Whether I’m piercèd by an arrow
Or whether it should miss – all’s welclass="underline"
A predetermined hour will tell
If we’re to wake or sleep tomorrow
(Chapter VI, stanza 21)
Pushkin describes, as if from a manual, the loading of pistols:
The pistols glistened; soon the mallets
Resoundingly on ramrods flicked,
Through cut-steel barrels went the bullets,
The cock has for the first time clicked.
(Chapter VI, stanza 29)
Irony bridges the several, often contradictory planes of the novel – linguistic, stylistic, cultural, social. There is scarcely anything in Onegin, from characters to environment, from convictions to sentiment, that is not touched by it. The one exception is Pushkin’s description of nature. Onegin reflects a world in flux. Some commentators have compared his irony with that of the German Romantics. This is wrong. The latter conceived the world as an illusion to be ironically punctured, not in favour of the real world, but a primordial chaos. Postmodernists have interpreted Pushkin in a similar way. Like the Romantics, Pushkin uses irony to remove illusion, but this makes his fictional world more rather than less real, which is how it was taken to be by his contemporaries and the generations that followed them.
Of Lensky and Onegin, for example, Alexander Herzen, exiled revolutionary of the decade succeeding Pushkin, wrote:
Between these two types – between the dedicated enthusiast and poet and, on the other hand, the weary, embittered and useless man, between Lensky’s grave and Onegin’s boredom – stretched the deep and muddy river of civilized Russia, with its aristocrats, bureaucrats, officers, gendarmes, grand-dukes and emperor – a dumb and formless mass of baseness, obsequiousness, bestiality and envy, a formless mass which draws in and engulfs everything.8
Or, as Pushkin puts it, that ‘slough/Where, friends, we bathe together now’ (Chapter VI, stanza 46). I have already referred to Dostoyevsky’s praise for Tatiana as the epitome of Russian womanhood.
Nevertheless, the characters are not of the kind we find in a realist prose novel. They are silhouettes. The encounters between Onegin and Tatiana are few, and the decisive ones are the responses to letters. There is a simple symmetry about their relationship: Tatiana falls in love with Onegin and is rejected; Onegin falls in love with her and is rejected. It is the symmetry of a mathematical equation or a chemical formula of the kind that Goethe pursues in his novel The Elective Affinities (1809). It gives the relationship between hero and heroine a spare objectivity that is consolidated by the central preoccupations of the novel – the nature of passion, romantic love, romantic literature, libertinage, marriage, the position of women, morality. Neither Onegin nor Tatiana develops slowly; they jump from situation to situation like film cuts. Pushkin agreed with his friend Katenin that the result of omitting the former Chapter VIII (Onegin’s Journey) was to make ‘the transition from Tatiana the provincial miss to Tatiana the grande dame… too unexpected and unexplained’ (Foreword to Fragments of Onegin’s Journey). But it is not just a question of excising a chapter. The characters are not the ‘independent’ actors of prose fiction. They are half-lyrical, half-novelistic. This is obvious in Chapter I, where Pushkin enters the story as Onegin’s friend, sharing the same discontent. They cross one another’s paths twice again in the novel, in Onegin’s Journey (stanza 10), when Onegin traverses the same route in the Caucasus that Pushkin had taken at the beginning of his exile, and in a variant, when they meet face to face in Odessa. Yet Pushkin is quick to disclaim identification with him. What we see in Chapter I is a fusion of poet and hero, followed by their parting, when Onegin is invited to his uncle’s deathbed, and resumes his separate status. But Pushkin’s friendship and their travel plans give Onegin a deeper sensibility than was evident before. The theme of exile unites them both – self-imposed for Onegin, who flees his killing of Lensky. Even after this Pushkin continues to speak indulgently of his hero. At the end of the novel Pushkin bids farewell to his ‘strange comrade’ (the Russian word sputnik can mean ‘travelling companion’). Onegin is part Pushkin’s earlier self.
In Chapter VIII Pushkin’s Muse embodies each of Pushkin’s feminine ideals in turn until she becomes Tatiana. (In Onegin’s Journey (stanza 9) he embraces the ideal of the housewife!) Pushkin’s friend the poet Wilhelm Küchelbecker remarked that he saw Pushkin himself in the new Tatiana. It has also been suggested that Pushkin intended his heroine as a model for his future wife to follow. There has been an industry of attempts in Russia to identify Pushkin’s characters with real people. But the direct source of his characters is his poetry. They are poetic creations. They proceed from his lyrical self. Pushkin constantly refers to them as ‘my Eugene’, ‘my Tatiana’, ‘my Lensky’. Each is endowed with a specific vocabulary that accompanies him or her through the story. Onegin is ‘strange’, ‘odd’, ‘eccentric’, ‘addicted to dreams’, ‘abrasive’, his mind is ‘sharp’ and ‘chilled’, his humour ‘bilious’, his epigrams ‘dark’. Nor is he just a Russian type. Pushkin noted in a draft that Onegin always took three novels with him: Charles Mathurin’s Melmoth the Wanderer, François-René de Chateaubriand’s René and Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe:
In which the epoch was displayed
And modern man put on parade
And fairly faithfully depicted:
With his depraved, immoral soul,
Dried up and egotistical,
To dreaming endlessly addicted,
With his embittered, seething mind
To futile enterprise consigned.
(Chapter VII, stanza 22)
The epithets attending Tatiana belong, by contrast, to elegiac poetry. She is ‘wayward’, ‘silent’, ‘sad’, ‘shy’, ‘dreamy’, ‘contemplative’, ‘languid’, ‘pale’, ‘strange’ – ‘strange’ not in the manner of Onegin, but as an anomaly in her family, in rural society and later in the monde where she hides her true feelings. In the early chapters she is always to be found at a window, contemplating the moon. Tatiana is transformed when she becomes a princess, but when she tells Onegin that this is only outward show, she speaks as she used to when she first met him. Like Onegin she is characterized by the foreign novels she reads. These, however, are the pre-Romantic or sentimental novels of the eighteenth century rather than the early nineteenth-century Romantic fiction that Onegin enjoys. She identifies with the heroines of Samuel Richardson, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Mme de Staël, whose novel Delphine appeared just at the beginning of the new century, in 1802. Although Tatiana is ‘Russian to the core’ (Chapter V, stanza 4), her letter to Onegin is not only a translation of a non-existent French original, but, as Nabokov has shown, French translators have found no difficulty in rendering it back into their own language more or less literally. It echoes not only phrases from Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse, one of Tatiana’s favourite novels, but other French sources beyond Tatiana’s ken. The letter can be decoded as a palimpsest of borrowings, while it retains the spontaneous passion that has moved generations of readers in Russia.9