The novel "Eugene Onegin"

Slubskikh Kira Olegovna

A. S. Pushkin (1799--1837)

onegin novel pushkin

Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin was born in Moscow. From an early age, Pushkin was brought up in a literary environment. His father was a connoisseur of literature, had a large library, his uncle was a poet. The Pushkin House was visited by N.M. Karamzin, V.A. Zhukovsky, I.I. Dmitriev.

Grandmother, Arina Rodionovna, uncle Nikita Kozlov, the Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum, where he began to study in 1811, played an important role in Pushkin's life. His friends at the Lyceum were: Ivan Pushchin, Wilhelm Kuchelbecker, Anton Delvig. There he began to write poetry, in 1814 the first poem "To a friend of a poet" was published.

After graduating from the Lyceum, A.S. Pushkin moved to St. Petersburg in 1817 and was enlisted in the Collegium of Foreign Affairs. In St. Petersburg, he communicated in secular society. In 1820 he completed the poem "Ruslan and Lyudmila" - the first major work.

For his works in 1820, Pushkin was sent into exile. There they wrote poems Prisoner of the Caucasus”,“ The Fountain of Bakhchisaray ”,“ The Robber Brothers ”, and in 1823 he began work on a novel in verse“ Eugene Onegin ”.

In 1824 Pushkin was again sent into exile. There he continued to work on "Eugene Onegin", wrote "Boris Godunov", poems. In the same place, in Mikhailovsky, his friends visited him. Pushchin brought Woe from Wit to Pushkin, and from him he learned about the Decembrist uprising, in which many of his friends participated, as well as about their execution.

On September 4, 1826, Nicholas I unexpectedly summoned Pushkin to Moscow. But already in 1328, a decree was issued on the supervision of A.S. Pushkin. In the same year he left for the Caucasus.

In 1830 Pushkin got married to N. Goncharova. Before his marriage, he went to the estate in Boldino. This period in Pushkin's work is called the Boldin autumn, because. he wrote a large number of works.

May 15, 1831 Pushkin married and moved to St. Petersburg. During these years, he wrote works: "Dubrovsky", " Captain's daughter"," The history of Pugachev. Communicated with V. G. Belinsky, N. V. Gogol, with artists.

On February 9, 1837, Pushkin shot himself in a duel with Dantes, was mortally wounded and died on February 10 in his house on the Moika.

Foreword

The first commentator on the novel "Eugene Onegin" was its brilliant author himself: Pushkin provided his novel with notes, where he revealed allusions to various phenomena of literary modernity, personal life, explained poetic quotations, defended common words and expressions introduced into the text of the novel from reactionary criticism, translated foreign sayings.

The modern reader in Pushkin's novel encounters the characteristic details of a life alien to him, Gukovsky G.A. writes about the novel: “... the very number of everyday topics and materials fundamentally distinguishes Pushkin's novel from previous literature. In "Eugene Onegin" the reader passes through a series of everyday phenomena, moral descriptive details, things, clothes, colors, dishes, customs. The reader can ignore much of what was burning for Pushkin, what worried his contemporaries due to the acuteness of the questions posed, aimed at all the details familiar at that time, ideological currents, even faces, and which now requires specific historical disclosure. The novel is not only full of "the mind of cold observations and the heart of sad remarks" of the author, it is saturated with Pushkin's worldview - philosophical, political, aesthetic. "Friend, comrade" of the noble revolutionaries, he sharply castigates the morals of the noble nobility and backward groups of the ruling class, sympathizes with the advanced representatives of the noble culture. Thus, the task arises to describe the socio-political moods during the years of writing the novel that gave rise to the main characters of the novel, determined their social fate, psychology, forms of behavior, and to reveal the circle of ideas of the author himself in the reality that changed during his lifetime, when hopes for social transformations were dashed after the defeat. Decembrists.

"Eugene Onegin" is a novel in verse, written in 1823-1831.

It is unique, because earlier in world literature there was not a single novel in verse. Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin created it like Lord Byron's poem Don Juan. Defining the novel as a “collection of motley chapters”, Pushkin emphasizes one of the features of this work: the novel is, as it were, “opened” in time, each chapter could be the last, but it can also have a continuation. And thus the reader draws attention to the independence of each chapter of the novel. Pushkin called the work on it a feat - of all his creative heritage, only Boris Godunov he characterized with the same word.

V. G. Belinsky in his article “Eugene Onegin” concluded: “Onegin can be called an encyclopedia of Russian life and an extremely folk work.”

History of creation

The first mention of Pushkin's work on the novel is found in his Odessa letter to P.A. Vyazemsky on November 4, 1823: "As for my studies, now I am not writing a novel, but a novel in verse - a diabolical difference ..."

Pushkin did not count on the possibility of the novel appearing in print, fearing censorship. “There’s nothing to think about printing” ... “If someday it is“ my poem ”and will be printed, it’s true, not in Moscow and not in St. Petersburg” ... “I don’t know if this poor Onegin will be allowed in” into the heavenly realm of printing; just in case, I'll try," he wrote in 1823-1824. Vyazemsky, Bestuzhev and A.I. Turgenev.

Although at the beginning of his work the poet "did not yet clearly distinguish" the "distance of his novel", his form had already been thought out: the novel was to become - in a free genre form - a reflection public life with abundant digressions from the main thread of the story about the hero and his fate; it was supposed to become a social novel and a confession novel, a lyrical and satirical novel, a "romantic poem" and a pamphlet novel (a satirical and caustic pamphlet that offends a person), saturated with themes of living modernity and responses from a direct participant who "chokes with bile ". The style of the novel somewhat later (in 1828) was determined by the poet himself in a dedication to P.A. Pletnev, published in the first edition of the IV and V chapters of "Eugene Onegin":

“Not thinking proud light to amuse,

Loving the attention of friendship,

I would like to introduce you

A pledge worthy of you

Worthy of a beautiful soul,

Holy dream come true

Poetry alive and clear,

High thoughts and simplicity;

But so be it - with a biased hand

Accept the collection of colorful heads,

Half funny, half sad

vulgar, ideal,

The careless fruit of my amusements,

Insomnia, light inspirations,

Immature and withered years

Crazy cold observations

And hearts of sad notes.

The author was pleased with his creation: "This is my best work," he wrote in January 1824. L.S. Pushkin; “Still, he, Onegin, is my best work,” he repeated in a letter to A.A. Bestuzhev on March 24, 1825.

"I'm talking too much," he confessed to A. Delvig in November 1823, shortly before finishing the first chapter of the novel. "Chattering", a casual tone of light conversation, running from one topic to another, a casual manner of speech, constant appeals to the reader of his own, secular circle, "a comic description of morals" with the apparent indifference of the author, what impression serious topics and funny jokes make on the reader, This is the tone of the first chapter. Beginning with the second chapter, this tone of the "talking" poet changes; the novel includes themes of great content; the image of the hero began to become clear to the reader in the hopelessness of his situation against the background of the ossified noble life, in the conditions of the political impasse of the 1920s. Elements of satire in the new chapters are manifested in the author's attitude to the "wild nobility", in sharp criticism of the "big world" and its "prejudices", in criticism of social mores and the political system that broke and maimed people with a large supply of mental strength. The "careless" tone completely disappears in the last chapters, written after December 14, 1825, under the conditions of the gloomy reaction of Nicholas. ingenious artist set himself serious problems about the relationship of the individual to society, about social and individual conflicts that are insoluble in a class society.

Pushkin, finishing the novel, said goodbye to him and to the reader with touching and exciting words:

"Whoever you are, my reader,

Friend, foe, I want to be with you

To part now as a friend.

Forgive me and you, my strange companion,

And you, my true ideal,

And you, alive and permanent,

Even a little work…”

Chronology of the novel "Eugene Onegin"

In the draft papers of Pushkin, P. Annenkov found a sheet on which the poet in 1830 sketched out a plan for the complete edition of Eugene Onegin.

Part one. Preface.

I song. Blues. Chisinau, Odessa.

II "Poet. Odessa. 1824.

III "The young lady. Odessa. Mikhailovskoye. 1824.

Part two.

IV song. Village. Mikhailovskoye. 1825.

V "Name day. Mikhailovskoye. 1825, 1826.

VI "Duel. Mikhailovskoye. 1826

Part three

VII song. Moscow. Mikhailovskoye. P.b. Raspberries. 1827, 1828.

VIII "Wandering. Moscow. 1829. Pavlovskoye. Boldino.

IX "Big light. Boldino.

Note.

This sketch can be supplemented with more precise instructions from Pushkin's draft notebooks.

The novel was conceived in Chisinau on May 9, 1823, the first stanzas of the first chapter were begun on the night of May 28, 1823, work continued in Odessa and was completed on October 22, 1823.

The second chapter was begun the next day, by November 1, 16 stanzas were ready, under the XVII-XVIII stanzas the note is November 3; on the night of December 8, 1823, stanza XXXIX was completed.

The third chapter began on the night of February 8, 1824; finished October 2, 1824 (in the village of Mikhailovsky).

The fourth chapter is marked: at XXIII stanza - December 31, 1824 and January 1, 1825; under stanza XLIII - January 2, 1826: under stanza LI - January 6, 1826

The seventh chapter was written in 1827-1828; started in Moscow on March 18, 1827; in the spring (in Moscow and St. Petersburg) Pushkin wrote stanzas dedicated to the description of Moscow; after a long break, Pushkin resumed work at the beginning of 1828: between stanzas XII and XIII of the mark on February 19, 1828; the seventh chapter was completed on November 4, 1828. On December 19, 1827, Pushkin wrote a dedication to Pletnev. The seventh chapter includes "Onegin's Album" - litter August 5, 1828.

The eighth chapter - subsequently excluded and published under the title "Fragments from Onegin's Journey" - began on December 24, 1829, but even earlier (no later than 1827) Pushkin wrote stanzas dedicated to Odessa. By October 30, the beginning of the chapter was ready up to the stanza "He sees the Wayward Terek"; the last stanza ("And the shore of Soroti is sloping") is dated September 18, 1830.

The ninth chapter, which later took the place of the eighth, was conceived in 1829, completed on September 25, 1830 (in Boldin); in the summer (in July - early August) of 1831, the poet inserted several stanzas from Onegin's journey into the eighth (printed) chapter, wrote new stanzas (for example, XIII), replaced the old ones (for example, the first 4), reworked the picture of Petersburg light (XXIV -XXVI stanzas) and on October 5, 1831 inserted "Onegin's Letter to Tatiana". On November 21, 1830, a preface to "Eugene Onegin" was written, which Pushkin wanted to preface the planned edition of the eighth and ninth chapters together.

Tenth chapter. Pushkin's note has been preserved: "October 19, 1830, burned the 10th song." In the diary of P. Vyazemsky dated December 19, 1830: “Pushkin wrote a lot in the countryside; put in order VIII and IX chapters of Onegin, and ends with it; from X, supposed, he read me stanzas about 1812 and the following - a glorious chronicle! "

Return to "Eugene Onegin". By the autumn of 1833, there are sketches in which Pushkin speaks of his desire to continue his novel. September 15, 1835 he wrote two opening stanzas for a planned continuation of the novel.

