The story
Eugene Onegin is a novel in verse by Alexander Pushkin. Its first chapter appeared in 1825, the chapters came out one at a time over several years, and the complete edition was published in 1833. It follows Onegin, a bored young nobleman of St. Petersburg who inherits a country estate. There he meets Tatyana, a dreamy country girl who writes him a love letter, and he coldly rejects her. Years later, they meet again, and now he falls for the married Tatyana, who turns him down.
Pushkin wrote it between 1823 and 1831, in the Russia of Alexander I and Nicholas I, a few years after the defeat of Napoleon and the Decembrist revolt of 1825. He was inspired by Byron's Don Juan and by the Romantic movement, but he invented a distinct Russian language of literature, mixing everyday speech with polished verse. The poem is written in a fixed 14-line stanza, now known as the Onegin stanza, with a set rhyme pattern in iambic tetrameter. Pushkin was killed in a duel in 1837, aged 37. Tchaikovsky's opera Eugene Onegin (1879) is one of the most performed Russian operas.
Why it mattered
- The poem set the direction of the nineteenth century Russian novel, which Dostoevsky and Tolstoy built on.
- Pushkin gave Russian literature a flexible modern language, and he is regarded as its founding poet.
- Its characters, the superfluous man and the strong woman, became recurring types in Russian fiction.
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