Pushkin Eugene Onegin Reading Order

Alexander Pushkin's Eugene Onegin (1825–1832) is the founding text of Russian literature — a novel in verse that invented the 'superfluous man' who would haunt Russian fiction for the next century, and a work of such formal brilliance and tonal complexity that Nabokov spent four volumes trying to translate it. Pushkin wrote it over eight years in what he called the 'Onegin stanza' — a fourteen-line form of his own invention — following 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 lives to regret both decisions. The novel's genius is its ironic narrator, who comments on, sympathizes with, and complicates every character and event, turning what might be a simple tale of romantic waste into a meditation on Russian identity, the cost of European fashion, and the impossibility of living up to the life one imagines.