“The New Onegin” from France with Love

Abstract

The article presents to the Russian reader a remake of Pushkin’s novel «Eugene Onegin» written by a young French writer Clementine Beauvais and published in Russian under the title «Is it really the same Tatiana?» in 2019. The first part of the novel mostly follows the plot of the original: Tatyana falls in love with Onegin and writes him a letter, to which she receives a refusal. But here are important differences too. The main characters are young French people: when they met, she was less than 15, and Onegin was 17 years old. The next meeting happens accidentally in the Paris metro 10 years later, and the situation changes dramatically. This time the feelings of the characters are mutual, but there are new obstacles on the way to happiness. As in Pushkin’s novel, there is a third important character there, a narrator, or, to be exact, a female narrator who loves to appeal to the reader commenting on the behavior of her characters, and introducing lyrical digressions on landscapes. She is more sympathetic to the main character then to Tatiana, because he reinterpreted his past critically and this time he is ready for anything to make his union with Tatiana come true. But an obstacle comes from Tatyana. The ending of the novel is open. The author invites readers to choose their own version, as well as to compare many other plot parallels with Pushkin’s original. C. Beauvais successfully experiments with interactive forms: e-mails, emoticons, etc. As a result, C. Beauvais’s novel has got a great diversity of rhythmic and strophic lines, which especially attracts a young reader