Pushkin's letters

A.S. Pushkin about "Eugene Onegin"

“As for my studies, I am now writing not a novel, but a novel in verse - a diabolical difference! In the Don Juan family. There is nothing to think about printing: I write carelessly ... "

"I'm writing now new poem, in which I talk to the limit ... God knows when we will read it together ... "

“I am writing a new poem at my leisure, Eugene Onegin, where I choke on bile. Two songs are ready."

In January 1824 in a letter to L. S. Pushkin:

“Perhaps I will send him [Delvig] excerpts from Onegin; this is my best work. Do not believe N. Raevsky, who scolds him - he expected Romanticism from me, found Satire and Cynicism and didn’t get enough of it.

“There is nothing to think about my poem. - It is written in stanzas almost freer than those of Don Juan. If someday it will be printed, then surely not in St. Petersburg and not in Moscow.

In early April 1824, in a letter to P. A. Vyazemsky:

“Slenin offers me as much as I want for Onegin ... The matter has become censorship, but I am not joking, because it is about my future fate, about independence - I need it. To print Onegin, I ... am ready even in the loop.

In April - the first half of May 1824 in a letter to P. A. Vyazemsky:

2You want to know what I am doing - writing colorful stanzas of a romantic poem - and taking lessons in pure Atheism ... "

“I will send you the 1st Song of Onegin with my wife. “Perhaps it will be published with the change of the ministry.”

“I will try to push towards the gates of censorship with the first chapter or the song of Onegin. Let's get through. You demand from me details about "Onegin" - boring, my soul. Some other time...”

“My Onegin is growing. Hell print it. I thought that your censorship had grown wiser under Shishkov, but I see that under the old, the old way.

“Knowing your old attachment to the pranks of the accursed muse, I was about to send you a few stanzas of my Onegin, but laziness. I don't know if this poor "Onegin" will be allowed into the heavenly realm of printing; I'll try it just in case."

In September - October 1824 in a letter to P. A. Pletnev:

“I carelessly and joyfully rely on you with regard to my Onegin. Call my Areopagus: that is, Zhukovsky, Gnedich and Delvig. I expect judgment from you and with humility I will accept its decision. I regret that there is no Baratynsky!”

In the first half of October 1824, in a letter to V. F. Vyazemskaya:

“As for my neighbors, at first I gave myself the trouble not to receive them; they don't bother me; I enjoy the reputation of Onegin among them - so I am a prophet in my fatherland ... I am in the best position imaginable to finish my poetic novel, but boredom is a cold muse, and my poem does not move at all; here, however, is the stanza to which I am indebted to you; show it to the prince [Pyotr Vyazemsky], tell him not to judge everything by this example.

In early November 1824, in letters to L. S. Pushkin:

“What is Onegin?.. Brother, here's a picture for Onegin - find a skillful and quick pencil. If there is another, so that everything is in the same location. Same scene, do you hear? This is what I absolutely need.”

In mid-November 1824, in a letter to L. S. Pushkin:

“Print, print “Onegin” and with “Conversation” ... Will “Onegin” have a picture?”

“... Your love letter to Tanya: I am writing to you - what more? - charm and craftsmanship. I do not find only the truth in the following verses:

But, they say, you are unsociable,

In the wilderness, in the village, everything is boring for you,

And we don't shine here!

An unsociable person should not be bored that they are in the wilderness and do not shine with anything. Here is counterintuition! - Do me a favor, send your Gypsies as soon as possible and let me print them especially! Let me print everything... In general, it's better to print in Moscow, or rather, it's cheaper. Petersburg literature has been so misguided, so humiliated, that it is a shame to deal with it. Journalists denounce each other, they only bother about pennies ... And it’s not bad for you to bother about pennies, or money for a rainy day; but this is different! Collect all your elegies and send them to me; you can print them separately. Then three poems. There are excerpts from Onegin; and finally the complete collection. Here is a glorious quitrent village for you! And dress me up with your Burmister. You now have a lot of time: there is leisure to collect, rewrite. Yes, and I'm idle and reluctant to do. And your occupation will be for me: do not do business, but do not run away from business. Do a favor for me and for yourself, attend to my proposal."

“My brother took Onegin to P.B. and print it there. Don't be angry, dear; I feel that in you I am losing my most faithful guardian; but under the present circumstances, any other publisher of mine will involuntarily attract attention and displeasure. “I wonder how Tanya’s Letter ended up in your possession. Interpret it to me. I am responding to your criticism. Unsociable is not a misanthrope, that is, one who hates people, but runs away from people. Onegin is unsociable for village neighbors; Tanya believes that the reason for this is that he is bored in the wilderness, in the village, and that glitter alone can attract him. If, however, the meaning is not entirely accurate, then all the more truth in the letter. A letter from a woman, also 17 years old, and in love!”

At the beginning of December 1824 in a letter to D. M. Knyazhevich:

“... It's been four months since I've been in a remote village - it's boring, but there's nothing to do. There is no sea here, no blue sky at noon, no Italian opera, no you, my friends. My solitude is perfect, idleness solemn. There are few neighbors around me, I know only one family, and then I see him quite rarely (perfect Onegin); riding all day, in the evening I listen to the tales of my nanny, the original nanny Tatyana: you seem to have seen her once; she is my only friend, and with her only I am not bored ... "

V. A. Zhukovsky to Pushkin in mid-November 1824:

“... I read Onegin and the conversation that served him as a preface: incomparably! By the authority given to me, I offer you the first place in the Russian Parnassus. And what a place if you combine with the loftiness of the Genius the loftiness of the goal.

“What is Kozlov blind? did you read Onegin to him?"

In December 1824, in a letter to L. S. Pushkin:

“By Christ God, I ask you to get Onegin out of censorship as soon as possible ... Money is needed. Do not bargain for poetry for a long time - cut, tear, shred at least all 54 stanzas, but money, for God's sake, money!

The efforts to publish the first chapter of "Eugene Onegin" were undertaken by P. A. Pletnev. So, he wrote:

"What to do, dear Pushkin! Your letter arrived late. The first page of Onegin has already been printed, 2,400 copies in number. Consequently, amendments cannot be made. Shouldn't they be left until the second edition? There will soon be a need for this ... Everyone is thirsty. "Your Onegin" will be a pocket mirror of the youth of St. Petersburg. What a charm! The Latin is hilariously sweet. The legs are delightful. The night on the Neva is not crazy for me. If in this chapter you fly and jump like that without almost any action, then I can't imagine what will come out after ... If you want money, then dispose of it quickly. When Onegin comes out, I hope to save up a significant amount for future editions, without depriving your whims of the necessary.

“You know from my previous letter that it is impossible to make amendments to Onegin and Conversation (unless you want to waste 2,400 sheets of velvet paper and delay the publication of the book for another month due to the accursed slowness of our printing houses). Now you still demand corrections, when everything has already been printed. Please, leave it until the second edition.

I anticipate your objection:

But I don't see shame here.

And in fact: your ticklishness is almost out of place. What you know, and who else, we will not understand. Everyone will think that it is impossible to write poems only about oneself.

“Today's letter will be a report, my soul, about Onegin... 2,400 copies printed. I made a condition with Olenin that he sell it himself and give it to whomever he wants for a commission, and I, apart from him, will not have accounts with anyone. For this he takes 10 per cent each, that is, he pays us 4 rubles for the book. 50 k., selling himself for 5 rubles. For all copies that he does not have in the shop, he pays money in full on every 1st of the month to send to you, or as you tell me. On March 1, that is, two weeks after Onegin went to press, I no longer found 700 copies in his shop, therefore, he sold, minus his interest, for 3150 rubles. Of this amount, I gave: 1) for paper (white and overlay) 397 rubles, 2) for typesetting and printing 220 rubles, 3) for binding 123 rubles, for sending copies to you, Delvig, father and uncle (your) 5 p. Total 745 rubles.”

“Bestuzhev writes me a lot about Onegin. Tell him he's wrong. Does he really want to banish everything light and cheerful from the realm of poetry? Where will satire and comedy go? Consequently, it will have to destroy Orlando furioso, and Goodibraz, and Pucelle, and Werner, and Reinecke-Foucault, and the best part of Darling, and La Fontaine's tales, and Krylov's fables, and so on. and so on. It's a little strict. The picture of secular life is also included in the field of poetry. But enough about "Onegin."

“... I share your opinion that pictures of secular life are included in the field of poetry. Yes, even if they didn’t come in, you, with your damn talent, would have pushed them in there by force. When Bestuzhev wrote his last letter to you, I had not yet fully read Onegin's first song. Now I have heard everything: she is beautiful; you grabbed everything that only such an object represents ... "

“Onegin is being printed, brother and Pletnev are looking after the publication; I did not expect him to rub his way through censorship. Honor and glory to Shishkov!..”

“Onegin has been printed; I think it has already come out…”

“It seems that Onegin owes you the patronage of Shishkov and the happy deliverance from Birukov. I see that our friendship has not changed, and this consoles me.

At the end of February 1825, in a letter to L. S. Pushkin:

“I read an ad about Onegin in Pchela; waiting for noise. If the edition sells out, then proceed immediately to another edition, or arrange with some bookseller. - Write about the impression he made. In the meantime, I have sent to the venerable Thaddeus Benediktovich Bulgarin two excerpts from Onegin, which neither Delvig nor Bestuzhev have: there never was and never will be... and who is to blame? All friends, all damned friends."

“... I have your Onegin, I read it and re-read it, and I burn with impatience to read its continuation, which, judging by the first chapter, must be more curious and more curious ...”

“Your letter is very clever, but still you are wrong; after all, you are looking at Onegin from the wrong point; Still, it is my best work. You're comparing the first chapter to Don Juan. No one respects Don Juan more than me (the first 5 songs, I haven't read the others), but it has nothing in common with Onegin. You talk about the satire of the Englishman Byron and compare it with mine, and demand the same from me! No, my soul, you want a lot. Where is my satire? There is no mention of her in "Eugene Onegin". My embankment would crackle if I touched satire. -- The very word satirical should not be in the preface. Wait for other songs. Oh! If I were to lure you to Mikhailovskoye!.. You will see that if one compares Onegin with Don Juan, then only in one respect: who is nicer and more charming (gracieuse) - Tatyana or Yulia? Canto 1 is just a quick introduction and I'm happy with it (which happens very rarely to me). I conclude our controversy ... "

“What is Delvig? According to rumors, you should have him ... I look forward to him to hear his opinion about the rest of the songs of your "Onegin."

Mid-April 1825, in a letter to P. A. Vyazemsky:

“I am rewriting Onegin for you. I want him to help you smile. For the first time the reader's smile me sourit; excuse this plane: in the blood! .. But meanwhile, be grateful to me: I never rewrote anything for anyone, even for Golitsyna.

“Tolstoy will appear to me in all his splendor in the 4th song of Onegin, if his libel is worth it, and therefore ask for his epigram, etc. from Vyazemsky (by all means). You, my dear, do not find any use in my moon - what to do? and print like this.”

