Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin

Jim and I saw a production of Tchaikovsky’s opera Eugene Onegin at Santa Fe this summer. It was my first experience of this opera performed live, and practically my first live performance of any music in a year and a half, so of course I loved it.

I had also read a biography of Tchaikovsky earlier this year. Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades is also based on Pushkin, as is Mussorgsky’s Boris Gudonov, and Glinka’s Ruslan and Ludmilla. After returning from Santa Fe I read a biography of Prokofiev who wrote an early opera based on Pushkin’s Feast in the Time of a Plague. I know from reading Tolstoy and Dostoevsky earlier this year that Pushkin is considered as highly in Russia as Shakespeare is in the west. So I was curious to read something of this author.

I don’t read Russian so my first task was to choose a translation. Eugene Onegin is a novel in verse, consisting of about 400 stanzas in eight chapters, each stanza consisting of 14 lines and following a strict meter and rhyming pattern. (There are a few exceptions.) For a translator to retain both the meaning of the words along with the rhythm and rhyme is an enormous challenge. I read a translation by James E. Falen. He addresses the difficulty in his Introduction:

“Confronted with an evident inability to render a work faithfully in either its absolute form or its total sense, the translator, it would seem, faces an impossible task and is condemned by the very nature of his enterprise to an act of compromise and betrayal. The only solution , it seems to me, is for the translator to try to view the work not as a hopeless dichotomy but as a unified whole and to try to be faithful, in some mysterious spirit, to this vision of wholeness.” (p, xxvi)

Makes sense to me. Falen’s translation was published in 1995. I read a second edition from Oxford University Press reissued in 2009.

Pushkin introduces us to Onegin first. Onegin is eighteen years old but already bored by life. He lives in St. Petersberg, entertaining himself with balls and the opera and other diversions of aristocratic life, all of which tire him.

An uncle dies leaving a country estate to Onegin. In the country, Onegin makes friends with a neighbor, a poet named Vladimir Lensky. Lensky intends to marry a local girl named Olga Larin. Lensky invites Onegin to the Larin home where Onegin meets Olga’s older sister, Tatayana. The ages of the girls aren’t specified but they must be teenagers, a few years younger than Onegin and Lensky.

The scene of Onegin meeting Tatayana is not given us by Pushkin, it occurs between stanzas 3 and 4 of Chapter Three. In Tchaikovsky’s libretto, Tatayana and Olga are introduced first and we get to see the Principals meet in Act One, Scene One.

Tatayana is smitten by Onegin. Over the next several weeks she becomes obsessed by thoughts of him. She is a teenager, after all, and a reader of romantic novels. But Onegin doesn’t return. Finally, she can stand it no longer and impulsively she writes Onegin a letter and has it delivered to him. The letter scene in Tchaikovsky’s opera (Act One, Scene Two) is justly famous and beautiful.

But Onegin doesn’t respond. Tatayana continues to moon about and wait. Finally he appears, in the garden of her estate. He preaches to Tatayana a speech that sounds like a sermon to her saying that though she thinks she would be happy with him if they were to wed they would soon tire of each other. So better that she stop being so emotional and forget about him. He goes away again. (Act One, Scene Three).

Several months pass without Tatayana and Onegin seeing each other. But Lensky is still courting Olga and Lensky has been invited to the Larin’s home for a party. Lensky convinces Onegin to go with him. But the party is a disaster. Tatayana is disturbed when she sees Onegin and a crowd of folks are there, gossiping about Onegin and Tatayana. Onegin is angry and blames Lensky. As an act of revenge he pretends to flirt with Olga, dancing every dance with her. In the opera (this is Act Two, Scene One) it isn’t so clear that Onegin does this deliberately to hurt Lensky, but it is clear in Pushkin.

Lensky leaves the party, jealous, insulted. The next day he sends Onegin a challenge to a duel. Onegin regrets his actions at the party but accepts the duel, as social custom demands. The day after, they duel. Onegin kills Lensky. (Act Two, Scene Two).

Onegin now leaves his country estate for far-flung travel. There’s a wonderful scene in Pushkin that isn’t in the opera where Tatayana visits Onegin’s abandoned house and the servants allow her to roam through the empty rooms. In the library she goes through his books, noticing which books he owns, where his fingernails have left a mark on the pages, and what he writes in the margins. She begins to suspect that his character may be a false person created from the fiction he reads. She begins to put him behind her, but cannot move forward either, giving in to melancholy and giving up on love.

