On Teaching Eugene Onegin in English

 Anne Lounsbery

It is a truth universally acknowledged among teachers of Russian literature in translation that (1) a nineteenth-century Russian literature survey must include Eugene Onegin and (2) this text—in its formal intricacy, metaliterary obsessions and historical embeddedness—will often resist our attempts to make it pleasurable and interesting. I generally start out by acknowledging these facts to my class, though not perhaps in so many words. That is, I begin by calling students’ attention to the following characteristics of Pushkin’s text: its up-to-the-minute engagement with the realia of upper-class Russian life; its thematizing of the process of writing; and its interest in “forms” and conventionality at all levels, from its representation of social rituals to its ostentatiously intricate stanzaic structure. I encourage them to be astonished that this is indeed a novel in verse—a formal fact that requires us to begin with certain big questions: What is a genre? What is a novel? Why does it matter? Why write a novel in verse? What can poetry do that prose cannot, and vice versa? Is there anything particularly “Russian” about this sort of genre-bending, and if so, why? Can we appreciate—or better yet, enjoy—this text in translation?