At the end of April 1825, in a letter to P. A. Vyazemsky:

“I have Delvig. Through him I am sending you the 2nd chapter of "Onegin" (rewritten to you and only for you). For a conversation with the nanny, without a letter, the brother received 600 rubles. You see that this is money, therefore it must be kept under lock and key.

At the end of May 1825, in a letter to A. A. Bestuzhev:

“Everything that you say about our upbringing, about foreign and internecine (charm!) imitations - is beautifully expressed and with heartfelt eloquence; in general thoughts boil in you. About Onegin you did not express everything that you had in your heart: I feel why, and I thank you; but why not make your opinion clear? For the time being, we will be guided by our personal relationships, we will not have criticism, and you are worthy to create it.

“... at the last mail, Prince Nikolai Sergeevich Golitsyn sent me from Moscow as a gift of your Onegin. Quite by accident I found my name in it, and this proof that you remember me and are well disposed towards me made me almost ashamed that I had not yet bothered to visit you ... I swallowed Mr. Yevgeny with excellent pleasure (as patronymic?) Onegin. In addition to charming verses, I found here you yourself, your conversation, your gaiety, and I remembered our barracks in Millonnaya. I would like to demand from you in fact the fulfillment of a joke promise: to write a poem, twenty-five songs; Yes, I don’t know what your disposition is now; our favorite activities sometimes become nasty. However, it seems that you have no dissatisfaction in literature, and your path to Parnassus is strewn with flowers ... "

At the beginning of June 1825, in a letter to A. A. Delvig:

“... What is my Onegin? Is it for sale? By the way, tell Pletnev to give Lev out of my money for nuts, and not for my commission ... What is Zhukovsky doing? Give me his opinion about the 2nd chapter of "Onegin" ... "

“... I heard from Delvig about the following songs of Onegin, but I can’t judge from oral stories ... If you knew how much I love, how much I appreciate your talent. Farewell, miracle worker ... "

"... J" ai lu le 2-m chant de "Eugene Onegin"; c "est un charme! .."

(I read the 2nd song of Eugene Onegin; lovely!)

“... I received the second part of Onegin and some other trinkets. I am very pleased with Onegin, that is, with much in it; but in this chapter there is less brilliance than in the first, and therefore I would not want to see it printed by itself, but perhaps with two, three, or at least one more chapter. In general, or in connection with the following, she will retain her dignity intact, but I am afraid that she will not stand comparison with the first, in the eyes of the world, which demands not only equal, but better ... "

In June 1825, in a letter to P. A. Vyazemsky:

“I think that you have already received my answer to the proposals of the Telegraph27. If he needs my poems, then send him whatever you come across (except for Onegin...).”

"Again," Onegin "is sold (except for those that I have already notified you about, that is, by March 1, 700 copies, and by March 28, 245 copies) 161 copies, i.e. for 724 rubles 50 k... I repeat: 2,400 copies were printed, of which 1,106 copies were sold for money, and 44 copies came out without money for various people. Consequently, there are still 1,250 copies left to sell. decided to cede 20 per cent to the booksellers for the speedy sale, that is, to charge you 4 rubles per copy, and not 4 rubles 50 kopecks as before. Are you satisfied with my orders?"... In a letter on August 29: “I was talking about Onegin with book sellers so that they would take the remaining copies with a concession to them for the entire edition of 1000 rubles. They don’t agree at all. They think that this book has already stopped, but they forget how they will snatch it, when you print another song or two. Then we will laugh at them fools. I confess, I am glad of this. Full of them to amuse us with their money. Dear, take my advice!"...

“4 songs of Onegin are ready for me and many more passages; but I'm not up to them. I am glad that you like the 1st song - I love it myself ...

Pletnev again asks Pushkin to publish the next chapters of Eugene Onegin - in a letter on January 21, 1826: "I beg you, print one or two chapters of Onegin at once. I’m already afraid of that: they frighten me that there are lists of the 2nd chapter in the city. In a letter on February 6: "Do yourself a favour, let Onegin out. Shall I not interrogate?"

“... Let them let me leave the damned Mikhailovskoye ... And you are good! you write to me: rewrite, and hire clerk scribes, and publish Onegin. I'm not up to Onegin. Damn it "Onegin"! I myself want to publish or give out. Fathers, help!”

“... Finally I took it out and read the second song of Onegin, and in general I am very pleased with it; rural life in it is just as well displayed as urban life in the first. Lensky is well drawn, but Tatyana promises a lot. I will note to you, however (for you initiated me into criticism), that up to this time the action has not yet begun; the variety of pictures and the charm of the poem, on first reading, mask this deficiency, but reflection reveals it; however, it is already impossible to correct him now, but another thing remains for you: to fully reward him in the following songs. Bude you do not print the second before the release of the almanac, donate it; but if you publish it first, we ask you to continue: it’s a lovely thing ... "

“... What is my friend Onegin doing? I would have sent him a bow with respect, but he didn’t care about all this: it’s a pity, but by the way, the little one is not a fool ... "

“... My deaf Mikhailovskoye makes me sad and furious. In the 4th song of "Onegin" I depicted my life ... "

“In the countryside, I wrote despicable prose, but inspiration does not climb. In Pskov, instead of writing the seventh chapter of Onegin, I lose the fourth chapter in shtos: it’s not funny.”

"Of the 2356 copies of the 1st Chapter" E. Onegin "remains in Olenin's shop only 750 copies, i.e. for 3000 rubles, and the other 1606 copies have already been sold and money has been received for them in full 6977 rubles.”

At the end of January 1827, in a letter to V.I. Tumansky:

"... They came to Odessa my passage"

“Nothing gives money so easily as Onegin, which came out in parts, but regularly every 2 or 3 months. This has already been proven, but posteriori. By the grace of God, it is all written. then you have a spleen. You answer the public in a fit of whim: here are the "Gypsies" for you; buy them! And the public, to spite you, does not want to buy them and is waiting for "Onegin" and "Onegin". Now let's see which of you will out-argue whom After all, the public has money: it’s more decent, it seems, that you submit to it, at least until you fill your pockets. they say, there's a whole regiment of old ones. All they need is the 2nd chapter of Onegin, which has settled in Moscow, but everyone here asked for it. So, upon receipt of this letter, immediately write to Moscow to send all the rest out of there. copies of "Onegin" of the 2nd chapter to St. Petersburg addressed to Slenin ... For the last time I beg you to rewrite the 4th chapter of "Onegin", and if you get excited, and the 5th, so as not to go to the censor with a thin notebook ... Everything shows that for your various creations, homeless and orphans, one breadwinner is destined by fate: "Eugene Onegin." Feel: your imagination has never yet created, and it seems will not create, a creation that would move such a huge amount of money by such simple means as this priceless treasure of the gold mine "Onegin". He ... should not lead the public out of patience with his frivolity.

In June 1827, in a letter to S. A. Sobolevsky:

“Write me a good word, where is Onegin Part II? Here it is required. Stopped even the sale of other chapters. And who is to blame? You..."

In November 1827, in a letter to S. A. Sobolevsky:

“If you had simply written to me, having arrived in Moscow, that you could not send me the 2nd chapter, then I would have reprinted it without any hassle; but you promised everything, promised - and, thanks to you, in all bookstores the sale of the 1st and 3rd chapters stopped.

At the end of 1827, in a letter to M.P. Pogodin:

"An excerpt from "Onegin" and "Stans" missed - one of these days I will send to Moscow .... "

Pushkin to E. M. Khitrovo:

At the beginning of February 1828 Petersburg:

“I take the liberty of sending you the chapters 4 and 5 of Onegin, which have just come out. With all my heart I would like them to make you smile.

Pushkin to E.M. Khitrovo.

End of January 1832 Petersburg:

“I am very glad that you liked Onegin: I value your opinion.”

E. Baratynsky to Pushkin. At the end of February - beginning of March 1828:

“... We have released two more Onegin songs. Everyone interprets them in his own way: some praise, others scold and everyone reads. I am very fond of the extensive plan of your "Onegin"; but most do not understand it. They are looking for a romantic plot, they are looking for the unusual and, of course, they do not find it. The high poetic simplicity of your creation seems to them the poverty of fiction, they do not notice that old and new Russia, life in all its changes, passes before their eyes, mais que le diable les emporte et que Dieu les benisse! I think that in Russia a poet can hope for great success only in his first immature experiments. All young people are behind him, finding in him almost their feelings, almost their thoughts, clothed in brilliant colors. The poet develops, writes with great deliberation, with great profundity: he is boring to officers, and the brigadiers do not put up with him, because his poems are still not prose ... "

"... I recently read the third part of "Onegin" and "Count Nulin": both are charming, although, without a doubt, "Onegin" is superior in dignity.

At the end of March 1828, in a letter to S. A. Sobolevsky:

“Who is this Atheneic Sage who so well analyzed Chapters IV and V - Zubarev or Ivan Savelich?”

In April 1828 (received on the 5th) in a letter to I. E. Velikopolsky:

“Dear Ivan Ermolaevich, Bulgarin showed me your very nice stanzas to me in response to my joke. He told me that the censorship does not let them through as a person without my consent. Unfortunately, I could not agree:

Onegin's second chapter

Moved modestly on an ace -

and your note -- of course, personality and obscenity. And the whole stanza is unworthy of your pen. The others are very nice. I think you are a little dissatisfied. Is it true? At least, yours responds with something bitter last poem. Do you really want to quarrel with me in earnest and force me, your peace-loving friend, to include hostile stanzas in the 8th chapter. "Onegin"? N.B. I did not lose the 2nd chapter, but I paid my debt with copies of it ... "

“There is Beketov in our neighborhood ... (he) has a sister - he knows all the chapters of Onegin by heart ... I found Pavlusha (son) in a notebook: criticism of “Eugene Onegin.”

“Here they think that I came to type stanzas in Onegin ... and I go by ferry.”

In early May 1830, in a letter to P. A. Pletnev:

“Tell me: did the review of the Northern Bee have an impact on Onegin’s consumption?”

“This is what I brought here: the last two chapters of Onegin, the eighth and ninth, completely ready for printing ...”

The novel begins with a grouchy speech by the young nobleman Eugene Onegin, dedicated to the illness of his uncle, which forced him to leave Petersburg and go to the patient's bed to say goodbye to him. Having thus indicated the plot, the author devotes the first chapter to the story of the origin, family, and life of his hero before receiving news of the illness of a relative. The narration is conducted on behalf of an unnamed author, who introduced himself as a good friend of Onegin. The very image of the author - the narrator and at the same time the "hero" of the novel - is a unique image.

Eugene was born "on the banks of the Neva", that is, in St. Petersburg, in the family of a typical nobleman of his time -

"Serving excellently nobly,

His father lived in debt.

Gave three balls annually

And finally squandered."

Onegin received a typical upbringing for many nobles - first the governess Madame, then the French tutor, who did not bother his pupil with an abundance of sciences. Pushkin emphasizes that Yevgeny's upbringing is typical for a person of his environment (a nobleman who was taught by foreign teachers from childhood).

