Eugene Onegin
Alexander Pushkin
EUGENE ONEGIN
ALEXANDER SERGEYEVICH PUSHKIN was born in Moscow in 1799. He was liberally educated and left school in 1817. Given a sinecure in the Foreign Office, he spent three dissipated years in St Petersburg writing light, erotic and highly polished verse. He flirted with several pre-Decembrist societies, composing the mildly revolutionary verses which led to his disgrace and exile in 1820. After travelling through the Caucasus and the Crimea, he was sent to Bessarabia, where he wrote The Captive of the Caucasus and The Fountain at Bakhchisaray, and began Eugene Onegin. His work took an increasingly serious turn during the last year of his southern exile, in Odessa. In 1824 he was transferred to his parents’ estate at Mikhailovskoe in north-west Russia, where he spent two solitary but fruitful years during which he wrote his historical drama Boris Godunov, continued Eugene Onegin and finished The Gipsies. After the failure of the Decembrist Revolt in 1825 and the succession of a new tsar, Pushkin was granted conditional freedom in 1826. During the next three years he wandered restlessly between St Petersburg and Moscow. He wrote an epic poem, Poltava, but little else. In 1829 he went with the Russian army to Transcaucasia, and the following year, stranded by a cholera outbreak at the small family estate of Boldino, he wrote his experimental Little Tragedies in blank verse and The Tales of Belkin in prose, and virtually completed Eugene Onegin. In 1831 he married the beautiful Natalya Goncharova. The rest of his life was soured by debts and the malice of his enemies. Although his literary output slackened, he produced his major prose works The Queen of Spades and The Captain’s Daughter, his masterpiece in verse, The Bronze Horseman, important lyrics and fairy tales, including The Tale of the Golden Cockerel. Towards the end of 1836 anonymous letters goaded Pushkin into challenging a troublesome admirer of his wife to a duel. He was mortally wounded and died in January 1837.
STANLEY MITCHELL was born in 1932 in London. He read Modern Languages (French, German and Russian) at Oxford. He taught at various universities – Birmingham, Essex, Sussex, San Diego California, McGill Montreal, Dar es Salaam Tanzania, Derby, University College London and Camberwell School of Art. Subjects included Russian literature and art, comparative literature, art history and cultural studies. He retired from Derby as Emeritus Professor of Aesthetics and was made an Honorary Senior Research Fellow in the Art History Department of UCL. He has translated Georg Lukács and Walter Benjamin, written a variety of articles and reviews, and given numerous lectures and talks.
ALEXANDER PUSHKIN
Eugene Onegin
A Novel in Verse
Translated with an Introduction and Notes by
STANLEY MITCHELL
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First published 1833
This translation first published in Penguin Classics 2008
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Translation and editorial material copyright © Stanley Mitchell, 2008
All rights reserved
The moral right of the translator and editor has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
EISBN: 9781101488614
Contents
Acknowledgements
Chronology
Introduction
Further Reading
A Note on the Translation
Map
EUGENE ONEGIN
Notes
Acknowledgements
I should like to thank the following for their help: Peter Carson, my editor for his constant scrutiny; Nina Zhutovsky (St. Petersburg) who cleared up every mistake; Robert Chandler for his devotion and counsel; Angela Livingstone for her careful reading and improvements; Ruth Pavey for her pertinent comments; Carla and Dan Mitchell for their common sense; the late Hannah Mitchell for her enthusiasm and encouragement; Leonid Arinshtein (Moscow) for his suggestions; Yu D. Levin (Moscow) for his criticism; Sergei Bocharov (Moscow) for his advice about the map; Martin Thom for his clarification of the role of the Carbonari in my Introduction; PKS Architects and the Art History Department of University College, London for the use of their photocopy facilities; Tom Dale Keever for sending me an audiotape of Innokentii Smoktunovsky reading Eugene Onegin. In retrospect, I am grateful to the late Isaiah Berlin and John Bayley for having blessed my very first stanza.
