Eugene Onegin - 2016 Programme

Eugene Onegin Lyric scenes in three acts and seven scenes Music Libretto

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky Konstantin Shilovsky and Tchaikovsky based on Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin

Characters in order of singing Natalya Romaniw

Tatyana the daughters of Madame Larina

Olga Madame Larina a widowed landowner Filippyevna an old nursemaid Peasant leader

Louise Winter Kathleen Wilkinson Adam Temple-Smith

Vladimir Lensky a poet

Oleksiy Palchykov

Eugene (Yevgeny) Onegin

Roderick Williams

A captain Monsieur Triquet a Frenchman

Martin Häßler Mark Wilde Andrew Tipple

Zaretsky Guillot Onegin’s manservant Prince Gremin a retired general

Adam Torrance Brindley Sherratt

Conductor

Douglas Boyd

Director

Michael Boyd

Designer Lighting designer Movement director / choreographer Acrobatic choreographer Assistant conductor Assistant director Chorus master

Tom Piper Giuseppe di Iorio Liz Ranken Lina Johansson Jack Ridley PJ Harris Susanna Stranders

Garsington Opera Orchestra and Chorus First performance: 29 March 1879, by students of the Conservatory of Music at the Maly Theatre, Moscow First professional performance: 23 January 1881 at the Bolshoi Theatre, Moscow First performance in Britain: 17 October 1892, by the Moody-Manners Company at the Olympic Theatre, London (in English) First performance of this production by Garsington Opera: 3 June 2016 Performances: 3, 5, 11, 16, 18, 25, 29 June & 1, 5, 7 July

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Eugene Onegin SYNOPSIS

ACT ONE Scene One An estate in the country, late summer Madame Larina and the old nursemaid, Filippyevna, remember their youth while the peasants on the estate are hard at work bringing in the harvest. Tatyana, the widowed Madame Larina’s eldest daughter, spends her time reading and dreaming, while her younger sister, Olga, plans to marry the poet Vladimir Lensky, their nearest neighbour. Lensky comes to visit, bringing with him his friend, Eugene Onegin. Tatyana is convinced that he is the man of her dreams.

Scene Two Tatyana’s bedroom Tatyana stays awake throughout the night, writing a love letter to Onegin. When morning comes she persuades Filippyevna to deliver it.

Scene Two A lonely spot, early morning, three days later Zaretsky, Lensky’s second in the duel, complains that their opponent is late. Lensky meditates on his love for Olga and the prospect of death. Onegin arrives and, although both he and Lensky are full of remorse and regret, they are unable to reach a reconciliation to avoid the duel. Lensky is killed.

ACT THREE Scene One A ballroom in St Petersburg, six years later Onegin has been travelling abroad since the duel. On his return to St Petersburg he attends a grand ball and encounters Prince Gremin, who introduces his young wife, Tatyana. Onegin falls hopelessly in love with her.

Scene Two A room in Prince Gremin’s place, some time later Scene Three A corner of the Larin estate Onegin returns Tatyana’s letter, telling her that he is unable to respond to such an impetuous outpouring of emotion: love and marriage are not for him.

Tatyana reads a love letter from Onegin, which has stirred up the memories of everything that has gone before. When Onegin implores her to respond to his passion Tatyana admits that she still loves him. But it is too late: she is now married and must honour the promises she has made to her husband. Onegin despairs.

ACT TWO Scene One The Larin home, winter It is Tatyana’s nameday and friends and neighbours have gathered to celebrate. A Frenchman, Monsieur Triquet, sings an ode to Tatyana. Angered at being dragged to the party by Lensky and maddened by the guests’ assumptions, coupling him with Tatyana, Onegin dances all night with Olga. Lensky is furiously jealous and, losing his temper, challenges his friend to a duel. Onegin accepts.

INTERVAL

Portrait of Tchaikovsky by Nikolai Kuznetsov, 1893

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IN CONVERSATION

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Douglas Boyd and Michael Boyd talk to Henrietta Bredin about Eugene Onegin

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his production of Eugene Onegin both Douglas and Michael Boyd (no relation), as conductor and director. They were able to work through the piece together in detail, looking at the score and at a literal translation of the Russian text, sitting at each other’s kitchen tables and discussing dramatic ideas and musical responses. ‘It’s the sort of dialogue that Tchaikovsky set up with Pushkin, even though of course they weren’t actually alive at the same time’, says Douglas. ‘Tchaikovsky rather had the upper hand there’, remarks Michael.

