Dalton-Brown, S., Pushkin’s ‘Evgenii Onegin’ (London: Bristol Classical Press, 1997)
Hoisington, S. S. (ed.), Russian Views of Pushkin’s ‘Eugene Onegin’, trans. S. S. Hoisington and W. Arndt (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988)
Studies of Pushkin with discussion of Eugene Onegin
Bayley, John, Pushkin: A Comparative Commentary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971)
Bethea, D. (ed.), Pushkin Today (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993).
Greenleaf, M., Pushkin and Romantic Fashion: Fragment, Elegy, Orient, Irony (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994)
Hoisington, S. S. (ed.), A Plot of Her Own: The Female Protagonist in Russian Literature (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1995). Includes chapter by Hoisington on ‘Tatiana’
Kahn, Andrew (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Pushkin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Includes chapter on Onegin by Marcus Levitt
Sandler, S., Distant Pleasures: Alexander Pushkin and the Writing of Exile (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989)
Tertz, Abram (A. Sinyavsky), Strolls with Pushkin (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993)
Vickery, Walter, Alexander Pushkin, revised edn (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1992)
Studies of Russian literature with discussion of Eugene Onegin
Andrew, Joe, Writers and Society during the Rise of Russian Realism (London: Macmillan, 1980)
Fennell, J., Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature: Studies of Ten Russian Writers (London: Faber and Faber, 1973)
Freeborn, R., The Rise of the Russian Noveclass="underline" Studies in the Russian Novel from ‘Eugene Onegin’ to ‘War and Peace’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973)
Todd, W. Mills, Fiction and Society in the Age of Pushkin: Ideology, Institutions, and Narrative (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1986)
Wilson, Edmund, The Triple Thinkers (New York: Oregon Books, 1977). Twelve essays on literary subjects including ‘In Honour of Pushkin’
Woodward, James B., ‘The Principle of Contradictions in Evgeniy Onegin’ in Form and Meaning: Essays on Russian Literature (Columbus, OH: Slavica, c. 1993)
Other Writings on Pushkin
Bethea, David, Realizing Metaphors: Alexander Pushkin and the Life of the Poet (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998)
Clarke, Roger, Eugene Onegin and Four Tales from Russia’s Southern Frontier: A Prisoner in the Caucasus, The Fountain of Bachchisaray, Gipsies, Poltava (Herts: Wordsworth Classics, 2005). Translated into English prose with an Introduction and Commentary
Fennell, J., Selected Verse with Introduction and Prose Translations (Bristoclass="underline" Bristol Classical Press, 1991)
Lukács, G., Russian Realism in World Literature (London: Merlin Press, 1970). Includes ‘Pushkin’s Place in World Literature’
Richards, D. J. and Cockerell, C. R. S., Russian Views of Pushkin (Oxford: Willem A. Meeuws, 1976)
Wolff, Tatiana, Pushkin on Literature (London: Methuen, 1971)
A Note on the Translation
The Onegin stanza looks like a sonnet, but lacks the sonnet’s traditional antithesis of octet and sestet. It is more a mixture of contrasts of the kind listed in the Dedication. Antithesis and repetition are its building blocks. Pushkin’s poetry has been called a ‘poetry of grammar’.1 In Onegin, more than elsewhere, the poet plays with a language that is just settling into a standard form. If Pushkin sought a ‘nakedness’ in prose,2 he uses the bare elements of grammar – adverbs, conjunctions, interrogatives – to construct the Onegin stanza. Stanza 22 in Chapter I, for example, turns on five repetitions of ‘still’, cut off by a single ‘already’ in the final couplet:
Still cupids, devils, snakes keep leaping
Across the stage with noisy roars;
And weary footmen still are sleeping
On furs at the theatre doors;
There’s coughing still and stamping, slapping,
Blowing of noses, hissing, clapping;
Still inside, outside, burning bright,
The lamps illuminate the night;
And still in harness shivering horses
Fidget, while coachmen round a fire,
Beating their palms together, tire,
Reviling masters with their curses;
Already, though, Onegin’s gone
To put some new apparel on.
Pushkin’s ‘stills’ initiate the lines, which I was unable to follow. Only Nabokov, in his literal translation, reproduces Pushkin’s syntax exactly, which is a useful exercise for showing how the poetry depends on the deployment of grammar, but makes no pretence to be poetic. Repetition and contrast of primary words form an armature for the Onegin stanza. But such words or particles are usually more open-throated than their English equivalents. The Russian conjunctions ‘i’ and ‘a’, for example, meaning ‘and’ and ‘but’, can be repeated melodically, whereas the repetition of their equivalents in translation will be rebarbative. The same holds for the interrogatives ‘when’, ‘what’, ‘which’, all ending in consonants, where their Russian equivalents terminate in vowels: ‘kogda’, ‘shto’, ‘kakoi/kotory’ and can take any number of repetitions. For this reason the structure of the Onegin stanza can easily fall apart in translation.
The iambic tetrameter is an octosyllabic line with a weak and strong beat repeated four times (as in ‘The boy stood on the burning deck’). This is the so-called ‘masculine line’, which has a strong stress on the final syllable. The ‘feminine line’ adds an unstressed syllable (‘The boy stood on the burning vessel’). The Onegin stanza is made up of eight masculine lines and six feminine. It is a succinct line, which can be used more flexibly in Russian because of the greater variety of long and short words. English is more monosyllabic. Any stanza of my translation will have used on the average a third more words than the original. This may be an argument for employing the pentameter (five stresses) instead. It is after all the classic verse of English poetry just as the tetrameter is of Russian. But to do so would miss the cadences of the original and the lightness of Pushkin’s line. One danger of the tetrameter in English is that it can easily degenerate into a jingle as it did in the vers de société of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
There is another technical problem – the ‘feminine’, or unstressed, ending (e.g. ‘rapture’), for which there are relatively few rhymes in English compared with what Russian’s inflected vocabulary offers, so that the translator is too often reduced to using the ‘shon’ words – ‘machination’, ‘domination’ – to which I, too, plead guilty. Instead I have allowed myself near-rhymes: ‘Lyudmila’/’fellow’, ‘service’/’impervious’, ‘Latin’/’smattering’. While feminine rhyming is more problematic, I have also used near or half-rhymes for many ‘masculine’ (stressed) endings, where I thought an exact rhyme would constrain the meaning: ‘live’/‘love’, ‘face’/’peace’, ‘Muse’/’joys’. These two practices have been customary in English poetry since at least the start of the last century. I have noticed an excess of padding and distortion in previous translations that keep resolutely to exact rhyming. But not every half-rhyme is euphonious, and in the end I’ve had to rely on my ear. In the metre too I have introduced the irregularity of a trochee (strong beat/weak beat) at the beginning of a line, again in common with poetic usage, certainly since Shakespeare. Although I am familiar with previous translations, at no point in my own did I consult them, but from Nabokov’s literal version I borrowed several phrases.