Onegin's life in St. Petersburg was full of love affairs and secular entertainment, but in this constant series of amusements there was no place for sincere feelings, which led the hero to a state of internal discord, emptiness, boredom. Eugene leaves for his uncle, and now he will be bored in the village. Upon arrival, it turns out that the uncle has died, and Eugene has become his heir. Onegin settles in the village, but even here he is overwhelmed by the blues.

Onegin's neighbor turns out to be eighteen-year-old Vladimir Lensky, a romantic poet, who came from Germany. Lensky and Onegin converge. Lensky is in love with Olga Larina, the daughter of a landowner. Forever cheerful Olga is not like her thoughtful sister Tatyana.

"Nor your sister's beauty,

Nor the freshness of her ruddy ... "

Olga, beautiful outwardly, is devoid of inner content, which Onegin notices:

“Are you in love with a smaller one?

I would choose another

When I was like you, a poet.

Olga has no life in features.

Having met Onegin, Tatyana falls in love with him and writes him a letter confessing her feelings. Her letter is "woven" from reminiscences from sentimental novels, which made up the heroine's reading circle, but Tatyana's feeling is sincere and deep. However, Onegin rejects her: he is not looking for a calm family life. Tatyana, through long disappointments and experiences, gradually comes to an insight about the deep essence of her chosen one. (In a prophetic dream, she sees Eugene among fanged horned monsters.)

Lensky and Onegin are invited to the Larins. Onegin is not happy about this invitation, but Lensky persuades him to go.

“[...] He pouted and, indignantly,

vowed to infuriate Lensky,

And take revenge."

At a dinner at the Larins', Onegin, in order to make Lensky jealous, suddenly begins courting Olga. Lensky challenges him to a duel. The duel ends with the death of Lensky, and Onegin leaves the village. It is here that Tatyana's final insight takes place. In Onegin's house, when, after her lover's departure, she visits his hereditary "castle", she reads his books. “An eccentric sad and dangerous, / Creation of hell or heaven ...” - this is how her chosen one now appears in the mind of the heroine. Tatyana's main discovery in Onegin is denoted by the author with the words "imitation", "parody". Onegin - “a Muscovite in Harold's cloak, everything in him is not his own, borrowed. His behavior is following Byronian patterns.

Three years later, after the trip, he appears in Moscow and meets Tatyana and does not recognize:

"She was slow...

Not cold, not talkative

Without an arrogant look for everyone,

No claim to success

Without these little antics

No imitations...

Everything is quiet, it was just in her.”

With her simplicity, naturalness and at the same time grandeur, she conquered secular Petersburg:

“Ladies moved closer to her;

The old women smiled at her;

The men bowed down

They caught the gaze of her eyes;

The girls passed quietly

In front of her in the hall ... "

Onegin was inflamed with love for her. He writes a letter to her. But Tatyana does not answer either the letter or the persecution of Onegin, despite the fact that Tatyana also loves him, but wants to remain faithful to her husband.

“I love you, (why lie?),

But I am given to another;

I will be faithful to him forever.

F. M. Dostoevsky, evaluating her act, exclaims: “She said it precisely, like a Russian woman, in this is her apotheosis ... can a person base his happiness on the misfortune of another? Happiness is not only in the pleasures of love, but in the highest harmony of the spirit ... Tell me, could Tatyana decide otherwise, with her high soul, with her heart, so much suffered? No; The pure Russian soul decides like this: “Let me, let me alone lose happiness ... but I don’t want to be happy, ruining another!”

Conditionally, the plot can be divided into two parts:

* chapters from the first to the seventh - the story of Tatiana's love for Onegin. In parallel, the line of Lensky and Olga is developing;

* Chapter Eight - Onegin returning from a journey and his love for Tatyana.

The culmination of each of these plots is a letter, and the denouement is an answer - a rebuff.

The work depicts events that contribute to the evolution of Onegin. The first chapter shows his monotonous monotonous existence in St. Petersburg, causing a state in him, which the author described as "Russian melancholy". Then under the influence of a different rhythm village life, Tatyana's love, friendship with Lensky, the murder of the latter in a duel, Onegin leaves the places "where the bloody shadow appeared to him every day." In the 8th chapter, another Onegin appears in St. Petersburg, able to wait for a date, to love ...

When Tatyana rejects his love, he stands "as if struck by thunder." The ending of the novel is fundamentally open. The reader will have to think about what "will happen to Onegin later"?

Storylines

1. Onegin and Tatyana. Episodes:

o Acquaintance with Tatyana,

o Talking to the babysitter

o Tatyana's letter to Onegin,

o Explanation in the garden,

o Tatyana's dream. name day,

o Visit to Lensky's house,

o Departure to Moscow,

o Meeting at a ball in St. Petersburg in 2 years,

o Letter to Tatiana (explanation),

o Evening at Tatyana's,

2. Onegin and Lensky. Episodes:

o Acquaintance in the village,

o A conversation after the evening with the Larins,

o Lensky's visit to Onegin,

o Name day of Tatyana,

o Duel (Lensky dies).

Characters

Eugene Onegin - the prototype Pyotr Chaadaev, Pushkin's friend, is named by Pushkin himself in the first chapter.

Tatyana Larina - one of the prototypes can be considered Avdotya (Dunya) Norova, Chaadaev's girlfriend. In this image, you can also find the features of Maria Volkonskaya, the wife of the Decembrist S. G. Volkonsky, a friend of Pushkin, as well as Anna Kern, Pushkin's lover.

Olga Larina, her sister, is a generalized image of a typical heroine of popular novels; beautiful in appearance, but devoid of deep content.

Vladimir Lensky - "energetic rapprochement between Lensky and Kuchelbecker, produced by Yu. N. Tynyanov"

Tatyana's nanny - a probable prototype - Arina Rodionovna, Pushkin's nanny

Zaretsky is a duelist, Fyodor Tolstoy-American was called among the prototypes

Tatyana Larina's husband, not named in the novel, "important general", General Kern, Anna Kern's husband.

Interesting Facts

Poetic Features

The novel is written in a special "Onegin stanza". Each such stanza consists of 14 lines of iambic tetrameter.

The first four lines rhyme crosswise, the lines from the fifth to the eighth - in pairs, the lines from the ninth to the twelfth are connected by a ring rhyme. The remaining 2 lines of the stanza rhyme with each other.

Translations

"Eugene Onegin" has been translated into many languages ​​of the world:

into English by Walter Arndt, Vladimir Nabokov and others;

into French - I. S. Turgenev and L. Viardot, Jean-Louis Bakes and Roger Legr, Jacques Chirac and others;

on German-- Rolf-Dietrich Keil and others;

into Belarusian - Arkady Kuleshov,

into Ukrainian - M. F. Rylsky,

in Hebrew - Abraham Shlonsky.

into Ossetian - Nafi Dzhusoyty.

In miniature

One of the Russian printing houses in 1837 published the novel "Eugene Onegin" in miniature - the last lifetime edition of A. S. Pushkin. The plans of the printing house were such that in one year the entire circulation (5,000 copies) could be sold at 5 rubles per book. But in connection with the sensation - the sad result of the life of the author of the work - the entire circulation was sold out within a week. And in 1988, the publishing house "Kniga" issued a facsimile edition of the book with a circulation of 15,000 copies.

One of the smallest complete editions of "Eugene Onegin" is a micro-edition in 4 volumes 8x9 mm in size 2002 Omsk, A. I. Konenko

Tenth chapter

On November 26, 1949, the chief bibliographer of the Leningrad State Public Library named after M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin D.N. Alshits discovered a manuscript of the second half of the 19th century, presumably with the text of the X chapter of Onegin. As David Samoilov stated, "not a single serious literary critic believed in the authenticity of the text" - the style is too unlike Pushkin's and the artistic level is low.

Influence on other works

In literature:

Type " extra person”, introduced by Pushkin in the image of Onegin, influenced all subsequent Russian literature. From the nearest illustrative examples - the surname "Pechorin" in Lermontov's "Hero of Our Time", as well as the surname of Onegin, is formed from the name of the Russian river. Many psychological characteristics are also close.

The modern Russian novel The Onegin Code, written by Dmitry Bykov under the pseudonym Brain Down, deals with the search for the missing chapter of Pushkin's manuscript.

The genre of a full-fledged "novel in verse" inspired A. Dolsky to create the novel "Anna", which was completed in 2005.

In music:

P. I. Tchaikovsky -- Opera "Eugene Onegin", (1878)

R. K. Shchedrin - Stanzas of "Eugene Onegin", for a cappella choir based on the novel in verse by A. Pushkin, (1981)

Contemporary critics

K. F. Ryleev, N. A. Polevoy, D. V. Venevitinov, N. I. Nadezhdin, F. V. Bulgarin, N. G. Chernyshevsky, N. A. Dobrolyubov, D. I. Pisarev, F. M. Dostoevsky, A. Grigoriev, A. V. Druzhinin

History of creation

Pushkin worked on the novel for over eight years. The novel was, according to the poet, "the fruit of the mind of cold observations and the heart of sorrowful remarks." Pushkin called the work on it a feat - of all his creative heritage, only Boris Godunov he described with the same word. In the work, against a wide background of pictures of Russian life, a dramatic fate is shown the best people noble intelligentsia.

Pushkin began work on Onegin in 1823, during his southern exile. The author abandoned romanticism as a leading creative method and began to write a realistic novel in verse, although the influence of romanticism is still noticeable in the first chapters. Initially, it was assumed that the novel in verse would consist of 9 chapters, but later Pushkin reworked its structure, leaving only 8 chapters. He excluded the chapter "Onegin's Journey" from the main text of the work, leaving it as an appendix. One chapter also had to be completely removed from the novel: it describes how Onegin sees military settlements near the Odessa pier, and then there are remarks and judgments, in some places in an excessively harsh tone. It was too dangerous to leave this chapter - Pushkin could have been arrested for revolutionary views, so he destroyed it.

The novel was published in verse in separate chapters, and the release of each part became a big event in Russian literature of that time. The first chapter of the work was published in 1825. In 1831 the novel in verse was finished and in 1833 it was published. It covers events from to 1825: from the foreign campaigns of the Russian army after the defeat of Napoleon to the uprising of the Decembrists. These were the years of the development of Russian society, during the reign of Alexander I. The plot of the novel is simple and well known, in the center of it - love story. In general, the events of the first quarter of the 19th century were reflected in the novel "Eugene Onegin", that is, the time of creation and the time of the novel approximately coincide.

Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin created a novel in verse like Lord Byron's poem Don Juan. Defining the novel as "a collection colorful chapters”, Pushkin highlights one of the features of this work: the novel is, as it were, “opened” in time (each chapter could be the last, but it can also have a continuation), thereby drawing readers' attention to the independence and integrity of each chapter. The novel became truly an encyclopedia of Russian life in the 1820s, since the breadth of the topics covered in it, the detail of everyday life, the multi-plot composition, the depth of the description of the characters' characters, and now reliably demonstrate to readers the features of the life of that era.

