A Note on Teaching Eugene Onegin in English

 Jim Rice

The Pushkin course introduced at the University of Oregon twenty years ago is designed to accommodate students with or without Russian. Without close reading and discussion of texts, a Pushkin course would lose much of its value. Our compromise has been to focus once weekly (Fridays) on a few short poems, assigned to all students in multiple translations (usually just two or three, but as many as twelve translations in the case of “Ia vas liubil,” <I loved you, once>). Those who read Russian of course have the Russian original, but they too must address the translations critically, which is only to extend and focus the problem they face in any event: that is, to draw appropriate meaning from the encoded message. Students without Russian are thus confronted routinely with a truism of Pushkinian language, the crux of which is often some strategic ambiguity. As a rule this characteristic feature has escaped some or all of the translators. Work with multiple translations helps alert all of the students to the quintessential manner of Pushkin’s verse language. Students with Russian are coaxed to assist their colleagues, as informants, while for pedagogical purposes the teacher is at liberty to play devil’s advocate, as usual.

The same principle of multiple translations can be applied to classroom study of Onegin, at least in measure. First, a word about how Eugene Onegin has come to be handled in my course. It is the work that spans the poet’s middle years, recapitulates (more than once) his comings and goings, and redeploys lyric ups and downs by the dozen. It is the work of Pushkin, more than any other, that I urge students to read in Russian if at all possible. But the novel is readily dismantled into its eight component chapters. Their serial origin is still obvious in the gracefully and playfully transitional endings, bidding readers adieu (at times indeed for years). And thus Onegin can effectively remain in the classroom, serially assigned with other materials chronologically intervening. Here is the synopsis of a course just concluded in March 2004. We met twice weekly in ninety-minute sessions.

This allows eight ninety-minute classes in large part on EO, and some portion of the Boldino week for the explosive creativity generated in part by the termination of Onegin. In addition to Onegin and the other major works listed above, fifty-five short poems were chronologically assigned, some discussed in lectures, others in the translation sessions. (When the course was launched two decades ago, 105 short poems were discussed. Now about half of these figure only in an advisory list, which includes multiple translations for each item.)

From the National Union Catalogue Pre-1956 Imprints, various electronic databases, and our own university library I am aware of a dozen EO translations into English, commencing with Lieutenant Col. Spalding’s (1881). The others are Elton (1937), Radin and Patrick (1937), Deutsch (1943, recently in print again, Dover Paperback), Kayden (1964), Nabokov (1964), Arndt (2nd ed., 1981), Johnston (1977), Falen (1991), Hofstadter (1999), and two that I have not yet seen: by Craig Wright and Kira Obolensky (Dramatic Paperback, 1996), and by Bayley in The Complete Works of Alexander Pushkin in English (vol. 4, 2002). The Charles Johnston version, in addition to its general reliability (a word, however, to be used with reservation as applied to Pushkin translations), has remained available for purchase in reprints.

Each of these editions has its successes and shortcomings in Englishing Pushkin. And all may have their uses in class. The multiple-translations principle is best applied to Onegin in carefully selected specimen passages, preferably and usually whole strophes, though in many cases pointed couplets or larger excerpts will present themselves for special attention. The instructor must locate these passages in advance, a leisurely task. All of them might be handily put up in a course packet, and it is to be hoped that your university provides an efficient Copyright Service to facilitate the printing. Choosing these materials, which might amount to no more than, say, three or four passages per class, takes us into the very cockles of the pedagogical heart, and I would not presume to arbitrate. I can, however, provide a very brief checklist of passages in Onegin which, in my experience, have proved hazardous for translators: One, LIX; Three, VII/VIII; Four, LI; Five, XX–XXI (with MS variants); Six, III; Seven, XXII; Eight, L. In the last instance, one question is whether the images (and specifically “trud”) reliably link in English with the Boldino lyric “Trud,” so that students will not overlook the connection. The first item here listed (One, LIX) has a blatant bit of frivolity (boldface):

Svoboden, vnov ishchu soiuza
Volshebnykh zvukov, chuvstv i dum—

which almost all translators have tended to overlook. (One exception is Hofstadter.) Passages may be chosen, of course, to introduce broader concepts of meaning, style, and character. A convenient distillate of Pushkin scholarship in English is to be found in Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature in English. A Bibliography of Criticism and Translations, compiled by Carl R. Proffer and Ronald Meyer (1990) including sixty-six articles on Onegin and the best Pushkin bibliographies (pages 122–38). A short list of the instructors’ more up-to-date enthusiasms along with the best of the Proffer/Meyer list could be handed out to students early as food for thought.