I thank the following for their warm support throughout my work on Onegin: Antony Wood, Natalia Mikhailova (Deputy Director of the Pushkin Museum, Moscow), Nicholas Jacobs, Dmitry Gutov (Moscow) and Gina Barker. Above all, I am indebted more than I can say to Barbara Rosenbaum for her love of the poem and her unstinting efforts to ensure that my translation was poetic. Whether it is or not is my responsibility not hers.
Stanley Mitchell
Chronology
1799 26 May Born in Moscow. Father of ancient Muscovite aristocratic lineage; mother a granddaughter of Abyssinian General Abram Gannibal (hero of Pushkin’s unfinished novel The Negro of Peter the Great).
1811–17 Educated at newly opened Imperial Lycée at Tsarskoe Selo. First poetry (earliest publication 1814).
1817–20 Nominal government appointment in Foreign Office, St Petersburg. Life of dissipation. ‘Free-thinking’ acquaintances (future Decembrists).
1820 Completed first major narrative poem, Ruslan and Lyudmila. Exiled to south for a handful of ‘liberal’ verses on freedom, serfdom and autocracy.
1820–24 ‘Southern exile’ (via Caucasus and Crimea to Kishinev and, from July 1823, Odessa). ‘Byronic’ narrative poems, including The Captive of the Caucasus and The Fountain at Bakhchisaray. Began Eugene Onegin (1823). Recognition as leading poet of his generation.
1824–6 After misdemeanours in Odessa, exile continued in greater isolation of parental estate of Mikhailovskoe. The Gipsies (1824); Count Nulin; Boris Godunov (1825). Misses Decembrist Revolt of 1825, ruthlessly suppressed by new emperor, Nicholas I.
1826 September Summoned to Moscow by Nicholas I. Freed from exile, with tsar as personal censor; subject thereafter to ‘surveillance, guidance and counselling’ of Count Benkendorf, Head of the Third Section (Secret Police). Resumed life in Moscow and St Petersburg; restlessness, search for stability.
1828 Poltava (narrative poem on Peter the Great and Mazeppa). Four-month visit to Transcaucasia. Witnessed Russian army in action against the Turks.
1830 Proposed to Natalya Goncharova (1812–63). In September – November stranded by cholera epide
mic at new estate of Boldino: first and most productive ‘Boldino autumn’ (Onegin; lyrics; Little Tragedies; Tales of Belkin; The Little House in Kolomna).
1831 Married in February. Settled in St Petersburg. Completed Onegin.
1833 Historical research. Travelled to Urals. Second Boldino autumn (The Bronze Horseman; work on The Queen of Spades).
1833–6 Unhappy period in St Petersburg: humiliations at court (with requests for retirement from government service refused), mounting debts and marital insecurity. Relatively little creative work: The Captain’s Daughter (completed 1836) and some outstanding lyrics.
1837 27 January Provoked into duel with Baron D’Anthès, adopted son of Dutch ambassador, and shot in stomach. Died two days later. ‘Secret’ burial decreed to avoid expressions of public sympathy.
Introduction
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Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837) is by the common consent of his compatriots Russia’s greatest writer. He is to Russia what Shakespeare is to England, Goethe to Germany and Dante to Italy. He lived at the springtime of Russian literature, which had gained its independent language only some fifty years before his birth. There was no unified language before Mikhail Lomonosov formulated it in his famous grammar of 1755. Before that, Church Slavonic coexisted with the disparate dialects of the civil service and the business community. With the growth of a centralized state a national language appeared.
In this new period Russian writers leaned heavily on Western models, and the nobility, to which Pushkin belonged, spoke French before it did Russian. French phraseology, often in its more flowery form, left its stamp on dramatists, novelists and poets during the reign of the German Empress Catherine the Great (1762–96), who loved all things French, corresponded with Voltaire and invited Diderot to St Petersburg. She freed the nobility from the service imposed on them by Peter the Great (1672–1725) and encouraged them to use their leisure in the pursuit of literature and the arts, as long as they didn’t question the fundamentals of the Russian state, in particular serfdom. Enlightenment figures at home were imprisoned or sent to Siberia.