It is an opera – one of quite a few – that disproves the so-called wisdom that librettos are best fashioned from second-rank source material. Pushkin’s novel works of literature in any language and Tchaikovsky was both nervous of and inspired by the text. For Michael, there is a particular appeal in ‘the tension line between the cooler, more objective, sardonic emotional strength of Tchaikovsky’s music and the dramaturgical shaping that he imposed, bringing us into the opera via Tatyana, a young girl, through her enclosed, restricted world and her point of view.

It’s only later on that you pan out and see a wider social context.’ Douglas is interested in the way in which Tchaikovsky turned away from what he saw as overblown and over-dramatic opera plots to focus on what he saw as a story of everyday life, despite the central, highly dramatic duel between Onegin and his friend Lensky, who does not survive the encounter.

‘It was everyday life in a sense, for Pushkin’, says Michael, ‘in that duels were part of his social world and he himself died, pointlessly and too young, as the result of a duel.’ ‘And for Tchaikovsky’, says Douglas, ‘there was the similarity between Tatyana pouring all her feelings into her letter to Onegin and the letter declaring passionate love that he received from one of his music students’. That student was Antonina Miliukova, with whom Tchaikovsky went on to contract a disastrous and extremely brief marriage.

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For Michael, the opera is ‘a great piece of work,

clues, but in the end it’s its own beast, with its own independent life. As an artistic enterprise it’s incredibly bold of Tchaikovsky to take on Pushkin’s central and iconic work and completely change the original narrative point of view, introducing us to the opera through Tatyana’s rather than Onegin’s eyes, right up until we get involved in Onegin’s anxiety at Tatyana’s name day party, as he wonders what the hell he’s doing there at all. They’re both victims of the engineered and inappropriate social coupling that’s going on around them. Tatyana responds by completely imploding and Onegin by completely exploding – and with that explosion we start to see his inner life and we travel with him for the rest of the opera.’

music. ‘The opening bars set up the whole opera. It starts very simply and for me that’s Tatyana’s theme: it’s symbolic of her longings to experience love, passion, to escape from her stultifying country life.

Wherever the music goes in that section, it’s always

that emotion trying to set itself free but something is going “no”. Fate, premonition, whatever you want to call it.’

Language and musical response to text are paramount for both Boyds. As Michael explains, ‘the push-me-pull-you dilemma for Russians, of feeling drawn to Europe and the liberalism of the West, but proudly and consciously Asiatic Slavs, was a burning cultural issue for Pushkin. He was writing at a time society and he broke with convention by writing high literature, enduring, powerful literature, in Russian –that’s his greatest achievement.’ And for Douglas, ‘I’ve been having sessions with our Russian language coach, Lada, and it may sound blindingly obvious but if there’s a stress in the music, it relates directly to a stress in the language. You can feel the phrasing of both, inextricably linked, and that’s why it’s wonderful that we’re performing this in the original Russian.’

Church of the Assumption, Karelia (photo: Richard Davies)

I write to you – no more confession is needed, nothing’s left to tell.

I know it’s now in your discretion with scorn to make my world a hell.

I know, godsent one, I’m protected until the grave by your strong hand.

You’d made appearance in my dreaming; unseen, already you were dear, my soul had heard your voice ring clear.

Alexander Pushkin

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The arrival of a rich neighbour makes a great epoch for those who live in the country.

The landowners and their house serfs discuss the matter for two months before the arrival and for three years afterward.

Alexander Pushkin

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A new kind of opera PHILIP ROSS BULLOCK

If Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin was written as an act of provocation, then something very similar can be said about Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s opera too, even have little in common with Pushkin’s brilliant jeu d’esprit.

Writing to his brother, Modest, in May 1877 Tchaikovsky contrasted his new opera with Aida – ‘how glad I am to be rid of Ethiopian princesses, pharaohs, poisonings, and all manner of stilted gestures’ – and it’s clear that his Onegin was written as a reaction against the vogue for grand opera that prevailed in mid-nineteenth-century Russia. In the summer of 1876 Tchaikovsky had attended the opening season of the Bayreuth Festival and felt as ambivalent about

Pushkin we read these texts in the company of the knowing narrator; in Tchaikovsky we see and hear these characters unmediated and respond directly to their predicaments. If Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin has a literary analogue at all, it is not Pushkin’s original work but Tolstoy’s and Turgenev’s realist novels of the 1860s and ’70s, with their emphasis on emotional truth and artistic verisimilitude.

