A Short Life of Pushkin by Robert Chandler

Author:Robert Chandler [Robert Chandler]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781782273455
Publisher: Steerforth Press
Published: 2017-04-16T04:00:00+00:00

The plot, as always with Pushkin, is simple. A bored, Byronic man about town, Eugene Onegin, retires to the country. There he befriends a young neighbour, Vladimir Lensky, a Romantic poet who is in love with a local girl, Olga Larina. Olga’s elder sister, Tatiana, falls in love with Onegin; she confesses her love in a long letter. Onegin tells her that he is too disillusioned with life to be capable of love. On Tatiana’s name-day, Onegin flirts with Olga. Lensky challenges him to a duel; Onegin kills him. Onegin goes on a long journey. Three years later Onegin meets Tatiana once again; she is now a St Petersburg grande dame, the wife of a general. Onegin writes her a love letter – a mirror image of hers to him. She says she still loves him, but that she will remain faithful to her husband.

The mid-nineteenth-century radical critic Vissarion Belinsky famously referred to Onegin as ‘an encyclopaedia of Russian life’. Pushkin’s poem-novel is indeed all-inclusive; it is hard to describe it except through paradoxes. Its sparkling levity proves able to incorporate tragedy, and the simple plot has room for the wildest, most inconsequential digressions. For all the artifice, there is a density of realistic detail that has led some critics to see Onegin as the beginning of Russian realism. And for all the realistic detail, there is a delight in sound and rhythm, a high-spirited playfulness, that has led others to see Pushkin as a believer in ‘art for art’s sake’. Pushkin is often at his most ‘literary’ when describing details of everyday life – and at his most realistic when showing how his characters model themselves, with disastrous results, on the heroes and heroines of fashionable books they have read. And he resolves the linguistic controversies of the time by asserting – often through making a mock apology – his right to employ every kind of vocabulary: simple Russian, archaic Russian, Church Slavonicisms, or borrowings from French, German and English. Few novels embody more of the openness of real life. Onegin repeatedly surprises the reader, and it clearly retained the capacity to surprise Pushkin himself. In an often quoted letter he wrote, ‘My Tatiana has gone and got married! I should never have thought it of her.’

For all the hypocritical attempts of politicians and ideologues to enlist Pushkin to their cause, there have always been many people who have felt that Pushkin embodies something deeply precious; this ‘something’ can perhaps best be defined as ‘grace’ – and none of Pushkin’s works is imbued with more of this grace than Eugene Onegin. In a speech at the Petrograd House of Writers in 1921, on the eighty-fourth anniversary of Pushkin’s death, the poet Vladislav Khodasevich (who was soon to emigrate) talked of how the ‘Pushkinian sun’ would soon be eclipsed. He ended: ‘our desire to make the day of Pushkin’s death a day of universal remembrance is, I think, partly prompted by this same premonition: we are coming to an agreement about how to call out to one another, by what name to hail one another in the impending darkness.

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