clumsy style, was, of course, not quite right in calling him an "ignorant compiler" - "uninformed compiler" 44 Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse by Aleksandr Pushkin / Translated from the Russian, with a Commentary, by Vladimir Nabokov. In 4 vols. N.Y.: Bollingen, 1964. Vol. 2. P. 246. . If we exclude the predictable "Sovietisms", which can be considered inevitable signs of the times, in Brodsky's book one can find a fairly solid real and historical-cultural commentary on the text of the novel.
"Onegin" ("Onegin"). Directed by Martha Fiennes. USA, UK, 1999
The four-volume work of Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) was first published in 1964, the second (corrected) in 1975. The first volume is occupied by an interlinear translation of Onegin into English language, the second and third - with an English commentary, the fourth - with indexes and a reprint of the Russian text. Nabokov's commentary was translated into Russian late; Russian translations of the commentary published in 1998-1999 (two of them) can hardly be considered successful.
Not only is Nabokov's commentary superior in volume to the work of other commentators, the Nabokov translation itself also performs commentary functions, interpreting certain words and expressions in the text of Eugene Onegin. For example, all commentators, except for Nabokov, explain the meaning of the adjective in the line "In his discharge carriage." "Discharge" means "discharged from abroad." This word has been supplanted in modern language by a new word with the same meaning, now the borrowed "import" is used instead. Nabokov does not explain anything, but simply translates: "imported".
The volume identified by Nabokov literary quotations and the literary and memoiral parallels he cited to the text of the novel are not surpassed by any of the previous and subsequent commentators, and this is not surprising: Nabokov, like no one else, felt himself at home From English - "like at home." not only in Russian literature, but also in European (especially French and English).
The discrepancy between personality and her way of life - this is the basis of the novel.
Valentin Nepomniachtchi
Finally, Nabokov was the only commentator on Onegin in the 20th century who knew the life of the Russian noble estate firsthand, but from his own experience and easily understood much of what Soviet philologists did not catch. Unfortunately, the impressive volume of Nabokov's commentary is created not only by useful and necessary information, but also thanks to a lot of information that is most remotely related to the commented work 45 Chukovsky K. I. Onegin in a foreign land // Chukovsky K. I. High art. M.: Soviet writer, 1988. S. 337-341. . But it's still very interesting to read!
In addition to comments, the modern reader can find explanations for incomprehensible words and expressions in Pushkin's Dictionary of Language (first edition - the turn of the 1950s and 60s; additions - 1982; consolidated edition - 2000). Prominent linguists and Pushkin scholars who had previously prepared the “large academic” edition of Pushkin participated in the creation of the dictionary: Viktor Vinogradov, Grigory Vinokur, Boris Tomashevsky, Sergei Bondi. In addition to the listed reference books, there are many special historical-literary and historical-linguistic works, the bibliography alone of which occupies a weighty volume.
Why don't they always help? Because the differences between our language and the language of the beginning of the 19th century are not pointy, but cross-cutting, and with each decade they only grow, like “cultural layers” on city streets. No commentary can exhaust the text, but even the minimally necessary for understanding commentary on the texts of the Pushkin era should already be line-by-line (and perhaps even word-by-word) and multilateral (real commentary, historical-linguistic, historical-literary, poetic, textual). Such a comment was not created even for "Eugene Onegin".