With Lensky dead, Olga finds someone else to marry, a “lancer”, and the family hopes to marry Tatayana, too. They send her to Moscow to live with an aunt, hoping she’ll find a man there. She doesn’t. She mopes. After many suitors try and fail, Tatayana’s aunts notice a General (he’s also a Prince) showing interest in Tatayana and point him out to her. He’s described as “heavy” and “maimed in battle.” She’s unimpressed. This is the end of Chapter Seven in Pushkin. This episode in Moscow is skipped entirely in Tchaikovsky, coming between Acts Two and Three.

There’s a missing chapter here in Pushkin’s novel, too: an original chapter eight, describing Onegin’s travels around Russia, which Pushkin deleted from the final published book. (The book appeared chapter by chapter as it was written, from 1825 to 1832 with a final revision published in 1837).

The final Chapter Eight and Tchaikovsky’s Act Three, Scene One, finds Tatayana married to the General and living in St. Petersberg. Pushkin dates this scene two years later. Onegin comes across Tatyana at a ball. He barely recognizes her. She is poised, and worldly, and still beautiful. He learns she is married. Now he falls for her. He follows her around. He tries to get her to notice him and re-ignite her former passion. But she stays aloof. Finally he does what she did then, he writes her a letter. Tatayana receives the letter and agrees to meet him.

In the final scene of both opera and novel, Tatayana and Onegin meet. Now it is Tatayana’s turn to make a speech. She is suspicious of Onegin’s motive, professing love now, when she has status and wealth she didn’t have before, and a husband. She confesses she still loves Onegin and that she married the General only to please her mother and because “all future seemed alike in woe” (p. 210). But it’s too late to go back. She says to Onegin “But I am now another’s wife, / And I’ll be faithful all my life” (p. 210). She leaves him alone. Onegin hears the General arriving home. And then Pushkin, too, leaves Onegin alone.

This all seems very straightforward, and the opera makes it seem so, too, but in the novel the story is complicated by Pushkin (or a Pushkin-like author/narrator) constantly interrupting the narrative to comment on the action, add a philosophical aside, and even describe his own writing process. The digressions serve to keep the story at arm’s length. It highlights the fiction of the characters and the story. And it keeps the tone ironic and humorous. Although the story is touching the narrator’s intrusions won’t let it become maudlin.

For example, after Tatayana has written her letter there are many pages of rising tension as she wonders what Onegin’s response will be, or whether he will respond at all. Finally she hears his horses arriving. At last they meet. She is consumed with apprehension at what he will say. Her entire future depends on his next words. Then Pushkin jumps in to say this:

Just now though, friends, I feel too tired
To tell you how this meeting went
And what ensued from that event;
I’ve talked so long that I’ve required
A little walk, some rest and play;
I’ll finish up another day. (p. 81)

Then there’s a chapter break and a little more digression before we finally hear Onegin’s speech.

This playfulness reminds me much of Tristram Shandy, though not so extreme as that, but the “meta” structure is the same.

The verse is light-hearted, which is not to say it isn’t ingenious, and I mean Falen’s impressive translation as well as (I’m assuming) Pushkin’s original. But the rhymes and the regular meter land unsophisticated on our modern ears. We’re used to serious poetry eschewing rhyme and meter, now. It’s hard to guess how it sounded to Pushkin’s Russian readers two hundred years ago but to me the verse reminded me of the “Greetings Friends!” piece that the New Yorker publishes at the end of every year. That impression is reinforced because both that poem and Pushkin’s stanzas often employ lists and name-dropping.

Here are two examples:

First from chapter one, a half a stanza describing the contents of Onegin’s stylish dressing room: (p. 15)

Imported pipes of Turkish amber,
Fine china, bronzes–all displayed;
And purely to delight and pamper,
Perfumes in crystal jars arrayed;
Steel files and combs in many guises,
Straight scissors, curved ones, thirty sizes
Of brushes for the modern male–
For hair and teeth and fingernail

And from Chapter Eight, a stanza of Onegin looking to books for comfort when the newly-elevated Tatayana ignores him: (p. 204)

Once more he turned to books and sages.
He read his Gibbon and Rousseau;
Chamfort, Manzoni, Herder’s pages;
Madame de Stael, Bichat, Tissot.
The sceptic Bayle he quite devoured,
The works of Fontenelle he scoured;
He even read some Russians too,
Nor did he scorn the odd review–
Those journals where each modern Moses
Instructs us in a moral way–
Where I’m so much abused today,
But where such madrigals and roses
I used to meet with now and then:
E sempre bene, gentlemen.

This Oxford World’s Classics edition includes Falen’s Introduction, explanatory notes for the many references, and an Appendix giving several additional stanzas that Pushkin deleted from the final version.