Yet the opera contains a number of subtly Pushkinian own description of the opera as a series of ‘lyric scenes’. Just as Pushkin confused his readers by calling his own Eugene Onegin ‘a novel in verse’, so too does Tchaikovsky propose

Verdi’s. In fact, the work that comes closest to Eugene Onegin is Carmen, which Tchaikovsky had heard in Paris not long before he embarked on his new opera. His account of Bizet’s score – ‘this is music without pretention to depth, but so charming in its simplicity, so alive, uncontrived, and so sincere that I have learned it almost by heart from beginning to end’ – reads like a description of his own work too.

and accepted conventions. There are moments of humour too, and not just the cod Russian used in one version of Monsieur Triquet’s couplets for Tatyana’s name day (there is another version in proper French). When Tatyana and Onegin return from their stroll in the garden at the start of the opera, Onegin addresses her using the words of the very opening

If Eugene Onegin was a new kind of opera, it required a new kind of audience. As Tchaikovsky noted in a letter to his patron, Nadezhda von Meck, ‘Onegin is not interesting

the novel – are spirited into the mouth of the opera’s principal male protagonist, and the resulting sense of incongruity can give rise to a sense of irony (at least for audiences who know their Pushkin well enough). In fact, the character of Onegin is very often undermined by the sense that he has no mode of expression to call his own; when, towards the

of an opera is its theatrical action But those people who are capable of searching within an opera for the musical reproduction of simple, everyday and universal human emotions that are far removed from tragedy opera.’ Accordingly, he refused to give the opera to either the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow or the Maryinsky Theatre in St Petersburg, preferring to entrust its stage premiere to students of the Moscow Conservatory, who performed in March 1879. But this challenge to convention was not without its risks and, perhaps predictably, Tchaikovsky’s opera did not meet with immediate approval. At its premiere, many in the audience felt its treatment of Pushkin’s original novel bordered on the sacrilegious. Writing from Paris, where he had access to the published score, the novelist Ivan Turgenev praised the music but criticized what he saw as the banality of the libretto. And it’s a judgement that has persisted: Vladimir Nabokov disliked Tchaikovsky’s ‘vile librettos’ almost as much as people who thought they were a

Tatyana, he expresses his emotions in words and music that recognises in the novel, nothing more than a parody, and one lacking in self-awareness too. Even the musical language of Tatyana’s letter scene can be heard as a nod to Pushkin.

Structured as a series of echoes of parlour romances of the 1820s and ’30s – the very era of the novel’s composition and early reception – it evokes the lost culture and values of Russia’s rural gentry and gives musical expression to Pushkin’s nostalgic evocation of starina (‘tradition, the good old ways’). It is decidedly not some grand operatic scena, and for all its virtuosity, neither is it a showpiece for some self-regarding diva. Tchaikovsky always objected to its being performed as a concert item, arguing that it was so tightly woven into the emotional fabric of the opera that it made no sense when heard on its own.

Ironically, perhaps, the character who comes closest

source text doesn’t get us very far, especially in the case of Eugene Onegin. It’s perhaps obvious that the most characteristic feature of Pushkin’s novel in verse – its chatty, knowing and often ironic narrator – would have to be jettisoned, at least for a composer as given to ardent expression as Tchaikovsky was. Pushkin’s two most virtuoso literary parodies – Tatyana’s letter to Onegin and the poem that Lensky writes before the duel scene – become, in the opera, fully embodied confessions of sincere emotion. In

‘The Threshing Floor’ (detail) by Alexei Venetsianov, 1821

appearances in the novel: Prince Gremin. Originally referred to merely as the ‘fat general’ to whom Tatyana is married from a number of fragments of the novel, as well as some strategic textual additions, Gremin’s aria certainly imagines a personal happiness that Tchaikovsky would never know in his own private life. Eugene Onegin was composed against the backdrop of his brief and unhappy involvement with Antonina Milyukova, a former student of the Moscow Conservatory

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who wrote to declare her love for the composer in the spring does to Tatyana), he married her that July, despite his homosexuality. By the autumn, however, he had abandoned Yet Gremin’s aria is not just an instance of life failing to imitate that Pushkin himself came to feel for his literary heroine over the course of the novel’s composition. Tchaikovsky, while

jettisoning whole chunks of the novel for entirely pragmatic reasons, spotted something all too easily overlooked about the truthfulness of Eugene Onegin’s emotional world and built it into one of the opera’s most poignant theatrical moments. In 1880, on the occasion of the unveiling of a statue of Pushkin in Moscow, Dostoyevsky famously singled out Tatyana as the novel’s most important character, as literary heroines. It was, though, Tchaikovsky who truly gave Pushkin’s Tatyana her voice.