While it would be wrong to say that Pushkin was the first authentically Russian writer, since predecessors like the fabulist Ivan Krylov and the playwright Denis Fonvizin were already incorporating the vernacular in their work, nevertheless he was the first to treat the major events of Russian history and society in an accessible way. He borrowed themes and styles from Western literature only to give them new twists from a Russian perspective. Although he tried his hand at most genres, he was essentially a poet. The new literary language had blossomed into a poetic culture in the generation preceding him, dominated by the Romantic Vasily Zhukovsky and the more classical Konstantin Batyushkov. Zhukovsky gave the language a new expressiveness and musicality, Batyushkov a fresh clarity and precision. Pushkin learned from them both. In his own generation a cluster of poets appeared – Yazykov, Delvig, Baratynsky – who became known as the Pushkin pleiad and appear as minor characters in Eugene Onegin. As elsewhere in contemporary Europe this poetic heyday was short-lived, superseded by the prose novel – Gogol, Turgenev – with which Western readers are more familiar. Pushkin himself went on to produce an historical novel, The Captain’s Daughter (1836), and other works of prose. His poetry reflected a time of hope among the younger members of the nobility, epitomized by two dates – 1812 and 1825.
In 1812, Russia’s armies defeated Napoleon. Yet on reaching Paris their younger officers were drawn to the ideals of the Enlightenment and the Revolution. Back in Russia, they were keen to introduce reforms – abolition of serfdom, a constitutional monarchy, even a republic. Having no influence on the increasingly reactionary Tsar Alexander I (1777–1825), who headed the Holy Alliance, they began forming secret societies on the model of the Western Carbonari1 movements, aimed at overturning the government. Pushkin, then aged thirteen, befriended some of these officers when they were quartered in the grounds of his lycée. Several of his close schoolfriends would later join the secret societies. For the liberal nobility 1812 was a wake-up call. Officers were impressed by the courage of their serf soldiers. Soon, on leaving the lycée, Pushkin was writing poems deploring serfdom. Circulating all over Russia, they earned him the honour of becoming the Tsar’s first political victim, exiled in 1820. The years of hope came to an end when the young revolutionaries attempted an ill-organized coup d’état on the death of Alexander, which was mercilessly crushed by the new Tsar, Nicholas I (1825–55). The date of the revolt, 14 December 1825, gave the participants the name ‘Decembrists’.
Pushkin was still in exile at the time. During the previous years he had met the conspirators, but was not admitted to their ranks because of his volatility and indiscretion. However, when the new Tsar called him to Moscow and asked him what he would have done had he been present at the attempted revolt, Pushkin replied that he would have stood with his friends on the Senate Square in St Petersburg, the chosen place of the insurrection. Nicholas played a cat-and-mouse game with him, revoking his exile and promising to be his personal protector and censor. In fact, the task fell to the chief of the secret police. Pushkin married the beautiful Natalia Goncharova in 1831, who had no interest in his work and was happy only at court functions, which Pushkin hated, particularly after having been assigned a demeaning rank by the Tsar out of keeping with his age. Nor was he, either as a small landowner or a professional writer, able to pay for his wife’s expensive tastes.
From this moment Pushkin was trapped by the court until his death in a duel with a French émigré officer, the Baron D’ Anthès, who was paying attentions to his wife. Pushkin was thirty-seven. Later, the symbolist poet Alexander Blok remarked that it was not D’ Anthès’s bullet that killed Pushkin, but ‘lack of air’ in the court environment.
Although the Pushkin age was short-lived, and Pushkin himself died at thirty-seven, his work provided the seeds for the later Russian novel and several operas. Eugene Onegin inaugurated a lineage of superfluous men and self-sacrificing women in the novels of Mikhail Lermontov, Alexander Herzen and Ivan Turgenev, and in Tchaikovsky’s opera version of Pushkin’s novel-in-verse. Pushkin suggested the plots of Dead Souls and The Inspector General to Nikolai Gogol, appreciating the latter’s gifts for the grotesque that were outside his more classical bent. Leo Tolstoy emulated Pushkin’s storytelling manner, comparing it with Homer’s, and his novel Anna Karenina describes what might have happened to Tatiana had she given in to Onegin. With Fyodor Dostoevsky, who condemned the Onegin type as a Western intrusion and glorified Tatiana as the exemplar of Russian womanhood, a nationalist cult of Pushkin began that has not ceased. Radicals and conservatives fought over Pushkin’s characters as if they were real people. Opponents of Tsarism saw Onegin, Lensky and Tatiana as kindred victims of feudal Russia.
By birth Pushkin was deeply embedded in Russian history. On his father’s side he could boast a 600-year lineage as a nobleman. On his mother’s he was the great-grandson of an African princeling, stolen from the harem at Constantinople for Peter the Great, under whose tutelage he rose to the rank of general. The features of Gannibal, as he was called, still showed in his great-grandson, whose African roots gave him the romantic feeling of an outsider wanting to get back to his native land (Chapter I, stanza 50). But Pushkin was equally attached to Peter, who played a dominant part in his outlook and work (see The Bronze Horseman (1833) and Poltava (1828–9)). At the same time he was envious of the new aristocracy who owed their advancement to Peter (and then to Catherine), ousting the older nobility to which his family, on his father’s side, belonged. Unloved as a child, he found a new family in his lycée, where he made lasting friendships. He was famed for his love poetry, but friendship nevertheless remained his chief value, as Onegin attests, where friends form an invisible audience or enter directly into the novel.
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On 4 November 1823 Pushkin wrote to a friend, Prince Vyazemsky, from Odessa: ‘I am writing now not a novel, but a novel in verse – the devil of a differe
nce. Something like Don Juan – there’s no point in thinking about publication; I’m writing whatever comes into my head.’2 Odessa was Pushkin’s second place of exile after Kishinev, in Bessarabia. In Odessa he was in the employ of the Governor Count Vorontsov, who had little appreciation for his poetry, calling him ‘a weak imitator of a writer whose usefulness may be said to be very slight – Lord Byron’.3 The zest with which Pushkin wrote his new work reflected a hectic life that included an affair with the Governor’s wife.
In 1825, he was removed from Odessa, at the request of Vorontsov, to Mikhailovskoye, the Pushkin family estate in north-west Russia, which was to be his third and final place of exile, From there, in a letter to another friend, Alexander Bestuzhev, Pushkin wrote, in a different vein, about Onegin and Don Juan:
No one respects Don Juan more than I do… but it hasn’t anything in common with Onegin. You compare the satire of the Englishman Byron with mine, and demand the same thing of me! No, my dear fellow, you are asking a lot. Where is my satire? There’s not a hint of it in Eugene Onegin. The foundations of Petersburg would crack if I touched satire. – The very word ‘satirical’ should not have entered the preface. Wait for the other cantos… Canto One is merely a rapid introduction.4
Bestuzhev, himself a writer, was also a Decembrist. Many Decembrists were literary men, who, like Bestuzhev, saw their craft as a means of political struggle against autocracy and serfdom and were puzzled by Pushkin’s apparent departure from the radical poems that had sent him into exile. Why was Russia’s foremost poet, they asked, wasting his talent on the trivial lives of the gentry? In 1824, four years into exile, Pushkin declared in response to the most significant of Decembrist works, Kondraty Ryleyev’s Dumy (Reflections), that the aim of poetry was poetry. In a series of poems Ryleyev had evoked heroic figures from the past as models to be followed in the present. Pushkin questioned the accuracy of Ryleyev’s work, claiming that he was on the contrary projecting present ideals into the past.
