The narrative poem Ruslan and Lyudmila (1817–20) was written, apart from its Introduction and Epilogue, before his exile and encounter with Byron’s ‘Southern’ poems. Its light-hearted tone links it much more with the later Byron of Don Juan, which prompted the writing of Onegin. Belonging to the exuberant tradition of mock-epic going back via Voltaire to Ariosto in the Renaissance, it is set in Kievan Russia, cradle of Russian civilization, in the reign of the Grand Duke Vladimir (c. 978–1015). Yet it is shot through with ironic references to contemporary St Petersburg, echoing Pushkin’s three wild years there after leaving school. The poem ensured Pushkin’s fame. Nothing like it had ever been heard before. Essentially a fairy tale, with some historical elements, it tells of the abduction of Lyudmila from her bridal bed by the wicked dwarf magician, Chernomor, and how her bridegroom, Ruslan, outwits and defeats three rivals to rescue her. It is to this playful atmosphere that Pushkin returns after three years of exile in ‘accursed Kishinev’, putting behind him his Romantic poems (except for The Gipsies) and introducing a new hero:
Friends of Ruslan and of Lyudmila,
Let me acquaint you with this fellow,
The hero of my novel, pray,
Without preamble or delay:
My friend Onegin was begotten
By the Neva, where maybe you
Originated, reader, too
Or where your lustre’s not forgotten
(Chapter I, stanza 2)
The old Romantic hero is brought back to St Petersburg and placed in the social context he has deserted. While he bears the scars of his predecessors, he is now the subject of irony.
5
Started in 1823 in Kishinev, Onegin was completed eight years later in the village of Tsarskoye Selo, which housed both the imperial summer palace and Pushkin’s lycée. Pushkin finished Chapter I in 1824 in Odessa on the Black Sea, to which he was transferred after Kishinev, and published it separately in 1825. Chapter II he wrote in the same year in Odessa together with part of Chapter III, which he completed in the following year, 1825, on the family estate at Mikhailovskoye in north-west Russia and his last place of exile. Here, from 1825 to 1827, he wrote Chapters IV to part of VII, which he finished in St Petersburg in 1828. Chapter VIII he wrote in Boldino, his father’s estate in the province of Nizhny Novgorod, south-west of Moscow, in 1830, revising it and adding Onegin’s letter in Tsarskoye Selo in 1831. By then he was thirty-two.
It will be seen from this trajectory that the romantic involvements of the four characters largely coincide with Pushkin’s stay in Mikhailovskoye. The countryside described in these chapters – the cornfields stretching out from Onegin’s manor house, the fields, valleys and woods where Tatiana wanders – reproduce the surroundings of Pushkin’s family estate. Exile was lonely here, forbidding the dissipations enjoyed in Kishinev and Odessa, but it allowed him to write the central chapters of Onegin and the magnificent historical drama Boris Godunov. And, as happened when the Rayevskys passed through Kishinev, so here in the neighbouring estate of Trigorskoye Pushkin found a hospitable family with attractive, intelligent daughters to engage his affections and his poetry. To one of the Rayevsky daughters has been ascribed the famous digression on little feet in Chapter I. Pushkin wrote his final tragic and bitter St Petersburg chapter in Boldino, where on his engagement to Natalia Goncharova he had received 200 serfs from his father and so become a landowner. His most creative times were spent in Boldino, but his desire to settle there foundered on the demands of his wife and the Tsar, both of whom wanted him in the capital. While Pushkin was now at the height of his powers, his popularity started to wane as an indifferent, bourgeois reading public emerged and populist journalists began attacking aristocratic literature. Pushkin’s growing isolation left its tone on much of the last chapter. Even the critic Vissarion Belinsky, his champion in the next generation, called him a poet of the landowning class. Belinsky, a commoner, strove for an embattled and critical literature that would replace what he saw as Pushkin’s resigned acceptance of the status quo. Nevertheless, he described Onegin as an ‘encyclopedia of Russian life’.14 In the new intellectual world of Russia, divided into opposing camps, especially the Westernizers and Slavophiles, it was not possible to repeat Pushkin’s universality, at least not in verse, and in prose not before Tolstoy. Pushkin’s many-sidedness did indeed depend on the pivotal position of the minor nobility and the momentary hope for national unity that inspired its most remarkable members. It also required a reading public for which poetry was still the most meaningful literary idiom. Eugene Onegin generated themes and characters for subsequent writers, but as a form it remained unique. One or two poets, notably Mikhail Lermontov, attempted something similar, but without success. Pushkin himself uses the Onegin stanza again in a small fragment, Yezersky (1832), in which he laments the decline of the old nobility. The hero, descendant of an ancient lineage, is now a civil servant, so anticipating the deliberately named Eugene of The Bronze Horseman (1833), who, no longer a nobleman, is destroyed by one of the recurrent floods that invade Peter the Great’s historic city.
The original Chapter VIII was meant to describe Onegin’s journey between leaving his estate and returning to St Petersburg. Chapter IX would have been the present Chapter VIII. In 1853, Pavel Katenin, writing to Pavel Annenkov, Pushkin’s biographer, suggested a political reason for the chapter’s exclusion:
Concerning the eighth chapter of Onegin, I heard from the late poet in 1832 that besides the Nizhny market and the Odessa port, Eugene saw the military settlements organized by Count Arakcheyev, and here occurred remarks, judgements, expressions that were too violent for publication and he decided were best assigned to eternal oblivion. Therefore, he discarded the whole chapter from his tale – a chapter that after cancellation has become too short and, so to speak, impoverished.15
The aim of these military establishments, established by Alexei Arakcheyev in 1817, was to reduce the cost of a standing army during peacetime by dragooning government peasants into labour camps, where they would combine military service with working on the land under punitive discipline. One of these settlements outside Odessa might have attracted the attention of Onegin as it did that of the Decembrist leader, Pavel Pestel, who hoped to break into it at the time of the planned revolt and incite the detainees to mutiny. As it stands, the published Fragment resembles a travelogue punctuated by the hero’s cries of ‘ennui’, as he moves restlessly from one place to another. Critics have noticed a similarity with Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, which continued to fascinate Pushkin and which he attempted to translate as late as 1836.