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?

I’ve found that these issues are easier to discuss if we have approached Pushkin by way of certain other texts. The syllabus begins with Karamzin’s “Poor Liza,” but what really helps lead into Onegin are the three Karamzin essays that are assigned—“On the Book Trade and the Love of Reading in Russia,” “Why is there so little writing talent in Russia?” and “What does an author need?” (all in Harold B. Segel, ed., The Literature of Eighteenth-Century Russia, vol. I; I excerpt the two longer ones). In an effort to put these essays in historical context, at this stage of the course I lecture much more than I usually will later, chiefly with an eye to what will make help make Onegin’s metaliterary musings and references to contemporary literary culture more comprehensible to students the following week. Therefore, in my opening “thumbnail sketch” of Russian society c. 1800, I talk about the transformation of literary life in the years separating early Karamzin from Pushkin—the rise of salons and the beginnings of print culture, and the two (or more) very different and indeed conflicting models of authorship that were fostered by these two phenomena. (Here I draw on William Mills Todd III’s Fiction and Society in the Age of Pushkin.)

We then begin our Pushkin unit (which occupies about three weeks of a one-semester survey covering the period 1792–1862) not with Onegin, but rather with “Egyptian Nights” (even though it was written later, I put it before Onegin on the syllabus). “Egyptian Nights” allows us to touch on salon culture, the nobleman-poet’s problematic status, the social role of art generally, and the supreme importance, in Pushkin’s world, of conventions both social and literary. And of course since this tale is explicitly metaliterary, it raises questions about genre and translation that help prepare students for Onegin. Given an opportunity to think about these issues beforehand, students seem better equipped to make sense of a “novel in verse”, or at least better equipped to ask questions about it.

We read Falen’s translation of Onegin, though I admit to the class that Arndt’s is the one that somehow imprinted on me, probably just because I read it first and at an impressionable undergraduate moment. Once we’ve embarked on Pushkin’s text, I distribute copies of a one-page article from the New York Times Book Review, Douglas Hofstadter’s “What’s Gained in Translation.” Hofstadter, who does not know Russian, reproduces two stanzas of Eugene Onegin in versions by four different translators—Sir Charles Johnston, James E. Falen, Walter Arndt and Oliver Elton/A.D.P. Briggs—and then assesses what each translation achieves. (See New York Times, Sunday December 8, 1996, Section 7, Page 47.) The stanzas Hofstadter compares are I: 6 and VIII: 20. I recommend photocopying his article from the paper edition of the NYT rather than ordering it online, since the online version’s formatting leaves something to be desired in its arrangement of the reproduced stanzas.

From here we go on to discuss the problem of translation in a broader sense, which leads us to questions about intended readers. Pushkin’s main “target audience,” judging from the text, seems to be a select number of literary and social insiders, i.e., the author’s own friends. I point out that since there are no longer any of these early-nineteenth-century Russian noblemen around to read Eugene Onegin, all readers, even those reading in the original, are to some extent faced with the task of “translating” a text that locates itself very insistently in a particular long-lost time and place. This can give rise to a discussion of the various ways in which virtually all our literary experiences are mediated (by editors, publishers, teachers, footnotes and other explanatory apparatuses…) even when we are reading a text in the language in which it was written.

This is not intended to deny the inevitable limitations of translated texts. Indeed, these limitations are especially painful in the case of Eugene Onegin: as Richard Lourie wrote a few years ago, paraphrasing Robert Frost, “Pushkin is what gets lost in translation.” I try to acknowledge and as far as possible to overcome these barriers through frequent reference to the Russian text, which I keep in front of me throughout the class. But I see little point in focusing students’ attention at great length on what most of them have no choice but to miss. I do try to convey, often with the help of the émigré native speakers who turn up in my classes, the experience of reading Pushkin in Russian—how easy it is, how paradoxically “natural” the language feels (i.e., this is not our experience of reading Shakespeare, or even Hawthorne), and how hard this quality is to reproduce in a translation.

In the course of this discussion I put a stanza on the board, explaining both the form itself and the system of notation used to diagram it (aBaB ccDD …). My real goal here is to encourage students to think about a key paradox of Pushkin’s writing—its combination of formal intricacy with the ease and “naturalness” noted above. I point out that this combination is central not only to the work’s form but also to the social world that it portrays. The passages describing Tatiana as a high-society hostess who is admired for her “simplicity” (8: 14–28) make this point most insistently: it is Tatiana’s perfect mastery of a set of complex rules that makes her behavior seem natural in what is in fact a decidedly unnatural situation. My hope is that all this talk about rules and forms—in Onegin stanzas and in the lives of Pushkin’s peers—will help students understand why Pushkin (often) represents the bright side of literary and social conventions, that is, their fruitfulness, their power to generate meaning. I tend to emphasize this because students often think of conventions simply as constraints on expression, as something that art must try to overcome. But in order to understand Onegin, they need to learn to think about conventions as being simultaneously playful, manipulable and deadly serious (the best example of the last being of course the duel, the codes governing which I discuss at some length, using as a guide Irina Reyfman’s book Ritualized Violence Russian Style). In this context I sometimes quote the opening lines of stanza 1: 25, though there are many others that might serve the same purpose: “For one may be a man of reason,/and mind the beauty of his nails./Why argue vainly with the season?—/For custom’s rule o’er man prevails” (Falen).

There are also other benefits, I’ve found, of starting with a discussion of how the text is put together and how its form reflects the values of a particular social world. For one thing, it establishes a precedent for paying attention to representation, i.e., for not talking about the characters simply as if they were real people. Of course we do talk about plot and characterization, especially in the case of Tatiana and the choice she makes at the end (here I draw on Olga Peters Hasty’s incisive analysis in her book Pushkin’s Tatiana). But having talked first about formal issues I have some basis on which I can call students’ attention back to questions of representation when I start to hear too many comments like “Eugene is so conceited!” And while it’s true that character analysis is always a good way to get students to talk, I’ve found that big questions about genre—like “what is a novel, anyway?”—can often enliven conversation while keeping our level of discourse somewhat higher.

We conclude our week on Onegin with a discussion of Pushkin as a cultural icon, the character of Onegin as a “type,” and Pushkin’s novel in verse as a foundational text of Russian national literature. I say a bit about the different versions of Pushkin that have dominated critical opinion in different eras and about key moments in the history of Pushkin’s reception and interpretation (e.g., Dostoevsky’s 1880 speech and the 1937 jubilee). And finally, I bring in a few pieces of Pushkiniana—candy boxes, etc., imprinted with the poet’s image—and explain to students that it is, or was, not unheard of for moderately well-educated Russians to require their children to memorize all of Eugene Onegin (here I give two examples from among my own acquaintances). Of course Onegin becomes a touchstone to which we often return over the course of the semester, and for the first paper I suggest several topics that allow students to consider Pushkin’s text in relationship to others that came later. In conclusion, I’d say that while our discussions don’t always go perfectly, and I’ve certainly seen my share of blank faces at certain moments, overall the students seem to come away pleased by their own ability to understand and even to enjoy something as strange as a novel that looks a lot like a very big poem.

New York University