Pushkin Eugene Onegin

About Eugene Onegin

Alexander Pushkin's Eugene Onegin (1825–1832) is the founding text of Russian literature — a novel in verse that invented the 'superfluous man' and established virtually every theme that Russian fiction would explore for the following century. Written in Pushkin's own fourteen-line 'Onegin stanza,' it follows the bored St. Petersburg dandy Onegin as he rejects the love of the provincial Tatyana, kills his best friend in a duel on a whim, and spends his life regretting both decisions. Nabokov called it the most important Russian literary work; Tchaikovsky made it into an opera. The novel gave Russian literature its essential type — the man too intelligent for his world and too passive to do anything with his intelligence — that runs through Lermontov's Pechorin, Turgenev's Bazarov, Goncharov's Oblomov, and Chekhov's Uncle Vanya.