Belinsky

First of all, in Onegin we see a poetically reproduced picture of Russian society, taken at one of the most interesting moments of its development. From this point of view, "Eugene Onegin" is a historical poem in the full sense of the word, although there is not a single historical person among its heroes.

In his poem, he was able to touch on so many things, to hint about so many things, that he belongs exclusively to the world of Russian nature, to the world of Russian society. "Onegin" can be called an encyclopedia of Russian life and an eminently folk work.

Research Yu. M. Lotman

"Eugene Onegin" is a difficult work. The very lightness of the verse, the familiarity of the content, familiar to the reader from childhood and emphatically simple, paradoxically create additional difficulties in understanding Pushkin's novel in verse. The illusory notion of the "comprehensibility" of the work hides from the consciousness of the modern reader a huge number of words, expressions, phraseological units, allusions, and quotations that are incomprehensible to him. Thinking about a verse that you know from childhood seems to be unjustified pedantry. However, it is worth overcoming this naive optimism of an inexperienced reader in order to make it obvious how far we are even from a simple textual understanding of the novel. The specific structure of the Pushkin novel in verse, in which any positive statement of the author can be imperceptibly turned into an ironic one, and the verbal fabric seems to slip, passing from one speaker to another, makes the method of forcible extraction of quotations especially dangerous. In order to avoid this threat, the novel should be viewed not as a mechanical sum of the author's statements on various issues, a kind of anthology of quotations, but as an organic art world, parts of which live and receive meaning only in relation to the whole. A simple list of problems that Pushkin “poses” in his work will not introduce us into the world of Onegin. artistic idea implies a special type of transformation of life in art. It is known that for Pushkin there was a "devilish difference" between poetic and prosaic modeling of the same reality, even while maintaining the same themes and issues.

Tenth chapter

On November 26, 1949, Daniil Alshits, the chief bibliographer of the Leningrad State Public Library named after M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin, discovered a manuscript of the second half of the 19th century, presumably with the text of the X chapter of Onegin. According to David Samoilov, "not a single serious literary critic believed in the authenticity of the text" - the style is too unlike Pushkin's and the artistic level is low.

Editions of the novel

Comments on the novel

One of the first comments on the novel was a small book by A. Volsky, published in 1877. Commentaries by Vladimir Nabokov, Nikolai Brodsky, Yuri Lotman, S. M. Bondi have become classics.

In miniature

"Eugene Onegin". Size 8x9 mm

One of the Russian printing houses in 1837 released the novel "Eugene Onegin" in miniature - the last lifetime edition of A. S. Pushkin. The plans of the printing house were such that in one year the entire circulation (5,000 copies) could be sold at 5 rubles per book. But due to the sensation - the sad outcome of the life of the author of the work - the entire circulation was sold out within a week. And in 1988, the publishing house "Kniga" issued a facsimile edition of the book with a circulation of 15,000 copies.

One of the smallest complete editions of "Eugene Onegin" is a micro-edition in 4 volumes 8 × 9 mm in size 2002 Omsk, A. I. Konenko.

Translations

"Eugene Onegin" has been translated into many languages ​​of the world:

Influence on other works

In literature

The type of "superfluous person", bred by Pushkin in the image of Onegin, influenced all subsequent Russian literature. Of the closest illustrative examples - Lermontov "Pechorin" from The Hero of Our Time, whose surname, like Onegin's surname, is derived from the name of the Russian river. Both characters are close in many psychological characteristics.

In the modern Russian novel "Onegin's Code", written by Dmitry Bykov under the pseudonym Brain Down, we are talking about the search for the missing chapter of Pushkin's manuscript. In addition, the novel contains bold assumptions about the true genealogy of Pushkin.

The genre of a full-fledged "novel in verse" inspired A. Dolsky to create the novel "Anna", which was completed in 2005.

In music

In cinema

• "Eugene Onegin" (1911). B/W, mute. In the role of Onegin - Pyotr Chardynin
• Onegin (1999). In the role of Eugene Onegin - Ralph Fiennes, Tatyana Larina - Liv Tyler, Vladimir Lensky - Toby Stevens

• "Eugene Onegin. Between past and future" documentary(), 52 min., director Nikita Tikhonov

opera adaptations:

• "Eugene Onegin" (1958). Screen version of the opera. In the role of Onegin - Vadim Medvedev, the vocal part is performed by Evgeny Kibkalo. Tatyana is played by Ariadna Shengelaya, voiced by Galina Vishnevskaya. In the role of Olga - Svetlana Nemolyaeva
• "Eugene Onegin" (1994). In the role of Eugene Onegin - Wojciech Drabovich
• "Eugene Onegin" (2002). In the role of Eugene Onegin - Peter Mattei
• "Eugene Onegin" (2007). In the role of Eugene Onegin - Peter Mattei

In education

In Russian schools, "Eugene Onegin" is included in the compulsory school curriculum in literature.

In addition, a number of excerpts describing nature (“Already the sky was breathing in autumn ...”, “Here is the north, catching up clouds ...”, “Winter! Peasant, triumphant ...”, “Driven by spring rays ...”) are used in elementary grades for memorization without regard to the work as a whole.

Notes

On 14.1936, Samad Vurgun translated A. S. Pushkin's novel "Eugene Onegin" into Azerbaijani and for this translation was awarded the Pushkin Committee with the Medal "A. S. Pushkin.

Links

• V. Nepomniachtchi "Eugene Onegin" The series on the channel "Culture" is read and commented by V. Nepomniachtchi.
• Pushkin A. S. Eugene Onegin: A novel in verse // Pushkin A. S. Complete works: In 10 volumes - L .: Science. Leningrad. department, 1977-1979. (FEB)
• "Eugene Onegin" with full commentary by Nabokov, Lotman and Tomashevsky on the website "Secrets of the Craft"

The novel "Eugene Onegin" is a work of amazing creative destiny. It was created for more than seven years - from May 1823 to September 1830. But work on the text did not stop until the first complete edition appeared in 1833. The last author's version of the novel was published in 1837. Pushkin has no works that would have just as long creative history. The novel was not written “in one breath”, but was composed of stanzas and chapters created at different times, in different circumstances, in different periods of creativity. The work on the novel covers four periods of Pushkin's work - from the southern exile to the Boldin autumn of 1830.

The work was interrupted not only by the twists of Pushkin's fate and new ideas, for the sake of which he threw the text of "Eugene Onegin". Some poems ("The Demon", "The Desert Sower of Freedom...") arose from drafts of the novel. In the drafts of the second chapter (written in 1824), Horace's verse "Exegi monumentum" flashed through, which 12 years later became the epigraph to the poem "I erected a monument to myself not made by hands ...". It seemed that history itself was not very favorable to Pushkin's work: from a novel about a contemporary and modern life, how the poet conceived "Eugene Onegin", after 1825 he became a novel about another historical era. The "internal chronology" of the novel covers about 6 years - from 1819 to the spring of 1825.

All chapters were published from 1825 to 1832 as independent parts great work and even before the completion of the novel became facts of the literary process. Perhaps, if we take into account the fragmentation, discontinuity of Pushkin's work, it can be argued that the novel was for him something like a huge “notebook” or a poetic “album” (“notebooks” sometimes the poet himself calls the chapters of the novel). For more than seven years, the records were replenished with sorrowful "notes" of the heart and "observations" of a cold mind.

This feature of the novel drew the attention of its first critics. So, N.I. Nadezhdin, denying him the unity and harmony of presentation, correctly defined the appearance of the work - "a poetic album of live impressions of talent, playing with its wealth." An interesting "image-outline" of "Eugene Onegin", supplementing Pushkin's judgments about the "free" novel, can be seen in the crossed out stanza of the seventh chapter, which spoke of Onegin's album:

He was painted, painted

Onegin's hand all around,

Between the incomprehensible maranya

Flashed thoughts, remarks,

Portraits, numbers, names,

Yes, letters, the secrets of writing,

Fragments, draft letters...

The first chapter, published in 1825, pointed to Eugene Onegin as the protagonist of the intended work. However, from the very beginning of work on the “big poem”, the author needed the figure of Onegin not only to express his ideas about “ modern man". There was another goal: Onegin was destined for the role of the central character, who, like a magnet, would "attract" heterogeneous life and literary material. The silhouette of Onegin and the silhouettes of other characters, barely outlined plot lines, gradually cleared up as the work on the novel progressed. From under the thick layers of rough notes, the contours of the fates and characters of Onegin, Tatyana Larina, Lensky appeared (“finished”), a unique image was created - image of the Author.

The portrait of the Author is hidden. Try to imagine his appearance - apart from a white spot, nothing will appear in front of you. We know a lot about the Author - about his fate and the spiritual world, about literary views and even about the wines that he loves. But the Author in "Eugene Onegin" is a man without a face, without appearance, without a name.

The author is the narrator and at the same time the "hero" of the novel. The Author reflected the personality of the creator of "Eugene Onegin". Pushkin gave him much of what he experienced, felt and changed his mind himself. However, identifying the Author with Pushkin is a gross mistake. It must be remembered that the Author is artistic image. The relationship between the Author in Eugene Onegin and Pushkin, the creator of the novel, is exactly the same as between the image of any person in a literary work and its prototype in real life. The image of the Author is autobiographical, it is the image of a person whose "biography" partially coincides with the real biography of Pushkin, and spiritual world and views on literature are a reflection of Pushkin's.

The study of the novel requires a special approach: first of all, it is necessary to carefully re-read it, having a commentary at hand (for example, Yu.M. Lotman’s book “A.S. text: it contains many realities, allusions and allegories that require explanation. The structure of the novel should be studied (dedication, epigraphs, sequence and content of chapters, the nature of the narrative, interrupted by author's digressions, author's notes). Only after this can one begin to study the main images of the novel, the plot and composition, the system of characters, the author's digressions and the image of the Author.

The novel "Eugene Onegin" is the most difficult work of Pushkin, despite the apparent lightness and simplicity. V. G. Belinsky called "Eugene Onegin" "an encyclopedia of Russian life", emphasizing the scale of Pushkin's "many years of work." This is not a critical praise of the novel, but its capacious metaphor. Behind the "variegation" of chapters and stanzas, the change in narrative techniques, there is a harmonious concept of a fundamentally innovative literary work - a "novel of life", which has absorbed a huge socio-historical, everyday, literary material.

The innovation of the "novel in verse" manifested itself primarily in the fact that Pushkin found new type problematic hero - "hero of time". Eugene Onegin became such a hero. His fate, character, relationships with people are determined by the totality of the circumstances of modern reality, outstanding personal qualities and the circle of "eternal", universal problems that he faces.

Onegin's personality was formed in the St. Petersburg secular environment. In a detailed background (chapter one), Pushkin noted the main social factors that determined his character. This is belonging to the highest stratum of the nobility, the usual upbringing, training for this circle, the first steps in the world, the experience of a "monotonous and motley" life for eight years. The life of a “free” nobleman, not burdened by service, is vain, carefree, full of entertainment and romance novels, - fit into one tiring day. Onegin in his early youth - "having fun and luxury a child", "a kind fellow, / Like you and me, like the whole world."

