Should they not stop and laugh instead before their hands have turned blood red?

Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin
First published in 1832

Spoiler Alert: Plot Poem

  (Eugene)        (Onegin)
Yev-ghen-ee Ah-nee-ggin, a novel in verse
A tale of love almost, not fated, more cursed
We follow Onegin as he bounds along
Not caring much between right and wrong.

He's a wealthy-ish Russian, with not much to do
But dance at balls and make girls cry boo-hoo
Not too much happens, really, other than this
Until he woos Olga and things go amiss.

Her sister, Tatiana, is lovely and single
And she tells Onegin she's ready to mingle
But he will have none of it, she's young and demure
He'd never be interested in someone so pure.

But Olga's with Lensky, Yevgeny's best friend,
And Lensky has his lady's honor to defend.
A duel is set, a battle twixt allies
Lensky's shot dead, not even a good-bye.

Yevgeny leaves the country-side, missing his pal
Tatiana's bereft, a sad little gal
But some time passes, her heart's on the mend
And on her walks, her feet do wend

Their way into Yevgeny's empty estate
Open to visits, with quite a first rate
Library that she falls for, all over again
With books as companions, who really needs men?

More time then passes, they drift apart
Till Tatiana captures Onegin's heart
He's smitten, now at a Petersburg ball
But she is married, not under his thrall

He tries to convince her, tells tales of his love
But the timing is wrong, not sent from above
She tells him that truly, she'll always love him
But once he dismissed her as only a whim

And now she is married, no longer free
So they two, simply, can never be we.

Spoiler Over: Continue Here

Ooph! I'm not sure how Pushkin pulled off all that poetry! I only did the little spoiler alert in rhyme to be a kind of homage to him, and it was hard! And I had the internet to help me find rhymes!

And huge kudos to the translators, who must have not only worked to translate the meaning, but also preserve the rhyme and the cadence and personality of Pushkin - another tremendous achievement!

You may have noticed I've sped up my reads lately - I have a mildly harebrained plan to have 34 books left to read after my 34th birthday, which is just a few weeks away. So wish me luck! And enjoy the blobs!

I really enjoyed this work - especially making the internet tell me how to pronounce Eugene Onegin, which had definitely been pronouncing YOU-JEAN OH-NAY-GUN. Yevgeny is much more fun than Eugene, in my opinion (no offense to any Eugenes out there). It also has a different number of syllables, which matters quite a lot when you're reading poetry! 

This book was short; only about 200 pages, but spread out because it's a poem. So if you're interested in a romp to Russia, I definitely recommend. Anyway, without further ado, let's jump in!

You speak no French, yes? 
I loved this couplet:

In French, which he'd by now perfected,
He could express himself and write.

Because it reminded me that so many Russians spoke and wrote in French back then. I suppose this was true of a wide variety of Europeans, but it seems so strangely romantic to me that you would grow up in a country like Russia and then write letters to your friends in French. I could technically write letters to my friends in French, but most of them couldn't read them, and it would be a lot of work. At one point, they even reference a woman whose Russian isn't great because she's so used to communicating in French, which I found kind of hilarious. 

Insert chapter here
Genji-style, sometimes chapters were just missing, which the notes section had a lot of opinions on. "The missing chapters are of three distinct varieties.. blah blah blah." I guess it's conceivable that you'd write missing chapters in with a reason, but it seems awfully silly to me that there would be multiple kinds of missing chapters, and some are on purpose, and some he just forgot to write. It seems equally silly to me that we continue to demarcate those chapters in current versions - it makes me think of how in Germantown, they stripped out the cobblestone except in the middle of the road (to keep it historic) and left in the trolley tracks (again, for historical reasons) even though there's no functioning trolley there and so now the road is just ugly AND awfully bumpy to drive on. So sorry, Pushkin, I'm not here for it. 

Fortunes
I liked Tatiana a lot, and I felt bad for her when Yevgeny was like, "Um, thanks for the love letter but I'm super not interested and you're lucky I'm being so nice about it." Here's a passage I liked about her. 

