Eugene Onegin: An Inverted Byronic Poem

Abstract

LEXANDER PUSHKIN'S most significant work, Eugene J\A Onegin, has as recently as 1971 been called by John Bayley most glitteringly of poems, and yet as full of 'felt life' as the most richly conceived work of fiction.l Written over a period of eight years (1823-1831), its genre has puzzled critics from the appearance of the very first chapter in February 1825.2 Many of Pushkin's contemporaries were disturbed by Onegin's subtitle, A Novel in Verse. Acutely aware of the digressive quality of Pushkin's work and of its improvisatory nature, intrigued not by the plot or the characters but rather by the virtuosity and wit of the poet-narrator, they could not accept Onegin as a novel, nor could they place it in any other commonly recognized literary tradition. The early critics, most notably Nikolay Polevoy and Nikolay Nadezhdin, concluded that Onegin lacked unity and wholeness and that it was nothing more than a poetic album of lively impressions.3 Little more than a decade later, in what proved to be perhaps the single most influential piece of Pushkin criticism,4 Vissarion Belinsky declared that Eugene Onegin was a novel because it depicted contempo-