At this stage of his life, Onegin is an original, witty man in his own way, a “small scientist”, but still quite ordinary, dutifully following the secular “decency crowd”. The only thing in which Onegin “was a true genius”, that “he knew more firmly than all sciences”, as the Author remarks, not without irony, was “the science of tender passion”, that is, the “art” of loving without loving, imitating feelings and passions, remaining cold and prudent. However, Onegin is interesting to Pushkin not as a representative of a common social type, the whole essence of which is exhausted positive characteristic, issued by the light-wasp rumor: “N. N. is a wonderful person.”

Onegin's character and life are shown in motion and development. In the first chapter we see crucial moment in his fate: he was able to abandon the stereotypes of secular behavior, from the noisy, but internally empty "ritual of life." Pushkin showed how a bright, outstanding personality suddenly appeared from a faceless, but demanding unconditional obedience crowd. Social intuition prompted the poet that it was not life "on the old pattern", but precisely the ability to overthrow the "burden" of its conditions, "leave behind the hustle and bustle" - the main sign of modern man.

Onegin's seclusion - his undeclared conflict with the world in the first chapter and with the society of village landowners in the second-sixth chapters - only at first glance seems to be a "fad" caused by purely individual reasons: boredom, "Russian blues", disappointment in the "science of tender passion" . This is a new stage in the life of a hero. Pushkin emphasizes that Onegin's "inimitable strangeness" is a kind of protest against social and spiritual dogmas that suppress a person's personality, depriving him of the right to be himself. The emptiness of the hero's soul was the result of the emptiness and lack of content of secular life. Onegin is looking for new spiritual values, a new path: in St. Petersburg and in the countryside, he diligently reads books, tries to write, communicates with a few people who are close in spirit (among them are the Author and Lensky). In the countryside, he even tried to "establish a new order", replacing the corvée with "easy dues".

Pushkin does not simplify his hero. The search for new life truths stretched out for long years and remained unfinished. The inner drama of this process is obvious: Onegin painfully frees himself from the burden of old ideas about life and people, but the past does not let him go. It seems that Onegin is the rightful master of his own life. But this is only an illusion. In St. Petersburg and in the countryside, he is equally bored - he still cannot overcome his spiritual laziness, cold skepticism, demonism, dependence on "public opinion".

The hero is by no means a victim of society and circumstances. By changing his lifestyle, he took responsibility for his own destiny. His actions depend on his determination, will, faith in people. However, having abandoned the secular fuss, Onegin became not a doer, but a contemplator. The feverish pursuit of pleasure gave way to solitary reflections. The two tests that awaited him in the countryside - the test of love and the test of friendship - showed that external freedom does not automatically entail liberation from false prejudices and opinions.

In relations with Tatyana Onegin proved himself to be a noble and mentally subtle person. He managed to see in the "maiden in love" genuine and sincere feelings, live, not bookish passions. You can’t blame the hero for not responding to Tatyana’s love: as you know, you can’t command the heart. But the fact is that Onegin listened not to the voice of his heart, but to the voice of reason. Even in the first chapter, the Author noted in Onegin "a sharp, chilled mind" and an inability to have strong feelings. Onegin is a cold, rational person. This mental disproportion was the cause of the drama. failed love. Onegin does not believe in love and is not capable of falling in love. The meaning of love is exhausted for him by the "science of tender passion" or the "home circle" that limits the freedom of man.

Onegin also did not stand the test of friendship. And in this case, the cause of the tragedy was his inability to live a life of feeling. No wonder the author, commenting on the state of the hero before the duel, remarks: "He could have discovered feelings, / And not bristle like a beast." Both at Tatyana's name day and before the duel, Onegin showed himself to be a "ball of prejudice", deaf both to the voice of his own heart and to Lensky's feelings. His behavior at the name day is the usual "social anger", and the duel is the result of indifference and fear of the evil-speaking of the "old duelist" Zaretsky and the landlord neighbors. Onegin did not notice how he became a prisoner of his old idol - "public opinion". After the murder of Lensky, Onegin was seized by "anguish of heartfelt remorse." Only tragedy could open to him a previously inaccessible world of feelings.

In the eighth chapter, Pushkin showed a new stage in the spiritual development of Onegin. Having met Tatiana in St. Petersburg, Onegin was completely transformed. There is nothing left of the former, cold and rational person in him - he is an ardent lover, not noticing anything except the object of his love (and this is very reminiscent of Lensky). Onegin experienced a real feeling for the first time, but it turned into a new love drama: now Tatyana could not answer his belated love. A peculiar explanation of the psychological state of the enamored Onegin, his inevitable love drama is the author's digression "All ages are submissive to love ..." (stanza XXIX). As before, in the foreground in the characterization of the hero is the relationship between reason and feeling. Now the mind has already been defeated - Onegin loves, "the mind is not heeding strict penalties." He “almost lost his mind / Or did not become a poet,” the Author notes, not without irony. In the eighth chapter there are no results of the spiritual development of the hero who believed in love and happiness. Onegin did not achieve the desired goal; there is still no harmony between feeling and reason in him. Pushkin leaves his character open, incomplete, emphasizing Onegin's very ability to drastically change value orientations and, let's note, readiness for action, for an act.

Pay attention to how often the Author reflects on love and friendship, on the relationship between lovers and friends. Love and friendship for Pushkin are two touchstones on which a person is tested, they reveal the richness of the soul or its emptiness. Onegin closed himself off from the false values ​​of the "empty light", despising their false brilliance, but neither in St. Petersburg nor in the countryside did he discover true values ​​- universal human values. The author showed how difficult it is for a person to move towards simple and understandable, it would seem, life truths, what trials he must go through in order to understand - both with his mind and heart - the greatness and significance of love and friendship. From class limitations and prejudices, inspired by upbringing and idle life, through rational demonic nihilism, which denies not only false, but also true life values, to the discovery of love, the high world of feelings - this is the path of the spiritual development of the hero draws Pushkin.

Lensky and Tatyana Larina are not only plot partners of the title character. These are full-blooded images of contemporaries, in whose fate the century was also “reflected”.

Romantic and poet Lensky seems to be the spiritual and social antipode of Onegin, an exceptional hero, completely cut off from everyday life, from Russian life. Worldly inexperience, the ardor of loving feelings for Olga, the "rivers" of elegies written in the spirit of "dull romanticism" - all this separates the eighteen-year-old landowner from the former St. Petersburg rake. The author, reporting on their acquaintance, first raises the differences between them to an absolute degree (“They came together. Wave and stone, / Poems and prose, ice and fire / Not so different from each other”), but immediately indicates that it is precisely “mutual different," they liked each other. There was a paradoxical friendship "from nothing to do."

Not only extremes connected the heroes - there is a lot in common between them. Onegin and Lensky are alienated from the landlord environment, each of them expresses one of the tendencies of Russian spiritual life: Onegin - disappointment and skepticism, Lensky - romantic daydreaming and an impulse towards the ideal. Both tendencies are part of European spiritual development. Onegin's idols are Byron and Napoleon. Lensky is an admirer of Kant and Schiller. Lensky is also looking for the purpose of life: "The purpose of our life for him / Was a tempting mystery, / He puzzled over it / And suspected miracles." And most importantly, the character of Lensky, like the character of Onegin, is disharmonious, incomplete. The sensitive Lensky is as far from Pushkin's ideal of human harmony as the rationalist Onegin.

With Lensky, the novel includes the themes of youth, friendship, cordial "ignorance", devotion to feelings, youthful courage and nobility. In an effort to protect Olga from the "corruptor", the hero is mistaken, but this is a sincere delusion. Lensky is a poet (another poet in the novel is the Author himself), and although there is a lot of irony, good-natured ridicule, banter in the author's commentary on his poems, the Author notes in them the authenticity of feelings and wit:

Not madrigals Lensky writes

In Olga's album young;

His pen breathes love

Not coldly shines with sharpness;

What neither sees nor hears

About Olga, he writes about that:

And, full of living truth,

The elegies flow like a river.

The unusual nature of the hero is explained by the author from a social standpoint. Lensky's soul did not fade from the "cold debauchery of the world", he was brought up not only in "Germany foggy", but also in the Russian village. There is more Russian in the "half-Russian" dreamer Lensky than in the crowd of surrounding landowners. The author sadly writes about his death, twice (in the sixth and seventh chapters) leads the reader to his grave. The author is saddened not only by the death of Lensky, but also by the possible impoverishment of youthful romanticism, the hero's growing into the inert landlord environment. With this version of Lensky's fate, the fates of the lover of sentimental novels Praskovya Larina and the "village old-timer" Uncle Onegin ironically "rhyme".

Tatyana Larina - "cute Ideal" of the Author. He does not hide his sympathy for the heroine, emphasizing her sincerity, depth of feelings and experiences, innocence and devotion to love. Her personality manifests itself in the sphere of love and family relationships. Like Onegin, she can be called a "genius of love." Tatyana is a participant in the main plot action, in which her role is comparable to the role of Onegin.

The character of Tatyana, like the character of Onegin, is dynamic, developing. Usually they pay attention to the sharp change in her social status and appearance in the last chapter: instead of a village young lady, direct and open, Onegin faced a majestic and cold secular lady, a princess, “legislator of the hall”. Her inner world closed from the reader: Tatyana does not utter a word until her final monologue, the Author also keeps a “secret” about her soul, limiting herself to the “visual” characteristics of the heroine (“How harsh! / She doesn’t see him, not a word with him; / U! how now she is surrounded / by Epiphany cold!”). However, the eighth chapter shows the third, final stage of the heroine's spiritual development. Its character changes significantly already in the "village" chapters. These changes are connected with her attitude to love, to Onegin, with ideas about duty.

In the second - fifth chapters, Tatyana appears as an internally contradictory person. Genuine feelings and sensitivity, inspired by sentimental novels, coexist in it. The author, characterizing the heroine, points first of all to the circle of her reading. Novels, the author emphasizes, "replaced everything" for her. Indeed, dreamy, alienated from her friends, so unlike Olga, Tatyana perceives everything around her as a novel that has not yet been written, she imagines herself as the heroine of her favorite books. The abstractness of Tatyana's dreams is shaded by a literary and everyday parallel - the biography of her mother, who also in her youth was "mad about Richardson", loved "Grandison", but, having married "by captivity", "was torn and cried at first", and then turned into ordinary landowner. Tatyana, who was expecting "someone" similar to the heroes of novels, saw in Onegin just such a hero. “But our hero, whoever he was, / Surely it was not Grandison,” the Author ironically. The behavior of Tatyana in love is based on the novel models known to her. Her letter, written in French, is an echo of the love letters of the heroines of the novels. The author translates Tatyana's letter, but his role as a "translator" is not limited to this: he is constantly forced, as it were, to release the true feelings of the heroine from the captivity of book templates.

