“Tatiana's potential-generating openness <...> leaves her particularly susceptible to partisan appropriation by her readers" (5). With this statement Olga Peters Hasty has offered an unwitting critique of her own text. After Nationalism, Sociologism, and Marxism-Leninism, we now have a new ideology appropriating Pushkin's heroine—Feminism. Hasty's thesis, derived from a comment by Diana Burgin, is that Tatiana is a poet, and Onegin her muse.

Before we look at Hasty's book itself, let us step back for a second and remember how the plot of Eugene Onegin is structured-around a symmetry of fates, in which Onegin appears as the nemesis of Tatiana, and Tatiana as the nemesis of Onegin. Both are enacting "plots" from different romantic novels. Driven by her infatuation with literature, Tatiana boldly and naively writes her letter to Onegin and is “punished" by his response. For his part, Onegin is also enacting a plot—of the cynical anti-hero. He too is punished—by falling out of role and in love with Tatiana too late. Happiness, i.e., the coincidence of plots, is, as always, so close, and yet so unrealizable. Tatiana finds her fate in a sensible marriage á la Jane Austin, and Onegin?

What does Tatiana want in writing her letter to Onegin? Matrimony? An affair? Love? Sex (something she barely understands...)? The short answer is that she doesn't know. Her letter is a naive expression of inchoate longing.  It is also a challenge to the strict conventions of her age and station. The one-time expression of an unrepeatable moment, the blossoming of a young girl. It is instantly transformed into a deep, bright secret, a remembrance of a particular night that will be encapsulated in her forever as the moment of intense experience in her life—not poetry, but the existential analogue thereof. Answer? She hardly expects one, and her trembling and anticipation are provoked by the possible consequences of her flaunting of convention. The worst thing that can happen is that her gesture will be discovered or answered.

It is typical of ideologically-driven readings of texts that they favor realistic interpretations where the characters are seen as what Lotman called the "analogues of real persons." Thus we find Hasty writing of both Tatiana and Onegin (whose characterization she has described in the introduction as "intentionally indeterminate") as "flesh-and-blood"(!). Hasty is infatuated with a Tatiana of her own making, a superwoman endowed with what she calls "creative erotic energy," and the other characters have to be downgraded in order to build her up. Olga, we are told, as Hasty makes Onegin's judgment her own, is "an abstract ideal in place of an actual woman" inhabiting an erotic wasteland, where "a book serves as an acceptable substitute for a flesh-and-blood bed-fellow" (!). Oh yeah? Then what is she thinking about while Lensky is composing that madrigal? And why the red face when she wakes up after her dream? With a nudge and a wink, Pushkin hints that Olga is shallow but sexy, her playfulness resembling that of those naughty peasant girls who sing their folksong while Tatiana runs trembling from Onegin.

The major opposition for Hasty is, of course, between Tatiana and Onegin, with predictable results. It is all in the epithets; Tatiana is "free," "spontaneous," “creative," while Onegin has to be seen as "fervorless," "predictable," etc., etc. After page after page of Onegin-bashing and Tatiana-hymning a certain reader-fatigue sets in. Bits of the text that do not fit the thesis are relentlessly sawn off, ignored, or glossed over. For example, in a critique of Onegin Siniavskii is quoted as saying that "opponents of fate are brought to their knees... "—yet what is Tatiana's letter but an attack on fate? Her mistake in the recipient of her letter is represented as the inadequacy of Onegin (men!!!), rather than what it is, a misplaced outburst of feelings on the part of a naive girl. Her "muse" is as ill-chosen as Lensky's—and, by the way, Pushkin's whole ironical attitude to the notion of a muse (his nurse, a flock of ducks, a drunken neighbor... ) is comfortably ignored. As for Onegin, Hasty's argument that Tatiana is the more vulnerable of the two is questionable—it would be psychologically more convincing to read Onegin's actions as the result of a deep-seated insecurity that makes him truly pitiable after their final scene, when the only release for him (subtly elided by Pushkin) must be suicide or madness. Tatiana is simply a better coper.

Regarding that final scene, Hasty's thesis leads to an untenable conclusion. Throughout the text Hasty has kept alive the potential for some other, shadowy option beyond an affair or matrimony. In their tete-a.-tete, Hasty argues, Tatiana's creative energy "promises to revitalize Eugene." She "draws him toward that space of possibility that is opened by mutual unrequited love" (209). Tatiana the liberated woman teaches the man who was her muse to be a liberated man beyond matrimony and sex! And his petrified state "as if struck by thunder"? And the spurs of her husband (the echo of shagi kommandora)? And the author's comment that this is "a terrible moment for him?" No, it's all a happy ending, and they enter a feminist utopia!

In short, Hasty has made Tatiana her muse, and has written her a lengthy love-letter. Unfortunately, love-letters always misread the object of their desire. There is no bright, utopian feminist future, only the eternal asymmetry of gender.

Douglas Clayton
University of Ottawa

Citation:
Clayton, J. Douglas. Rev. of Pushkin's Tatiana. Pushkin Review / Pushkinskii vestnik 06-07 (2003-04): 201-02. <http://www.pushkiniana.org>.

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