Tatiana held to the convictions
Of ancient lore, believed in dreams,
In guessing cards and the predictions
Discernible in moonlight beams.

It reminded me of my bosom bud, Mar, who is very into dreams, and tells fascinating stories to decipher them whenever we're together. 

Duels
I was totally surprised when Yevgeny ended up in a duel with his buddy, but I loved the poetry of how Pushkin described it. (Also, apparently Pushkin himself died in a duel, defending the honor of His wife? So... life imitating art or art imitating life?)

It was a gentlemanly letter,
A challenge or cartel he'd penned;
Polite and cold and to the matter
He sought a duel with his friend.

Should they not stop and laugh instead
Before their hands have turned blood red?

Fickle friends
I love that Tatiana calls Onegin out when he's suddenly into her now that she's married and living the city life: 

'Admit that in our backwoods haven,
From empty rumour far away,
I was not to your liking...Say, then,
Why you're pursuing me today.

I love you (why should I disguise it),
But I am someone else's wife,
To him I shall be true for life.

Seasons
When the narrator described the seasons, it reminded me of Genji, and the frequent discussions of and descriptions of the seasons. 

How sad to me is spring's arrival,
Season of love, when all's in bud!
What languid tumult, what upheaval
Disturb my soul, disturb my blood!
With what a heavy, tender feeling
I revel in the season, breathing
The vernal wind that fans my face
In some secluded, rural place!

Sleighs
Several times they travel by sleigh, and it's snowing, and it sounds SUPER DELIGHTFUL. I was especially jealous since it didn't snow at all this year and it has therefore felt like winter simply decided not to come. It has left me feeling deeply off kilter. (IN CASE YOU COULDN'T TELL.)

It's dark: into a sleigh he settles.
The cry resounds: 'Away, away';
Upon his beaver collar, petals
Of frostdust form a silver spray.

Tatiana, knowing not the reason,
But being Russian to the core,
Adored the Russian winter season,
The frosty beauty that it wore. 

Slays
Yevgeny is apparently a bit of a fop - super into how he dresses, wealthy, kind of a do-nothing, and it seems Pushkin created an archetype for several Russian characters that would follow. I loved this description of him getting ready: 

My Eugene, like Chaadaev, fearful
Of jealous censure, was most careful
About his dress - a pedant or
A dandy, as we said before.
At least three hours he spent preparing
In front of mirrors in his lair,
And, stepping out at last from there,
Looked like a giddy Venus wearing
A man's attire, who, thus arrayed,
Drives out to join a masquerade.

Sleeps
Amusingly (and perhaps disturbingly), Yevgeny oversleeps the day of his duel:

But, turning morning into nighttime,
Exhausted by the ballroom's din
The child of luxury and pastime
In blissful shade sleeps quietly in.

At last he wakes, prepares to rise,
The curtains of his bed he's parted;
He looks outside - and sees, alack,
He should have started some time back.

Whoops! Time's a wasting! So much time, so many duels to do!

Oh he's away? Let me just check out his library real quick...
I think my favorite part of the book was when Tatiana ended up visiting Onegin's country estate and then devouring books in his library. It reminded me of the scene in Pride and Prejudice when Lizzie visits Pemberley and falls for it and him all at once, in a way.

With apprehension
She avidly began to read
And found a different world indeed.

There's also something beautifully intimate about not just reading his books, but seeing the marks of him having read them. I keep the books I read for this blog and I have marked all of them up, and I like to think that some day when I die, they will be distributed to my close friends and family, and then people can have a piece of me in a way, and a piece of the things I cherished. 

There were preserved on many pages
The trenchant mark of fingernails,
With them the watchful girl engages
As if she were deciphering spells.
Tatiana saw with trepidation
What thought it was or observation
Had struck Onegin, what they meant,
To which he'd given mute consent.
And in the margins she encountered
His pencil marks by certain lines.
Throughout, his soul was by such signs,
Without his knowing it, expounded,
Whether by cross, by succinct word,
Or question mark, as they occurred.

The country
There's a Sylvia Plath line where she thinks about whether she'd want to live in the city or the country, and she says she'd like to live "in the city and the country both". I know just what she means. I live in a city now, but lines like this really make me miss the farms and open spaces of where I grew up:

But I was born for peaceful pleasures,
For country quiet: there I thrive:
There sounds the lyre with clearer measures.
Creative dreams are more alive.

Women reading
Sometimes as I was reading, I forgot that this was published almost 200 years ago, and that as a woman, I would not have been the target audience. I was amused by this line: 

Some would have women reading Russian,
A frightful prospect, if applied;
Imagine females in discussion
With The Well-Meaner at their side!

According to my notes, The Well-Meaner was "a periodical that used to be conducted by the late A. Izmaylov rather negligently. He once apologized in print to the public, saying that during the holidays he had “caroused.” Lolz. 

I also read this, and thought, yes, be my own man. Wait, what? 

Love your own self, be your own man,
My worthy, venerable reader!
A worthwhile object: surely who
Could be more lovable than you? 

I like to think I'm still pretty lovable. ;)

A Few Passages I Particularly Liked:

Through sleeping streets, past houses darkened
Twin carriage lamps pour out a jocund
Illumination row on row,
Projecting rainbows on the snow.

I to this day would love a ball.
I love the youthfulness and madness,
The crush, the glitter and the gladness. Oh, I do LOVE a ball!

Where are my dreams, the dreams I cherished?
What rhyme now follows, if not 'perished'?

Words New to Me:
anchorite - a religious recluse

animadversion - criticism or censure

comet wine - comet vintages are years during which an astronomical event, involving generally a "Great Comet", occurs prior to harvest. The term "comet wine" is sometimes used in the wine world to describe a wine of exceptional quality in reference to the high reputation that comet vintages have. I had never heard of this, and I thought it sounded very cool. 

droshky - a low four-wheeled open carriage of a kind formerly used in Russia

eclogue - a short poem, especially a pastoral dialogue

mazurka - a lively Polish dance in triple time (they dance Lots of mazurkas. Here's a sampling if you're curious.)

mobcap - a large soft hat covering all of the hair and typically having a decorative frill, worn indoors by women in the 18th and early 19th centuries

periwig - a highly styled wig worn formerly as a fashionable headdress by both women and men

Petrovsky Castle - built for Catherine the Great and designed by the famous Russian architect Matvei Kazakov in 1775-82.  It was meant to be the last overnight station of royal journeys from St. Petersburg to Moscow, providing the empress a chance to rest before entering Moscow. Catherine visited once, in 1785. Her son Paul stayed in the palace before he was crowned in the Moscow Kremlin.  In the 19th century Petrovsky Palace witnessed many official ceremonies; it was from here that Russian tsars began their journeys to the Kremlin for their coronation. It survived the Bolshevik Revolution and is currently used as a hotel for dignitaries.

I loved this line about the Petrovsky Palace: 

Here Bonaparte chose to reside
By Fortune's smile intoxicated,
He waited - but in vain he waited -
For Moscow on her bended knees
To yield to him old Kremlin's keys.

I'm rusty on my Russian history, but it seems Russia set Moscow on fire rather than turn it over to Napoleon, and this was the beginning of the end of the French advance into Russia. You'd like this city? Hard pass. We'll just go ahead and light it on fire ourselves. #kthanxbye

I'll leave you with a few final lines I liked, particularly as I think about my birthday coming up, and not being any particularly special age, but getting older and more solidly into the thirties: 

The noontide of my life is starting,
Which I must needs accept, I know;
But oh, my light youth, if we're parting,
I want you as a friend to go!

I like the idea of a noontide, kind of like reaching life's afternoon stage. I also liked this line: 

Meanwhile, enjoy, friends, till it's ended,
This light existence, every dram!

And of course this one, which is so clearly me: 

Oh, I'd surrender
At once this masquerade, this splendour,
With all its glitter, noise and smoke
For one wild garden and a book.

Wishing you weekends full of wild gardens and books, and reminding you to enjoy, friends, every dram! I'm off to read The Purposeful Traveler. Or was it The Intentional Globetrotter? Something of that ilk. Keep each other safe! Keep faith! Good night.