Eugene Onegin
3.9
Alexander Pushkin
When the world-weary dandy Eugene Onegin moves from St Petersburg to take up residence in the country estate he has inherited, he strikes up an unlikely friendship with his neighbour, the poet Vladimir Lensky. Coldly rejecting the amorous advances of Tatyana and cynically courting her sister Olga - Lensky's fiancee - Onegin finds himself dragged into a tragedy of his own making.Eugene Onegin - presented here in a sparkling translation by Roger Clarke, along with extensive notes and commentary - was the founding text of modern Russian literature, marking a clean break from the high-flown classical style of its predecessors and introducing the quintessentially Russian hero and heroine, which would remain the archetypes for novelists throughout the nineteenth century.
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"The opera is definitely better.<br/><br/>I felt at times that I was reading a spoof of overblown faux-classical blather; endless references to "Diane's blush", "the dance of the Nereids", "wandering the shades of the mournful tomb". etc. And what is with the foot fetish? Yikes. Obviously, much of this depends on the translation: I used Charles Johnson for this initial attempt, but have a couple of other versions to compare it with (including Nabokov's unrhymed translation) and may revise my review accordingly.<br/><br/>There were a few high points; some witty mockery of Lensky's boy band good looks and pretensions, and the piquant observation that "friendship flourishes when there's nothing to do". I was thrilled by Tatyana's disturbing dream of Onegin hosting a gathering of monsters, and the description of SPOILER ALERT Lensky's death, coupled with the acknowledgment that for all his fine ambitions, it's far more probable that he would have eased into a predictable, unremarkable bourgeois existence was a sobering moment.<br/><br/>So, not a disaster, but disappointing given its reputation."
Lesley Williams