In search of a ‘crosscurrent.’ The metaplot of Eugene Onegin

Abstract

To this day, the ideas of A. Veselovsky’s Historical Poetics [Istoricheskaya poetika] have been confined to philological discourse. V. Shklovsky’s quip that ‘Aleksandr Veselovsky had no pupils, only admirers’ still rings true. The article represents the first attempt at analysing the metaplot of Eugene Onegin, Pushkin’s novel in verse, through the application of Veselovsky’s comparative method. The study seeks to resolve the problem of imitation, which occupied the mind of the novel’s creator, from the viewpoints of the author and his artistic doppelganger the poet. In this regard, a resolution of the dilemma ‘one’s own — someone else’s’ is reached by means of Veselovsky’s comparative approach, which owes its recent revival in scholarly discourse to works by I. Shaytanov. Assimilation of ‘someone else’s’ is explained in the context of Veselovsky’s concept of ‘crosscurrent’ discovered by the scholar during his study of Pushkin’s ideas on the subject. In her examination of ‘imitativeness,’ the author is guided by Pushkin’s understanding of it, as later embraced by Veselovsky; i. e., rather than as a mechanical act, it is viewed as an act of creation, whose purpose it is to reveal the uniqueness of a specific national culture.