Oneginskii tekst v russkoi literature by Kirill s> Postoutenko (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 315 achievement will almost certainlybe varied. This is a truly unusual, in some ways very American book (incidentally,the rhymes assume American rather than Britishpronunciation).It may well attractyoung readersunfamiliarwith Pushkin'soriginalwho will not be disturbedby, for example, the rendition of 'i luchshe vydumat'ne mog' as 'of all his ploys that takesthe cake' (p. i). The present reviewer found pleasure as well as aggravation in the work of the latest, to use Nabokov's intolerant coining, 'paraphrast'.On the downside is the transatlanticflippancywhich seems remote from Pushkin'sdry irony, but to be admiredare some happy solutions,particularlyin the laterchapters. Falen'stranslationof EvgeniiOnegin must remain the recommended one for anglophone readers hoping to glimpse, albeit dimly, the cornerstone of Russian literature.But if Douglas Hofstadter's'novel versification'attractsa new and different,perhapsyounger, audience to Pushkin'swork, it will have served a useful purpose. School ofSlavonic andEastEuropean Studies ARNOLD MCMILLIN tlniversity College London Postoutenko,Kirill. Oneginskii tekstv russkoi literature. Studi Slavi Dipartimento di Linguistica Universita' degli Studi di Pisa, 9. ECIG, Pisa, I998. 195 pp. Notes. Bibliography.Priceunknown. INhis introductionto this important structuraliststudy of the Onegin text in Russian literaturethe author disarminglysuggeststhat he might have written it differentlyfrom the way it was first conceived in 1992 (as a candidate's dissertation in Moscow) had he not wanted to risk replacing a conscious anachronism with an unconscious one (p. 8). Be that as it may, this is a complex text that requires close reading to reveal its message. It is an introductory work, not intended to be exhaustive, but which none the less breaksimportantnew ground and shouLld serve as a valuablebasisfor further research. ProfessorPostoutenkodistinguishesbetween what he callsthe Onegin text's nucleus and its periphery, the latter comprising assorted references to Pushkin's text through words, individually and combined, rhyme schemes, stanzaicform,rhythmand otherelements. His conclusion, in directcontradiction of L. P. Grossman's work of 1922, is that, leaving aside content, the Oinegin stanza, far from being a flexible receptacle for various styles and genres, is in fact a highly complex structure which is easily destroyed by imitation: 'The Onegin text is impossible without the Onegin stanza, whilst the broader its expansion, the less productive it is a peak of generic and prosodic sophistication (izoshchrennost')' (p. 172). It is these two factors which Postoutenko considers to be central to the specific nature of the Onegin text in Russian literature. In the first chapter he sets out the nucleus of the text, beginning with people (from Evgenii to the reader), places and other topoi, discourse, nature, and the additional elements of suetaand starina.Within the most important of these categories (such as 'Evgenii', 'Onegin' and 'Tat'iana') their characteristic positions in the lines and the stanzas are noted. XWhenTat'iana's name is 3I6 SEER, 79, 2, 2001 mentioned in full, for example, it is shown to be predominantlyfound in the firstline of the stanza(pp. 36-37). Chapter Two is concerned with the peripheryof the Onegin text, and the demonstation of how elements of the nucleus function within it, always througha processof simplification.Most of the examplesin thisextensive and not easily summararizablesection are from three chronological groups:first, Pushkin'sminor contemporarieslike M. I. Voskresenskii,authorof a novel in verse, Evgenii Vel'skii (I828-29), N. N. Murav'ev, A. I. Polezhaev and P. Volkov; secondly, writers of the middle to late nineteenth century like N. P. Ogarev, A. A. Grigor'ev and D. D. Minaev; and thirdly, what Postoustenko calls twentieth-century neoclassical poets like A. Liakide, A. Razorenov, V. Ruadze, I. Severianin (particularly in his 'Roial' Leandra' [1925]) and Viacheslav Ivanov. Such very different poets produce a wide variety of responses to the Onegin text. Apart from differences in quality, over the hundred or so years of the examples here, there was a decline in the imitation of rhyme, rhythm and syntax as the art of poetry degenerated in mid-century, with a revival of regard for these elements in the early twentieth century. Outside these broad categories, particular attention is paid to the special case of Lermontov with his 'Tambovskaia kaznacheisha' (i 828). The third chapter begins with a survey of earlier work on the Onegin stanza after which...