A revolution in Tatyana's fate takes place in the seventh chapter. External changes in her life are only a consequence of the complex process that went on in her soul after Onegin's departure. She was finally convinced of her "optical" deception. Restoring Onegin's appearance according to the "traces" left in his estate, she realized that her lover was an utterly mysterious, strange person, but not at all the one she took him for. The main result of Tatyana's "research" was love not for a literary chimera, but for a genuine Onegin. She completely freed herself from bookish ideas about life. Finding herself in new circumstances, not hoping for a new meeting and reciprocity of her lover, Tatyana makes a decisive moral choice: she agrees to go to Moscow and get married. Note that this is a free choice of the heroine, for whom "all lots are equal." She loves Onegin, but voluntarily submits to her duty to her family. Thus, Tatyana's words in the last monologue - “But I am given to another; / I will be faithful to him for a century ”- news for Onegin, but not for the reader: the heroine only confirmed the choice made earlier.

One should not oversimplify the question of the influence on Tatyana's character of the new circumstances of her life. In the last episode of the novel, the contrast between secular and "domestic" Tatyana becomes obvious: "Who would have known the former Tanya, poor Tanya / Now I would not recognize the princess!" However, the heroine's monologue testifies not only to the fact that she retained her former spiritual qualities, loyalty to love for Onegin and his marital duty. Onegin's Lesson is full of unfair remarks and absurd assumptions. Tatyana does not understand the feelings of the hero, seeing in his love only secular intrigue, a desire to drop her honor in the eyes of society, accusing him of self-interest. Onegin's love is "littleness" for her, "a petty feeling," and in him she sees only the slave of this feeling. Again, as once in the village, Tatyana sees and "does not recognize" the real Onegin. Her false idea of ​​him was born of the world, that “oppressive dignity”, the methods of which, as the Author noted, she “soon adopted”. Tatyana's monologue reflects her inner drama. The meaning of this drama is not in the choice between love for Onegin and fidelity to her husband, but in the “corrosion” of feelings that occurred in the heroine under the influence secular society. Tatyana lives in memories and is not even able to believe in the sincerity of the person who loves her. The disease, from which Onegin was so painfully freed, also struck Tatyana. The “Empty Light”, as if reminded by the wise Author, is hostile to any manifestation of a living, human feeling.

The main characters of "Eugene Onegin" are free from predeterminedness, one-linearity. Pushkin refuses to see in them the embodiment of vices or "exemplars of perfection." The novel consistently implements new principles for depicting characters. The author will make it clear that he does not have ready-made answers to all questions about their destinies, characters, psychology. Rejecting the role of the “all-knowing” narrator, traditional for the Roma, he “hesitates”, “doubts”, and is sometimes inconsistent in his judgments and assessments. The author, as it were, invites the reader to complete the portraits of the characters, imagine their behavior, try to look at them from a different, unexpected point of view. For this purpose, numerous "pauses" (missing lines and stanzas) are also introduced into the novel. The reader must "recognize" the characters, correlate them with their own lives, with their thoughts, feelings, habits, superstitions, read books and magazines.

The appearance of Onegin, Tatyana Larina, Lensky is formed not only from the characteristics, observations and assessments of the Author - the creator of the novel, but also from rumors, gossip, rumors. Each hero appears in a halo of public opinion, reflecting the points of view of the most different people: friends, acquaintances, relatives, neighbors, landowners, secular gossips. Society is the source of rumors about heroes. For the author, this is a rich set of worldly "optics", which he turns into artistic "optics". The reader is invited to choose the view of the hero that is closer to him, it seems the most reliable and convincing. The author, recreating the picture of opinions, reserves the right to place the necessary accents, gives the reader social and moral guidelines.

"Eugene Onegin" looks like an improvisational novel. The effect of a casual conversation with the reader is created primarily expressive possibilities iambic tetrameter - Pushkin's favorite meter and the flexibility created by Pushkin specifically for the novel "Onegin" stanza, which includes 14 verses of iambic tetrameter with strict rhyming CCdd EffE gg(capital letters denote feminine endings, lowercase letters denote masculine endings). The author called his lyre "talkative", emphasizing the "free" nature of the narration, the variety of intonations and styles of speech - from the "high", bookish to the colloquial style of ordinary village gossip "about haymaking, about wine, about the kennel, about one's family."

A novel in verse is a consistent denial of the well-known, universally recognized laws of the genre. And it's not just a daring rejection of the usual prose speech for the novel. In "Eugene Onegin" there is no coherent narrative about the characters and events that fits into the predetermined framework of the plot. In such a plot, the action develops smoothly, without breaks and digressions - from the beginning of the action to its denouement. Step by step, the author goes to his main goal - to create images of heroes against the backdrop of a logically verified plot scheme.

In "Eugene Onegin" the narrator now and then "departs" from the story of the characters and events, indulging in "free" reflections on biographical, everyday and literary themes. The characters and the Author are constantly changing places: either the characters or the Author are in the center of the reader's attention. Depending on the content of specific chapters, there may be more or less such “intrusions” by the Author, but the principle of “landscape”, outwardly unmotivated, connection of plot narration with author’s monologues is preserved in almost all chapters. The exception is the fifth chapter, in which Tatyana's dream occupies more than 10 stanzas and a new plot knot is tied - Lensky's quarrel with Onegin.

The plot narrative is also heterogeneous: it is accompanied by more or less detailed author's "remarks aside". From the very beginning of the novel, the author reveals himself, as if peeking out from behind the backs of the characters, reminding him of who is leading the story, who is creating the world of the novel.

The plot of the novel outwardly resembles a chronicle of the life of the heroes - Onegin, Lensky, Tatyana Larina. As in any chronicle plot, it lacks a central conflict. The action is built around conflicts that arise in the sphere privacy(love and friendship). But only a sketch of a coherent chronicle narrative is created. Already in the first chapter, containing Onegin's background, one day of his life is described in detail, and the events associated with his arrival in the village are simply listed. Onegin spent several months in the village, but the narrator was not interested in many details of his village life. Only individual episodes are reproduced quite fully (a trip to the Larins, an explanation with Tatiana, a name day and a duel). Onegin's almost three-year journey, which was supposed to link two periods of his life, is simply omitted.

Time in the novel does not coincide with real time: it is either compressed, compressed, or stretched. The author often, as it were, invites the reader to simply “flip through” the pages of the novel, briefly reporting on the actions of the characters, on their daily activities. Separate episodes, on the contrary, are enlarged, stretched out in time - attention is delayed on them. They resemble dramatic "scenes" with dialogues, monologues, with clearly defined scenery (see, for example, the scene of Tatyana's conversation with the nanny in the third chapter, the explanation of Tatyana and Onegin, divided into two "phenomena" - in the third and fourth chapters).

The author emphasizes that the lifetime of his characters, plot time, - artistic convention. The "calendar" of the novel, contrary to Pushkin's semi-serious assurance in one of the notes - "in our novel, time is calculated according to the calendar" - is special. It consists of days, which are equal to months and years, and months, and even years, which have been awarded several remarks by the Author. The illusion of a chronicle narrative is supported by "phenological notes" - indications of the change of seasons, weather and seasonal activities of people.

The author either simply keeps silent about many events, or replaces the direct depiction of events with a story about them. This is the most important principle of storytelling. For example, Onegin's disputes with Lensky are reported as a permanent form of friendly communication, the topics of disputes are listed, but none of them is shown. The same device of silence about events or their simple enumeration is used in the eighth chapter, where the Author tells about Onegin's unsuccessful attempts to explain himself to Tatyana. More than two years pass between the events of the seventh and eighth chapters. This discontinuity in the narrative is particularly noticeable.

The plot of the eighth chapter is separate from the plot of the first seven chapters. The character system has changed. In the first, “village” chapters, it was rather branched: the central characters are Onegin, Tatyana, Lensky, the secondary ones are Olga, Praskovya Larina, the nanny, Zaretsky, Princess Alina, episodic characters appear in the fifth and seventh chapters: guests at the name day, outlined one or two strokes, the Moscow relatives of the Larins. In the eighth chapter, the system of characters is much simpler: Onegin and Tatyana remain the central characters, Tatyana's husband appears twice, there are several nameless episodic characters. The eighth chapter can be perceived as a completely independent plot narrative, which, however, does not have the same detailed exposure, as the plot of the first seven chapters, and the denouement of the action: Onegin was left by the Author "in an evil moment for him", nothing is reported about his further fate.

Many plot situations in the novel are outlined, but remain unrealized. The author creates the impression that he has many options for the development of events in his hands, from which he chooses the necessary one or refuses to choose at all, leaving it to the reader to do it himself. The principle of plot "multiple options" is already set in the first stanzas of the novel: Onegin (and the reader) does not know what awaits him in the village - the agonizing expectation of the death of his uncle, or, on the contrary, he will arrive already as the owner of the “charming corner” (later the Author also reports on another, unrealized, option the life of the hero: "Onegin was ready with me / To see foreign countries"). At the end of the novel, literally “throwing” Onegin, the Author, as it were, invites the reader to choose among the many options completion of the story.

Traditional novel schemes - overcoming obstacles that arise between lovers, love rivalry, happy endings - Pushkin outlines, but resolutely discards. In fact, there are no external obstacles before Onegin and Tatiana, Lensky and Olga, nothing prevents the seemingly happy end of their relationship. Tatiana loves Onegin, he sympathizes with Tatiana. All the neighbors unanimously tipped Onegin for her as a suitor, but the Author chooses a path dictated not by the logic of a "family" novel, but by the logic of the characters' characters. Lensky and Olga are even closer to the "secret of the marriage bed", but instead of a wedding and pictures of family life - a duel and death of Lensky, Olga's short grief and her departure with a lancer. The accomplished version of Lensky's fate is supplemented by two more, unrealized. Already after the death of the hero, the Author reflects on his two “destinies” - high, poetic, about life “for the good of the world”, and quite ordinary, “prosaic”: “I would part with the muses, get married, / In the village, happy and horned, / I would wear a quilted robe."

All versions of the plot action, at first glance, contradict each other. But the narrator needs them equally. He emphasizes that the novel arises from sketches, drafts, from novel situations already “worked out” by other writers. It is in his hands that the "staff" does not allow the plot to wander "at random". In addition, unrealized plot options become important elements of the characterization of the characters, indicating the possible prospects for the development of their destinies. An interesting feature of the novel is the “plot self-awareness” of the characters: not only Onegin, Lensky, Tatyana, but also minor characters- Tatyana's mother, Princess Alina - are aware of the unfulfilled options for their lives.

Despite the obvious fragmentation, intermittent, "contradictory" nature of the narrative, "Eugene Onegin" is perceived as a work that has a well-thought-out structure, "the form of a plan." The novel has its own internal logic - it is consistently sustained principle of narrative symmetry.