The predominant and controversial role of Tatiana brings me back, inevitably and routinely, to the articles on her dream and her last speech to Onegin, by Richard Gregg (see Proffer/Meyer, 137), models of close reading and pedagogical excellence. Without superimposing my own drift, I would only add that Tatiana’s dream opens the way to ever more productive discussion of what is primarily and after all a male fantasy of female sexuality. Whether or not there is a difference, everyone in class deserves to be heard. The dream world of Tatiana takes her (by her own unconscious wish) into the Walpurgisnacht of Onegin’s lust (a projection of her own desire which becomes more explicit as the dream progresses). The instructor may or may not feel obliged to explain just how far Pushkin’s drafts take the erotic fantasies of Tatiana’s dream.

Several productive questions should be addressed, to help nudge students into complicity as readers. What is a dream? Does Tatiana’s dream wash (specifically, as the dream of a woman spun out by a male poet)? What can the dream contribute to the novel? And to bring the issues home to our student personnel: Does Tatiana’s dream have anything to teach us about sex in the present day? A persuasive push in the right direction is given by Bruno Bettelheim in The Uses of Enchantment. The Meaning and Interpretation of Fairy Tales (1976, especially the last chapter: “The Animal-Groom Cycle of Fairy Tales,” 277–310).

A course of this duration (10 weeks) cannot dwell overmuch on Pushkin’s Southern Poems; however, their analogy to Byron’s Eastern Poems should be trumpeted loud, as well as the two poets’ respective transitions to Don Juan and Onegin. It is remarkable that Zhirmunskii’s famous book on Byron and Pushkin mentions Don Juan only twice, in passing, to dismiss the huge task of comparing those major works, Juan and Onegin. But insofar as our students, in a few hasty weeks, can enjoy the extra luxury and benefit of some comparative reflection, I think that nothing is quite so valuable for them as reading in and about Byron, whose backstage personality is so wonderfully documented. (See Lord Byron, Selected Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand, 1982.) The “Russian” cantos of Don Juan (VII–XI) have their own eccentric appeal, and a certain historic relevance to the political saga of Pushkin. And can the last line of the first stanza in Onegin, Chapter One, be quite unconnected with the last couplet of Don Juan, Canto the First, stanza one?

We all have seen him, in the pantomime,
Sent to the Devil somewhat ere his time.

It still gives me pause, I confess. And I always expect that tomorrow I’ll find the answer somewhere in the vast Pushkin literature. In Don Juan, too, one finds myriad specimens of that basic Pushkinian stylistic principle (already prominent in his verse from the Lyceum days), the comic puncture of rhetorical balloons. A Byronic example can serve as a useful shorthand to call attention to similar devices in Onegin, for instance, the couplet describing Juan’s father (Canto the First, IX):

A better cavalier ne’er mounted horse,
Or, being mounted, e’er got down again.

There was something in Pushkin, like Byron, centrifugal, a good old boy in exile, fun-loving. There was also the hedgehog bristling up, drawn to the power center, an aristocrat manqué, and decidedly hard to fathom: a Voltairean from childhood. Getting to know that Pushkin is the harder row to hoe. I generally send students to Theodore Besterman’s Voltaire (1969, chapter 25: “Prussia: hail and farewell”).

But for teaching Onegin in English, the primary, self-evident and indispensable model is Lord Byron. In 1821 Byron was visited in Ravenna by a young Bostonian. The great poet felt his visitor hadn’t taken to him, because of “his having expected to meet a misanthropic gentleman, in wolf-skin breeches, and answering in fierce monosyllables.” Byron protested that the excited passion of poetry could not be kept up around the clock “any more than a continuous earthquake, or an eternal fever. Besides, who would ever shave themselves in such a state?” (Marchand, Op. cit., 255). Pushkin’s record gives us rich material for reconstructing a similar backstage life of lucid wit and wisdom, background to a creativity of pure pleasure. This side of the poet (Oneginesque) is accessible, while Pushkin’s terminal gestures and strategies remain obscure, and remote from the modern classroom.

University of Oregon