The language of the novel, although largely the idiom of the nobility, extends into popular speech, for which Pushkin was often taken to task at the time by conservative critics. Surpassing previous writers in this respect, Pushkin took his Russian directly from the streets, the market-places and the country estates. In Onegin he honours his Decembrist friend Pavel Katenin for translating Corneille’s Le Cid (Chapter I, stanza 18). French neo-classicism and its heroic language were a model for the revolutionary nobility. Pushkin’s Boris Godunov, by contrast, abounds with ordinary speech, as does his historical novel The Captain’s Daughter. ‘Vulgar’ expressions enter into the most intimate of Pushkin’s lyrics. By and large, writers came from the gentry, that is the minor nobility, and shared on their estates a common culture with their serfs, as the Larin family does in Onegin, despite differences in status and education. The Larin family is not wealthy. It does not employ foreign tutors or governesses. The Westernized Onegin, by contrast, grows up, handed from one to another. Only the serf nurse looks after the two sisters.
As early as Chapter III of Onegin Pushkin announces that he might give up poetry for prose. At this moment in the story he is responding to the harmful effect of Western novels and tales upon Tatiana. In the place of these he proposes to write an idyllic novel about innocent love and the ancient ways of Russia, but does no such thing, instantly returning to his heroine’s romantic agony. Towards the end of Chapter VI, as he contemplates his passing youth, he considers again the abandonment of poetry:
To Spartan prose the years are turning,
Coquettish rhyme the years are spurning;
And I – I with a sigh confess –
I’m running after her much less.
(Stanza 43)
The novel-in-verse, as Pushkin chose to call his poem, is a workshop out of which his later prose fiction emerges. His Dedication to his publisher, written after he had completed five chapters, pinpoints the character of his new work:
Accept these chapters and their rhymes,
Half-comic and half-melancholic,
Ideal and down-to-earth bucolic…
The intellect’s cold observations,
The heart’s impressions marked in tears.
Pushkin prefaced his first chapter, which he published on its own in 1825, with ‘A Conversation Between a Bookseller and a Poet’, in which the poet argues the rights of poetry against the requirements of the market. After a flood of Romantic protestation the poet suddenly accepts the bookseller’s case, abandons his verse and negotiates the sale of his manuscript in three short sentences of prose: ‘You’re perfectly right. Here’s my manuscript. Let’s come to terms.’
What Pushkin calls his ‘descent’ to prose is, however, more than a matter of using ordinary language. The death of the poet Lensky in Chapter VI not only sounds the knell of Pushkin’s youth, too, but questions the future of his own poetry in a world that kills imagination:
Let not a poet’s soul be frozen,
Made rough and hard, reduced to bone
And finally be turned to stone
In that benumbing world he goes in,
In that intoxicating slough
Where, friends, we bathe together now.
(Stanza 46)
From now on the tone of the novel changes. Pushkin completed Chapter VI about four months after the five Decembrist leaders were hanged. Repeatedly, in his manuscripts he draws sketches of his friends on the gallows, in one case adding ‘this might have been me’. In an omitted stanza he suggests that Lensky, too, had he lived, could have swung from the gallows like the Decembrist poet Ryleyev, who was also Pushkin’s acquaintance. Pushkin’s distancing from the Decembrists was part of his ‘descent’ to prose, yet the executions of his friends haunted him for the rest of his life, as they do the pages of Onegin.
Chapters VII and VIII present a post-Decembrist world full of nonentities with the exception of his poet friend Vyazemsky, who comforts an unhappy Tatiana on her entry into the monde – the same Vyazemsky from whom the epigraph to Chapter I is taken. Both Tatiana and Onegin are hopelessly isolated in this new milieu, despite the former’s well-schooled endeavours to behave comme il faut, which, as she confesses to Onegin, are a pretence. The term ‘prose’ refers not only to language, but to the prosaic world of Russia at all its levels. In Onegin Pushkin turned this prose into a new kind of poetry.
