Pushkin's intricate and playful exploration of the connections between art and life permeates the work. His own practice as a poet is a case in point, issuing not only from his own genius, but from his enormous reading and his extensive knowledge of literary tradition. The novel's verse, poetry of the highest order, is also at times a pastiche of all the many clichs of poetic imagery and diction, of the techniques and formal conventions of a vast existing literature; though the writer may violate or mix or parody these traditions, he cannot exist without them. In support of its author's sly yet revealing game, the novel is full of literary allusions and references to other writers; it mocks the easy conflation of literature and life in countless ways: by the device, for example, of mixing real with fictional personages. Most prominently, of course, Pushkin has inserted himself into his book, not only as its narrator, but as the ostensible friend of its hero, Onegin. Tatyana, to give another instance, encounters and captivates at a Moscow soire Prince Vyazemsky, Pushkin's actual friend and fellow-poet. When the poem momentarily turns historical novel, the Emperor Napoleon briefly appears, only to be condemned as the impostor (in Russian memory) whose heroic pretensions were consumed by a Moscow conflagration and by life's intractability. Napoleon also figures in the novel as an icon of the European romantic imagination and, ironically, as the idol of the westernized Russian Onegin, who keeps a statuette of his hero in his study.
Again and again the work demonstrates that cultural myths are deeply embedded in the modern consciousness, that we cannot disentangle ourselves from our words or extricate our 'selves' from our texts. None of this, happily, seems to make human nature in Pushkin's eyes any less real or human characters any less responsible for their actions. The disguises we wear and the poses we assume or, contrastingly, the more active and creative roles that we may elect to play in life, define us as human beings.
The early-nineteenth-century critic Belinsky remarked famously that Pushkin's novel is 'an encyclopedia of Russian life'. Although it is currently fashionable to disparage Belinsky's 'crudely sociological' approach to literature, there is much to be said (especially if we remove the word 'Russian') for his observation. For all this work's literary self-consciousness (it is an encyclopedia of literature, too), what a richly woven and glittering tapestry of life it contains, much of it supplied in apparently casual passing fashion, as was Pushkin's way. He shows us the theatre, where on a public stage writers, actors, and audience all perform and where the wings become a setting for erotic adventure; he gives us dance in its many shapes and styles: the ballet, the society ball, the country shindig, the peasant stomp; other music and song: in opera, in a regimental band, in the singing of serf-girls; food and dining, in fashionable restaurants and at rustic feasts; the architectural environment in churches, palaces, city mansions, apartments, urban hovels, and country manors; the varying styles of clothing; the books; the protocols of duelling; the customs of matchmaking, courtship, and marriage; life as played out in passionate youth and in resigned middle-age; the relationships of parents and children; the ways of the contemporary city and the ancient traditions of the countryside; the horses and conveyances that people use (which are also metaphors for the Pushkinian rush to experience life's variety, or at least to observe it from the window of a moving carriage)all the activities, codes, customs, and conventions through which we live and which
determine, whether we observe or defy them, who we are. And note as well the lively capsule biographies of some of the novel's minor characters: Tatyana's parents, Onegin's father and uncle, the rake Zaretsky, and even the two alternative futures imagined for Lensky beyond the novel's time-frame. Once again, in these mini-biographies, the author's touch is light and fleeting, his method the sparing use of a few trivial and prosaic details, the more insignificant the more telling.
Let me close these brief introductory remarks on Pushkin's masterwork with a few observations on some of its autobiographical implications. It presents, among its other texts, the writer's report to himself at mid-career, recording his discoveries about life and art and his concerns for his creative future. Not only the novel's narrator, it should be noted, but also the three other major characters are quite clearly expressions of Pushkin's personality. Onegin, despite the author's disclaimer to the contrary, bears some of Pushkin's own human traits, and the two share a number of social masks; the essential and decisive difference between them, of course, is that Onegin has none of the poet in him. Lensky, on the other hand, who does possess a genuine if immature poetic sensibility, is not unlike the younger Pushkin, a persona the writer has outgrown and now regards with affectionate irony. The conflict in the novel between Onegin and Lensky, so perplexingly motivated in terms of the characters' psychology, represents much more plausibly a conflict in the soul of the author, a struggle between his 'prosaic' and 'poetic' selves (recall the description when the two characters first meet: Lensky all poetry, Onegin all prose). If it seems that Pushkin takes the cynical Onegin rather seriously and merely mocks the naive Lensky, this is something of a subterfuge, a device to conceal his own passionate commitment, even as he questions it, to poetry. Onegin, Pushkin's 'friend', is at once his baser alter ego and a symbol of his new allegiance to the truths of prose. Tatyana, whom the narrator calls his 'ideal' and who by the novel's end is identified with Pushkin's Muse, seems on a symbolic plane to stand as the
artist's emblem for the native sources of his poetry, or as an avatar of his art itself. She is a figure who, though unhappy and unfree (like Pushkin himself), remains steadfast in her adherence to values beyond the gratifications of the self. There is an undeniable sadness in this sparkling novel, especially at its end. If it opened to the tune of a sprightly scherzo, it closes to the strains of a somewhat mournful adagio. Pain and disappointment have a prominent place in the world of Onegin, but so too does the celebration of life in all its enticing minutiae; and thus the novel gives us neither a conventionally happy nor a conventionally unhappy ending. It avoids, to be sure, any overt statement of tragedy, for the hero and heroine still live, are indeed still relatively young. Their stories, abruptly abandoned in typically Pushkinian fashion, remain incomplete, their ultimate fates still unresolved. In his final chapter does Pushkin even try to rescue his hapless hero from the shallowness of his egoism? Does he seek to make him worthy through his suffering of someone's, if not Tatyana's, love? Could the tale that unwinds beyond the pages of the book be resumed, could it take unexpected turns and move in new directions, are other outcomes possible? One suspects, despite the aesthetically pleasing roundedness of the poem, that the answers are yes, that other roads lie ahead for the heroes, that life still beckons. In his generosity of spirit the author gives to his characters, and thereby to himself, the possibility of renewal. The concluding chapters of Eugene Onegin are Pushkin's farewell to his poetic youth. Henceforth, in his effort to reinvent himself, and as a sign of his commitment to become yet more fully engaged in the life of literature, he would devote his energies mainly to prose. For Pushkin, however, to cease completely to be a poet was to die, and in his 'novel in verse' he announces a continuing will to live. Life's chalice, he tells us in its final stanza, never runs dry, life's novel (which the artist both reads and writes) never comes to an end for the taker of risks.