Eugene Oneguine [Onegin]Aleksandr Sergeevich PushkinOmniClassics · Literature
Eugene Oneguine [Onegin]
Aleksandr Sergeevich PushkinA disenchanted young man enters a provincial circle where friendship, romantic expectation, and pride prove difficult to reconcile.
Progress is saved in this browser
About the book
Eugene Oneguine brings the habits of fashionable society into a quieter world of neighbouring estates. His friendship with the poet Lensky and his encounter with Tatiana place different ideas of feeling beside one another: cultivated boredom, literary enthusiasm, and an inward life nourished by reading. Pushkin's narrator does more than relate their story. He digresses, addresses the reader, remembers pleasures, and reflects on the conventions through which people understand themselves. The changing tone makes social comedy and emotional seriousness coexist without a simple boundary. Henry Spalding's English verse translation includes a biographical sketch and explanatory notes, and its preface acknowledges translation difficulties. Read it as a particular historical rendering of a verse novel, not as an invisible substitute for the Russian.
- Love and self-image
- Society and convention
- Time and missed understanding
Why read it
For a verse narrative whose conversational narrator keeps changing the distance between comedy and regret.
English verse translation by Henry Spalding · 1881