Pushkin belongs to a European shift from poetry to prose that Edmund Wilson characterizes in his excellent essay ‘In Honour of Pushkin’ (1937):
It was as if in those generations where Byron, Shelley, Keats, Leopardi, and Poe were dead in their twenties or thirties or barely reached forty, where Coleridge and Wordsworth and Beddoes and Musset burned out while still alive, where Lermontov, like Pushkin, was killed in a duel, before he was twenty seven – it was as if in that great age of the bourgeois ascendancy – and even in still feudal Russia – it were impossible for a poet to survive.
He adds:
There was for the man of imagination and moral passion a basic maladjustment to society in which only the student of society – the social philosopher, the historian, the novelist – could find himself and learn to function. And to deal with the affairs of society, he had to learn to speak its language, he had – as Goethe and Hugo did, as Pushkin did just before he died – to train himself to write in prose.6
A heroic age had come to an end that began with the French Revolution and of which the Decembrist revolt was Europe’s last echo. In poems of 1821 and 1824 Pushkin mourned the death of the epoch’s giants, Napoleon and Byron, despite his fluctuating attitudes to them. (Onegin’s study is adorned with a portrait of Byron and a statuette of Napoleon.) Pushkin was already concerning himself with the role of prose in 1822, at the height of his Romantic period, a decade before he embarked on prose fiction, insisting on the need for ‘precision and brevity’, as well as ‘thought and more thought’. While poetry, he acknowledged, was different, it, too, he declared, would benefit from ‘a larger stock of ideas’, adding: ‘Our literature won’t get very far on memories of vanished youth.’7
Pushkin is referring here to elegiac poetry, including his own, which prevailed in his day. Onegin is, of course, full of ‘memories of vanished youth’, largely in the digressions. An ironic seesaw turns between ‘remembrance of things past’ and the narrative demands of the present. Recidivist memories are quenched by a brisk couplet, allowing the story to continue, as in the ‘little feet’ digression from Chapter I:
Their charming words and glances cheat
As surely as… their little feet.
(Stanza 34)
Or a digressive stanza tunes back into the narrative, as when Pushkin, having mourned the absence of ballerinas he has known in the past, whisks his hero into the theatre of today:
My goddesses! Where now? Forsaken?
Oh hearken to my call, I rue:
Are you the same? Have others taken
Your place without replacing you?
When shall I listen to your chorus,
Behold in soul-filled flight before us
Russia’s Terpsichore again?…
The house is full; the boxes brilliant…
(Chapter I, stanzas 19–20)
The digressions are slower in pace than the narrative, more insistent, impassioned, full of questions. The language is more archaic, more ‘poetical’. Pushkin’s narrative in general is precise, brief and straightforward. Rarely is a noun accompanied by more than one adjective. But Pushkin’s recourse to the past is more than a question of ‘vanished memories’. It is also an attachment to past values, traditions, institutions, sometimes ironically expressed, but not always. In a world dominated by Western fashions Pushkin likes to return to the ‘good, old days’. He is constantly calling his generation ‘light’, that is, without depth, not rooted. The digressions refer either to the past or the future, to ‘vanished memories’ or future hopes. Tatiana and Onegin are likewise immersed in their past, while Lensky thinks only of a happy or heroic future. Nevertheless, the narrative takes place in the present, although told mostly in the pasttense. Here is the real world which Pushkin describes with a mixture of realism and irony – from the benevolent evocations of country customs to the repugnant chatter of the monde. The most Romantic episode in the novel, Tatiana’s dream, is firmly based in folklore. The digressions remain the locus of romanticism, but they are always tempered with irony, as in the examples given above, and they get fewer towards the end of the novel. Romanticism and realism contrast most starkly in the Narrative between Lensky’s elegiac poem written on the eve of the duel and Pushkin’s meticulous account of the duel itself. Where Lensky writes: