Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin, and the Man who Predicted his Own Death
"Love's a joke that Santan plays on gentlefolk" - stanza 21, chapter IV
One thing about me is that I love making lists. I have a weird need to rank and categorise my favourite movies, brands, dishes, tv shows, and of course, books. I once made a list of my favourite love stories, which included Atonement, Before Sunrise trilogy, Wuthering Heights, Romeo and Juliet, Anna Karenina, the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, and Eugene Onegin. As I established them, I realised they all have one thing in common: the lovers don’t end up together.
I didn’t notice this particularity until I gathered them in a group, and I confess I was a bit surprised by my tendency to tragedy. Then I thought something was wrong with me (as one inevitably does) because this fascination with tragic love stories can’t be good for my mental health and relationships right?
So I spent roughly a week (I kid you not) reflecting on why I prefer tragic and doomed love stories – a self-discovery moment if you will. First I blamed society and the patriarchy for pushing a narrative where love is supposed to be complicated and irrevocably worse for the woman; then I blamed my teenage media consumption with The Vampire Diaries and borderline psychotic 1D fanfics; I blamed my Cancer venus; and finally, I decided that there was no one to blame because being dramatic is not a crime. In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche conjectured why we see beauty in tragedy (is beauty really terror? do we truly quiver before what we call beautiful?), stating that Beauty is both an “intimation of the horror of life and a consolation for it”; it couldn’t be the latter unless it was simultaneously the former. Art at its greatest, he said, tells the truth and makes it possible to bear it.
But still, I needed a solid reason – so I conducted a psychological investigation on myself and here are the conclusions. I have seemingly contradictory natures: I’m a Romantic while a practical pessimist; I’m emotional but I usually guide my decisions by logic. In my worldview, as much as I love romance, it is more plausible that a couple is tragically separated than achieving the ‘happily ever after’.
I do not think that love conquers all. On the contrary, I think love is so rare and requires so much luck and effort, that I find Anna's suicide in front of a train due to moral torture more compelling than the marriage of Elizabeth-the-cottage-girl and Darcy-the-millionaire. So far as I'm concerned, the story that presents the most authenticity - at least within my pessimistic view of reality - unintentionally wins a place in my heart. And I think that says a lot about me.
Eugene Onegin is my favourite love story precisely because of its tragic nature: the right person wrong time trope, the too-late realisation, the lost opportunities, and the sense that all misfortune could’ve been avoided – if only. The storyline is rich with powerful dramatic elements, which makes sense considering the literary context of Romanticism and the influence of German sentimentalism on Pushkin. Happy endings just sound too good to be true and that’s what gets me.
The Romantic Anti-Hero
I first discovered Pushkin’s story through the 1999 film adaptation with Ralph Fiennes and Liv Tyler, a visually beautiful piece decently faithful to the novel. Then I watched the Ballet version, which I deemed a true masterpiece (especially with the Royal Ballet company). When I finally read the book exactly one year ago, I was well familiar with the plot – but this did not spoil the reading experience in the slightest. Eugene Onegin is worth reading first and foremost due to its writing: a marvellously lyrical text, every sentence perfectly composed. Despite the seemingly restricted poetic form, Pushkin develops his characters psychologically as far as possible within the limits of his pre-Realist literary method, creating characters that appear to exist independently from the author-narrator's consciousness. Eugene Onegin is indeed a ‘poet's novel,’ but not due to stanzas alone.
Pushkin was hailed as the leading Russian poet of the day and the head of the romantic, liberty-loving generation of the 1820s. In May 1823 he started composing his greatest legacy, the novel in verse Eugene Onegin (1833), on which he continued to work relentlessly until 1831. In it, he turned to the idea of presenting a typical figure of his own age but in a wider setting and employing new artistic and textual techniques. Just like Turgenev introduced the “superfluous man” of the 1840s, Pushkin gave us the melancholic gentleman of the 1820s.
As well as creating a new novel, Pushkin invented a new stanza: the iambic tetrameter with alternating feminine and masculine rhymes, one of the reasons he is deemed Russia’s Shakespeare. Eugene Onegin unfolds a panoramic picture of bourgeois Russian life, and his characters are predecessors of what would later become Russian archetypes: Onegin, the disenchanted sceptic; Lensky, the romantic idealist; and Tatyana, the heroine and a “precious ideal,” in the poet’s own words. They are portrayed concerning the social and environmental forces by which they are products.
One of the most curious elements of the novel is the mysterious narrator (who at times appears to be the author himself), acting as an authoritative, omniscient and omnipresent presence. He tells the tale some years after the event he narrates, and is in no sense a detached, objective observer of the type we find in so many of the novels of later Realist writers. He is physically present in parts of the story as Onegin's friend, and he does not hide his emotional involvement with the characters whose lives he relates – especially Tatiana's.
The main character, Eugene, has the narrative characteristics of a Byronic hero, but with the cynicism that only the Russians can portray. He is a rich man in his 30s, without friends, family, beliefs, occupations or reason to live. He reminded me a lot of Des Esseintes from the french novel À Rebours written by Joris-Karl Huysmans (a great influence on Oscar Wilde). After inheriting a property in the countryside, he moves there and begins a polite yet contemptuous relationship with his neighbours: the sisters Tatiana and Olga, and the young gentleman Lensky whom he later befriends. The dynamic of these four people reminded me a lot of Austen's novel Pride & Prejudice: Onegin being Darcy, Lensky - Mr Bingly, Tatiana - Elizabeth and Olga - Jane. Only that none of these characters ends up together.
I have an inclination to cherish tragic characters above others, especially if they are morally tormented – that’s one of the reasons for my fondness for Hamlet. Personally, I think Onegin is a little like the Danish Prince, but he’s more on the anti-hero spectrum. Onegin is responsible for all the suffering throughout the novel, especially his own: he destroys his best friend’s life, breaks the heart of the only woman who could ever love him and condemns her sister to an unhappy spinster fate. And while Pushkin played with autobiography, the novel turned out to be more accurate than he could’ve ever imagined: like Pushkin himself, Onegin gets involved in a duel, though the character survives by killing his opponent, Pushkin was murdered at the hand of his own.
The Poet’s Life and Ominous Death
I think the author deserves a little presentation on his life before we move on to his overtly interesting death. Very well. Aleksander Pushkin, a Gemini, was born into one of Russia’s most famous noble families. His mother was the granddaughter of an Abyssinian prince, Hannibal, who had been a favourite of Tsar Peter I, and many of Pushkin’s forebears played important roles in Russian history. Pushkin began writing poetry as a student at the Lyceum at Tsarskoe Selo, a school for aristocratic youth. As a young man, he was immersed in French poetry and Russian Neoclassicism, as well as in such English writers as William Shakespeare, Lord Byron, Sir Walter Scott, and the Lake poets.
Overall, Pushkin’s life was marked by political and romantic scandals. Due to his political verses and epigrams, he was made the main influence for the ideas and aspirations of the participants in the Decembrist rising of 1825, the unsuccessful culmination of a Russian revolutionary movement in its earliest stage. These political associations were catastrophic because he got banished from St. Petersburg to a remote southern province. However, once the Decembrists were suppressed, the new Tsar Nicholas I, aware of Pushkin’s immense popularity and knowing that he had taken no part in the Decembrist “conspiracy,” allowed him to return to Moscow in the autumn of 1826.
In 1831, Pushkin married Natalia Goncharova. Her beauty and favour at court led to many problems for him: the Tsar himself was infatuated with her, as was the French royalist George D’Anthès who openly pursued Natalia for years. The couple met D’Anthès in 1834 and he began paying court to her in 1835. The whole affair came to a head when Pushkin received a letter informing him that he had been elected to ‘The Most Serene Order of Cuckolds’ (I laughed out loud). Although it was never proven that Natalia had been unfaithful, Pushkin eventually challenged D’Anthès to a duel that took place on the afternoon of 27 January 1837. The Poet was shot in the stomach and died from the wound two days later. While the court sympathized with D’Anthès, the Russian public mourned Pushkin with great intensity.
The way his death occurred was uncannily similar to the death he wrote for Onegin’s romantic poet friend, Lensky. In the novel, Onegin dances and flirts with Olga, Lensky’s object of affection. Being a young idealist who reads too much Byron, Lensky immediately takes offence — as a true literary gentleman would — and defies Onegin to a duel for the sake of his honour, for he could not marry Olga in those circumstances. The duel takes place at dawn in a snow-covered grove, and despite Onegin’s reluctance, for he’s aware of the stupidity of his actions, his pride overtakes his good sense, setting for the duel secretly hoping to get killed. Yet, when both gentlemen fire the shot, Lensky is the one who falls to the ground.
Onegin is desolated at his friend’s death, and he flees the province after the event, wandering about Russia and Europe for a couple of years, overwhelmed by guilt. Olga’s family was counting on the marriage since they are almost poor, and now they have no prospects. Tatiana, Olga’s sister and Onegin’s admirer, is heartbroken and goes to an aunt’s house in St. Petersburg to become a lady and get married to the richest man her position allows her to. All this could’ve been avoided, if not for Onegin’s foolish pride in accepting a duel with his young naive friend.
In the same way as Lensky, Pushkin defied a man over the woman he (allegedly) loved and this brought him his death. Just like Lensky, he was a young poet, an idealist and a romantic, admired by his community. I was astonished by how accurately similar the death he wrote in his greatest piece was the simulacrum of his own demise.
Pushkin’s Legacy: The Hero of the Russian Language?
In 1880, a statue of Pushkin was set in Moscow, and it was a great event with speeches given by Dostoevsky and Turgenev, who claimed that the statue allowed Russians to claim themselves as a great nation “because this nation has given birth to such a man.” Of all the speeches the most popular success fell to Dostoyevsky. Nabokov said that the core of his speech was illustrating Pushkin as “the embodiment of the national spirit of Russia, which subtly understands the ideals of other nations but assimilates and digests them in accordance with its own spiritual setup.”
The Poet’s legacy is larger than the quality of his works, because of a Russian particularity at the time. If you’ve read any Tolstoy, you know that the rich speak french all the time. In the 19th century, the Russian language was far from the one we know today, and it was considered “lower-class”, a status that limited it to a scarce lexicon and simple phraseology that could not compete with other languages of that time such as English, German, and French. Because the upper classes so widely ignored Russian, the language failed to develop complex sentence structures, many critical words, and techniques to express intricate ideas.
Then Pushkin came to the rescue and began to masterfully use the Russian language in his works, so the rest of the aristocracy (the trendsetters) followed him and started using it in their speech and writing. Another reason for this was the new nationalism due to the Napolean wars: in War and Peace there is a scene where aristocrats, who spent their whole lives speaking french, decided to banish le français from their salons in a bursting wave of patriotism, culminating in a comic scene in which they try to converse in Russian failing miserably.
Pushkin was highly admired intellectually, therefore, when he bestowed his talents on a fading language, he virtually saved his culture from becoming completely Europeanised. He developed the highly nuanced level of language that has defined all Russian literature after him and is credited with massively expanding the Russian vocabulary.
Given this, it is inevitable to lament the fact that I am not (and may never be) able to read Eugene Onegin in the original. Nabokov famously advocated the work being untranslatable, and he himself attempted to do it in the most “accurate” fashion. However, many critics consider his translation rather controversial, because he made it too literal, lacking Pushkin’s musicality. I read Stanley Mitchell’s translation in the Penguin Classics edition of 2008, and I found it a marvellous job. Furthermore, I want to share George Steiner's input:
One does gather something of the dimensions which, for so many Russians, set Pushkin next to Shakespeare. The diversity of formal inventions is, perhaps, unique in literature. Pushkin's verse extends from bitter satire to pure lyricism, from uttermost concision to the subtle largesse of the verse-novel, from short stories of matchless compactness and tension to novellas whose historical sweep prepares for Tolstoy. Pushkin - Gogol after him - created the lasting wonder of Russian literature. His conception of the poet as the more or less clandestine, Aesopian voice of conscience under despotism, as the prime witness to the desolation's and hopes of the incredible fate that is Russian history, informs Pasternak and Brodsky as it did Dostoevsky.
We can affirm, then, that to the later classical writers of the 19th century, Pushkin stood as the cornerstone of Russian literature, in Maxim Gorky’s words, “the beginning of beginnings.” Pushkin has thus become an inseparable part of the literary world of the Russian people.
A Respite from Death
Ali Smith said that art is the primary way of moving beyond ourselves. That couldn't be more true: the way I relate to pieces written in such a different time and place is evidence of humanness, of some metaphysical element that connects us as emotional creatures. Maybe this element is art itself. I believe it is. Reading Russian novels is a very special experience for me, even if I’m reading completely different works, they all have some je ne sais quoi that strikes a chord inside me. Somehow, It's like coming home to a place I've never been. Russian literature is inviting in this way: It opens its world in the minutest detail and shows its idiosyncrasies until you feel like you know the land and its people, being they a serf or a prince. I felt everything Onegin, Tatiana and Lensky felt. I was glad Pushkin was able to translate those timeless emotional experiences, and even more glad that I decided to read it. A good book should leave you grateful to be alive at a time when you can access it, to have had the opportunity to relish in those words.
You may have noticed that I've been indirectly quoting Donna Tartt, and I will do it again, but this time explicitly. My favourite thing she ever wrote belongs to a dear work of fiction named The Goldfinch, and it goes: “It is a glory and a privilege to love what death doesn't touch.” This quote represents the feeling I get when I think of an artist like Pushkin, but it is also valid for my relationship with art as a whole. A true work of art possesses transcendental and timeless power, managing to reinvent itself through new generations of audiences, never failing to move: it goes beyond the life or death of its creator, and in this way, it is made eternal. Every time someone new dives into a work of art, a respite from death is created.
Pushkin was ahead of his time, undoubtedly. He suffered some awful humiliations but also came to know genuine admiration. His work changed the course of a whole culture, and I bet he couldn't have imagined that almost 200 years after his death, a girl on the other side of the world would be writing about him, telling strangers how much she loves his novel.
True poetry is rare and has a certain mystical quality. When art is too good, the process of making it is inconceivable to me: it's like it has always existed, beautiful and vigorous, immaculate as nature. Just as I can't imagine Shakespeare sitting in his house writing King Lear, I can't picture Pushkin in his exile composing the most endearing verses I've ever read. In the adversities of the cold Russian soil, sprouted the true Hero of this immense nation, and he wasn't a Knight like Pechorin or a revolutionary like Zhivago, but simply and truly an artist.
Fare thee well, and, if for ever. Still for ever fare thee well.