From Tchaikovsky to his brother, Modeste, May 1877

Recently I was at Madame Lavrovsky’s. The conversation fell upon opera librettos. X talked a lot of rubbish and made the most appalling suggestions. Madame Lavrovsky said nothing and only laughed. Suddenly, however, she remarked: ‘What about Eugene Onegin?’ The idea struck me as curious, and I made no reply. Afterwards, while dining alone at a restaurant, her words came back to me and, on consideration, the idea did not seem at all search of Pushkin’s works. I was enchanted when I read the work. I spent a sleepless night; the result – a sketch of a delicious opera based upon Pushkin’s text. You have no idea how crazy I am upon this subject. How delightful to avoid the commonplace pharaohs, Ethiopian princesses, poisoned cups, and all the rest of these dolls’ tales! I know well enough the work gives little scope for treatment, and the human quality and simplicity of the subject, joined to Pushkin’s inspired verses, will compensate for what it lacks in other respects.

From Tchaikovsky to his patron, Nadezhda von Meck, 27 May 1877

On Sunday I am going to the country to stay with K.K. Shilovsky, a delightful person who lives with an equally delightful wife and family on his estate near the Novy Ierusalem monastery. I shall have the use of a completely separate house with a piano. I fully intend to get down to the writing of an opera. On my instructions Shilovsky is compiling a libretto from Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin.

Isn’t this a daring idea? The few people I have told about my intention of writing an opera on this subject were at opera will, of course, have no strong dramatic action, but the portrayal of everyday life will be interesting, and how full of poetry it all is! The scene between Tatyana and her nurse is marvellous. If only I can attain that calm state of mind essential for composition, I am sure that Pushkin’s text will be an absolute inspiration to me.

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Portrait of Vera Stepanova Putyatina by Alexei Venetsianov, 1815

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A duel in the snow Next day at eight o’clock in the morning Pierre and Nesvitsky drove to the Sokolniky woods and found Dolohov, Denisov and Rostov already there. Pierre had concerned with the matter in hand. His haggard face was yellow. He had evidently not slept that night. He looked about him vaguely and screwed up his eyes as though dazzled by glaring sunshine. … ‘Why this duel, this manslaughter? Either I shall kill him, or he will put a bullet through my head, my elbow, or my knee. Can’t I get the thought that passed through his mind. But at the very moments when such ideas occurred to him, he would be asking with a peculiarly calm and unconcerned face, which inspired the respect of the onlookers, ‘Will it be long?

Aren’t we ready?’

When they were all set, with swords stuck in the snow to mark out the limits to which they were to advance, and the pistols loaded, Nesvistky went up to Pierre. ‘I should not be doing my duty, count,’ he faltered, ‘or be worthy choosing me for your second, if at this grave moment, this very grave moment, I did not speak the whole truth to you. does not warrant the shedding of blood. You were in the wrong, you lost your temper …’

‘Oh yes, it is horribly foolish …’ said Pierre.

‘Then allow me to express your regrets, and I am sure our opposite numbers will agree to accept your apology,’ said Nesvitsky (who like the other participants, and like all men in similar cases, did not believe even now that the business had actually come to a duel).’You know, count, it is far more honourable to admit one’s mistake than to let matters proceed to the irrevocable. There was no insult on either side. Allow me to confer …’

‘No, what is there to talk about?’ said Pierre.

‘It doesn’t matter. Is everything ready then?’ he added. ‘Only tell me where I am to go

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smile. He took up the pistol and began to inquire about the working of the trigger, as he had never held a pistol in his hand before – a fact he was unwilling to confess.

‘Oh yes, like that, of course. I know, I had only forgotten,’ said he.

‘No apologies, none whatever,’ Dolohov was saying to Denisov (who on his side had been making an attempt at reconciliation), and he too went up to the appointed spot.

The place selected for the duel was some eighty yards from the road where the sledges had been left, in a small clearing in the pine woods, covered with melting snow after the thaw of the last few days. The antagonists stood forty paces from one another at the farther edge of the in the deep wet snow from the spot where they had been standing to the swords of Nesvitsky and Dolohov, which were stuck into the ground ten paces apart to mark the barrier. It was thawing and misty; forty yards away nothing could be seen. For three minutes everything had been ready, but still they delayed. Everyone was silent.

Leo Tolstoy War and Peace

The death of Lensky

The death of Pushkin

‘Now march.’ And calmly, not yet seeking To aim, at steady, even pace The foes, cold-blooded and unspeaking, Each took four steps across the space, Four fateful steps. Then, without slowing The level tenor of his going, Evgeny quietly began To lift his pistol up. A span

Goaded beyond endurance by spiralling rumours and insinuations

And Lensky, left eye closing, aimed –

Pushkin provoked her alleged lover, Georges d’Anthès to a duel. near the Black River on the outskirts of St Petersburg. The river Neva was frozen

without the coachmen witnessing it. The snow was knee-deep. Pushkin sat on a mound of snow as the place was cleared and levelled in readiness. He was impatient to begin, and when the signal was given he rushed towards the

The clock of doom had stuck as fated; And the poet, without a sound, Let fall his pistol on the ground. his second shot. In the event, Pushkin dropped, seriously wounded by

Vladimir drops, hand softly sliding To heart. And in his misted gaze Is death, not pain. So gently gliding Down slopes of mountains, when a blaze

elbow and said, ‘Wait. I have enough strength to take my shot.’ He took his aim and, indeed, d’Anthès fell to the ground. Seeing as much and believing his adversary dead, Pushkin shouted ‘Bravo’ and threw his pistol aside. In

A block of snow will slip and tumble.

Onegin, drenched with sudden chill, Darts to the boy, and looks, and still Calls out his name … All unavailing: The youthful votary of rhyme Has found an end before his time.

The storm is over, dawn is paling, The bloom has withered on the bough;

by a button – his main injury proved to be bruised ribs. It was Pushkin who was seriously wounded, with a bullet lodged deep in his lower abdomen.

Alexander Pushkin

Elaine Feinstein Pushkin

Alexander Pushkin’s duel with Georges d’Anthes by Alexander Naumov, 1884

The coachmen made a litter to carry him to the sleigh and they proceeded towards St Petersburg slowly as all movement was very painful. Pushkin’s old valet carried the poet in his arms to his study. … At about two o’clock he sent for Natalya, asking for cloudberries. On her knees, she fed him cloudberry preserves with a spoon. Pushkin began to hallucinate, dreaming of climbing to the top of his own bookcases and getting dizzy there. Suddenly, as if awaking from a sleep, he opened his eyes wide and said, ‘Life is ended. It is hard to breathe. Something is weighing me down.’

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A bravura piece of writing JULIE A.E. CURTIS

Alexander Pushkin wrote Eugene Onegin (Evgeny Onegin in Russian) as a provocation, as an literary tastes in Russia. He was just 23 years old and he had already incurred the Tsar’s wrath by writing subversive poetry such as his Ode to Freedom, in which he called for legal limitations to curb autocratic powers.

Pushkin had been punished with a sentence of internal exile, which meant that since 1820 he had been forbidden to live in either Moscow or St Petersburg. friends and from literary and political gossip, and had to wait for letters from fellow writers or copies of journals to reach him before he could catch up with latest developments on the literary scene. Eugene Onegin, which he began in Odessa in the spring of 1823, was published in separate chapters as he completed them over a period of nearly eight years, and represented his ongoing contribution to the literary debates of the day. It was a bravura piece of writing, intended to make sure that he was not forgotten in his absence (he was pardoned only late in 1826) and to set startling challenges to fellow writers and contemporary readers.

Russian literature was then in its infancy. It has been estimated that 90 per cent of prose works published in Russia during the 1790s were works translated from other languages – in other words, there had been no truly polarised as it was between landowners and serfs; and young ladies and gentlemen in Pushkin’s day were in any case brought up to use French, rather than Russian, as the language of polite discourse. It was only after the trauma of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812 that writers really began to develop Russian as a literary language in its own prevailed after Bonaparte’s defeat. Like Tatyana and Onegin, Pushkin’s readers had grown up on a diet of Richardson, Fielding and Sterne, together with Byron as the celebrity of the day. Pushkin was determined to startle them out of their modish enthusiasms and their propensity for modelling both behaviour and appearance on the shallow posing of Byron’s Romantic heroes.

Eugene Onegin was a bewildering text. For one thing, it proclaimed itself a novel, and yet it

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was a ‘novel in verse’. What’s more, its contradictory genre was made even stranger by its innovative poetic form: Pushkin invented an entirely new rhyme scheme for its 14-line stanzas, now known in Russian poetics as the ‘Onegin stanza’. It was written wholly in the Russian language (the narrator even claims to have had to translate Tatyana’s letter back from the French), adopting an informal, witty and mostly conversational tone (as Pushkin put it, ‘a novel needs to be full of chatter’).

But the novel also includes exquisite lyrical descriptions of nature and the seasons.

Furthermore, he cited peasant songs, using a language (sometimes bawdy) that had never before appeared in print: ‘I would like to preserve a certain biblical obscenity in Russian. I do not like to see primitive language: coarseness and simplicity suit it better.’ all conventional expectations for a novel focusing on a love story. The opening stanza of the text is almost incomprehensible: a piece of direct speech consisting of sit at the bedside of his ailing uncle. The plot then gradually sometimes called them, invoking the model of Byron’s Don Juan) unfolds. However, it is a plot full of interruptions and gaps: there are missing lines, many apparently missing stanzas, and a huge number of narratorial digressions deliberately calculated to puncture suspense or frustrate our hopes of an emotional climax. After Onegin has preached his sanctimonious ‘sermon’ to Tatyana, the narrator spends of allowing us to share her distress. At the end of the novel, after Tatyana tells Onegin she will remain faithful to her vows while admitting that she still loves him, she leaves the room and the clink of her husband’s spurs is heard outside: And here my hero At a moment that is tricky for him, Reader, we will now abandon, For a long while … Forever …

Let us congratulate one another on having reached the far shore. Hurrah!

It’s high time (is that not the truth?)!

Alexander Pushkin in a park by Valentin Serov, 1899

A St Petersburg ball Before and behind them, other guests were mounting the stairs, also talking in low tones and wearing ball-dresses.

The looking-glasses along the staircase from his hero, by contrast with the supremely melodramatic climax that closes Tchaikovsky’s opera. As the Russian Formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky shrewdly observed, Eugene Onegin is not so much a novel about the love story of Onegin and Tatyana, but rather a game that the author plays with that plot – and with his readers.

All the main characters are shown to be foolish. Pushkin mocks Onegin throughout as a hollow poseur. When Tatyana

and pink gowns, with diamonds and pearls on their bare arms and bosoms.

Natasha looked in the mirrors and from the others. Everything intertwined into one brilliant procession.

Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

copies of Byron, in which he has marked notable passages thing, whose grief for Lensky will not last long: in no time she will be married to a dashing Uhlan instead. Lensky himself is deeply ironised as a sentimental poet; those lines which make up his beautiful aria in the opera, in which he mourns the golden days of his youth, are presented in the novel as Thus he wrote darkly and limply (which we call Romanticism, although I don’t see a jot of Romanticism in it).

And yet, and yet… the one character who rises above all this juvenile behaviour is Tatyana. True, her rash decision to write so frankly to Onegin is shown to be the direct product of too much reading of Richardson’s History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753) and other such novels. But the narrator also portrays her as a young woman with sincere feelings and true judgement. Above all, she is the epitome of all things that are good about Russia: she is associated with the countryside and landscape; she has an old nanny to connect her with the common people and their tales and language, just as Pushkin’s own nanny Arina Rodionovna did for him; she takes part in fortune-telling with the maids as holy festivals approach; she has a prophetic dream populated with characters from Russian folk tales. One of the key concepts starina (‘tradition, the good old ways’). These are the values which strengthen her to become reconciled with her lot, following her mother as she comes to understand that the pursuit of romantic love often has to give way to settling down sensibly and making the best of an arranged marriage: Habit is given to us from on high, As a substitute for happiness.

The hot-headed young poet Pushkin turns out, as he reaches the age of 30, to have a very prosaic message for his contemporary readers, about living life according to common sense.

(translations of Pushkin by Julie A.E. Curtis)

Ballroom of the Peterhof Palace, St Petersburg (photo: Danita Delimont)

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