The plot of the eighth chapter, despite its isolation, is a mirror image of part of the plot of the first seven chapters. There is a kind of “castling” of the characters: Onegin is in the place of Tatyana in love, and the cold, inaccessible Tatyana is in the role of Onegin. The meeting of Onegin and Tatyana at a social event, Onegin's letter, the explanation of the characters in the eighth chapter are plot parallels to similar situations in the third - fourth chapters. In addition, the "mirror image" of the eighth chapter in relation to the first is emphasized by topographical and biographical parallels. Onegin returns to St. Petersburg, visits the house of an old friend, Prince N. His love "romance" with Tatyana outwardly resembles secular "novels" that he has half forgotten. Having failed, “he again renounced the light. / And in a silent office / He remembered the time / When the cruel melancholy / Chased him in a noisy light ... "The author, as in the finale of the first chapter, recalls the beginning of work on the novel, about friends to whom" he read the first stanzas " .

Inside the "village" chapters, the same principle of symmetry operates. The seventh chapter is symmetrical to the first: if only Onegin is shown in the first chapter, then all the attention of the Author in the seventh chapter is focused on Tatyana - this is the only chapter where main character absent. There is a plot parallel between the couples Onegin - Tatyana and Lensky - Olga. After the episode that ends the brief love conflict between Onegin and Tatyana, the narrative abruptly switches: The author wants to "cheer up the imagination / with a picture of happy love" of Lensky and Olga. An implicit, hidden parallel is drawn between Tatyana's dream-phantasmagoria, filled with terrible monsters that came from two worlds - folklore and literary, and "a fun birthday party." The dream turns out to be not only "prophetic" (a quarrel and a duel are predicted in it), but also, as it were, a fantastic "draft" of a village ball.

The contradictions of improvisational narration and the compositional symmetry of chapters, episodes, scenes, descriptions - principles close to the technique of literary "montage" - do not exclude, but complement each other. Their interaction makes the novel a dynamic, internally unified artistic text.

The artistic uniqueness of the novel is largely determined by the special position that the Author occupies in it.

The author in Pushkin's novel is not a traditional narrator, leading the story of the characters and events, clearly separating himself from them and from the readers. The author is both the creator of the novel and at the same time its hero. He persistently reminds readers of the "literary" nature of the novel, that the text he creates is a new, life-like reality that must be perceived "positively", trusting his story. The heroes of the novel are fictional, everything that is said about them has nothing to do with real people. The world in which the characters live is also the fruit of the author's creative imagination. Real life is only material for the novel, selected and organized by him, the creator of the novel world.

The author maintains a constant dialogue with the reader - shares "technical" secrets, writes the author's "criticism" on his novel and refutes the possible opinions of magazine critics, draws attention to plot twists, to breaks in time, introduces plans and drafts into the text - in a word, not lets you forget that the novel has not yet been completed, it has not been presented to the reader as a book “ready to use”, which you just need to read. The novel is created right before the eyes of the reader, with his participation, with an eye to his opinion. The author sees him as a co-author, referring to the many-sided reader: “friend”, “foe”, “friend”.

The author is the creator of the novel world, the creator of the plot narrative, but he is also its “destroyer”. The contradiction between the Author - the creator and the Author - the "destroyer" of the narrative arises when, interrupting the narrative, he himself enters the next "frame" of the novel - for a short time (with a remark, remark) or fills it entirely (with the author's monologue). However, the Author, breaking away from the plot, does not separate himself from his novel, becomes its "hero". We emphasize that the “hero” is a metaphor that conditionally designates the Author, because he is not an ordinary hero, a participant in the plot. It is hardly possible to single out an independent "plot of the Author" in the text of the novel. The plot of the novel is one, the Author is outside the plot action.

The Author has a special place in the novel, defined more specifically by his two roles. The first is the role of the narrator, the narrator, commenting on everything that happens to the characters. The second is the role of the “representative” of life, which is also part of the novel, but does not fit into the framework literary plot. The author finds himself not only outside the plot, but also above the plot. His life is part of the general flow of life. He is the hero of the "novel of life", which is said in the last verses of "Eugene Onegin":

Blessed is he who celebrates life early

Left without drinking to the bottom

Glasses of full wine

Who has not finished reading her novel

And suddenly he knew how to part with him,

As I am with my Onegin.

Separate intersections of the Author and the characters (the meetings of Onegin and the Author in St. Petersburg, which are mentioned in the first chapter, Tatiana's letter (“I cherish him sacredly”), which came to him), emphasize that the characters of “my novel” are only a part of that life, which is represented in the novel by the Author.

Image of the Author created by other means than the images of Onegin, Tatyana, Lensky. The author is clearly separated from them, but at the same time, there are correspondences, semantic parallels between him and the main characters. Not being actor, The author appears in the novel as the subject of utterances - remarks and monologues (they are usually called author's digressions). Speaking about life, about literature, about the novel that he creates, the Author either approaches the characters, or moves away from them. His judgments may coincide with their opinions or, conversely, oppose them. Each appearance of the Author in the text of the novel is a statement that corrects or evaluates the actions and views of the characters. Sometimes the Author directly points to the similarities or differences between himself and the characters: “We both knew the passion game; / Tormented by the life of both of us; / In both hearts the heat died down”; “I am always glad to notice the difference / Between Onegin and me”; “That’s exactly what my Eugene thought”; “Tatiana, dear Tatiana! / With you now I shed tears.

Most often, compositional and semantic parallels arise between the statements of the Author and the lives of the characters. The appearance of the author's monologues and remarks, which are not outwardly motivated, is connected with the plot episodes by deep semantic connections. The general principle can be defined as follows: the action or characterization of the hero gives rise to a response from the Author, forcing him to talk about a particular subject. Each statement of the Author adds new touches to his portrait, becomes a component of his image.

The main role in creating the image of the Author is played by his monologues - copyright digressions. These are fragments of text that are completely complete in meaning, possessing a harmonious composition and unique style. For convenience of analysis, they can be divided into several groups.

Most of the digressions are lyrical and lyrical-philosophical. In them, saturated with a variety of life impressions, observations, joyful and sorrowful "notes of the heart", philosophical reflections, the reader opens the spiritual world of the Author: this is the voice of the wise Poet, who has seen and experienced a lot in life. He experienced everything that makes up a person's life: strong, lofty feelings and the cold of doubts and disappointments, the sweet torments of love and creativity and the painful anguish of worldly fuss. He is either young, mischievous and passionate, or mocking and ironic. The author is attracted by women and wine, companionship, theatre, balls, poems and novels, but he also notes: “I was born for a peaceful life, / For village silence: / In the wilderness, the lyrical voice is more sonorous, / Creative dreams are more alive.” The author keenly feels the change in the ages of a person: the cross-cutting theme of his thoughts is youth and maturity, “the age is late and barren, / At the turn of our years.” The author is a philosopher who learned a lot of sad truth about people, but did not stop loving them.

Some digressions are imbued with the spirit of literary controversy. In an extensive digression in the third chapter (stanzas XI-XIV), first an ironic "historical and literary" reference is given, and then the Author introduces the reader to the plan of his "novel in the old way." In other digressions, the Author enters into disputes about the Russian literary language, emphasizing fidelity to the "Karamzinist" ideals of youth (Chapter Three, stanzas XXVII-XXIX), argues with the "strict critic" (V.K. Kuchelbecker) (Chapter Four, stanzas XXXII-XXXIII ). Critically evaluating the literary opinions of opponents, the Author determines his literary position.

In a number of digressions, the Author sneers at ideas about life that are alien to him, and sometimes openly ridicules them. The objects of the author's irony in the digressions of the fourth chapter (stanzas VII-VIII - "The less we love a woman ..."; stanzas XVIII-XXII - "Everyone has enemies in the world ..."; stanzas XXVIII-XXX - "Of course, you do not once you have seen / the county young lady's album ... "), the eighth chapter (stanzas X-XI - "Blessed is he who was young from his youth ...") - vulgarity and hypocrisy, envy and malevolence, mental laziness and depravity, disguised by secular good breeding. Such digressions can be called ironic. The author, unlike the "honorable readers" from the secular crowd, does not doubt the genuine life values and spiritual qualities of people. He is faithful to freedom, friendship, love, honor, he looks for spiritual sincerity and simplicity in people.

In many digressions, the Author appears as a Petersburg poet, a contemporary of the heroes of the novel. The reader will learn little about his fate, these are just biographical “points” (lyceum - Petersburg - South - village - Moscow - Petersburg), slips of the tongue, allusions, “dreams” that form the external background of the author's monologues. All digressions in the first chapter, part of the digressions in the eighth chapter (stanzas I-VII; stanzas XLIX-LI), in the third chapter (stanzas XXII-XXIII), in the fourth chapter (stanza XXXV), the famous digression in the finale of the sixth chapter have an autobiographical character. , in which the Author-poet says goodbye to youth (stanzas XLIII-XLVI), digression about Moscow in the seventh chapter (stanzas ХXXVI-XXXVII). Biographical details are also "ciphered" in literary and polemical digressions. The author takes into account that the reader is familiar with modern literary life.

The fullness of spiritual life, the ability for a holistic perception of the world in the unity of light and dark sides are the main features of the Author's personality, which distinguish him from the heroes of the novel. It was in the Author that Pushkin embodied his ideal of man and poet.

History of creation. "Eugene Onegin", the first Russian realistic novel, is Pushkin's most significant work, which has a long history of creation, covering several periods of the poet's work. According to Pushkin's own calculations, work on the novel lasted for 7 years, 4 months, 17 days - from May 1823 to September 26, 1830, and in 1831 "Onegin's Letter to Tatiana" was also written. The publication of the work was carried out as it was created: at first, separate chapters came out, and only in 1833 did the first complete edition come out. Until that time, Pushkin did not stop making certain adjustments to the text.The novel was, according to the poet, "the fruit of the mind of cold observations and the heart of sorrowful remarks."

Completing work on the last chapter of the novel in 1830, Pushkin sketched out his draft plan, which looks like this:

Part one. Preface. 1st song. Khandra (Kishinev, Odessa, 1823); 2nd song. Poet (Odessa, 1824); 3rd song. Young lady (Odessa, Mikhailovskoye, 1824).

Part two. 4th song. Village (Mikhailovskoe, 1825); 5th song. Name days (Mikhailovskoe, 1825, 1826); 6th song. Duel (Mikhailovskoe, 1826).

Part three. 7th song. Moscow (Mikhailovskoye, Petersburg, 1827, 1828); 8th song. Wandering (Moscow, Pavlovsk, Boldino, 1829); 9th song. Great Light (Boldino, 1830).

In the final version, Pushkin had to make certain adjustments to the plan: for censorship reasons, he excluded Chapter 8 - "The Journey". Now it is published as an appendix to the novel - "Excerpts from Onegin's Journey", and the final chapter 9 - "Big Light" - became, respectively, the eighth. In this form, in 1833, the novel was published as a separate edition.

In addition, there is an assumption about the existence of chapter 10, which was written in the Boldin autumn of 1830, but on October 19 it was burned by the poet , as it was devoted to depicting the era of the Napoleonic wars and the birth of Decembrism and contained a number of dangerous political allusions. Insignificant fragments of this chapter (16 stanzas) encrypted by Pushkin have been preserved. The key to the cipher was found only at the beginning of the 20th century by the Pushkinist NO. Morozov, and then other researchers supplemented the deciphered text. But disputes about the legitimacy of the assertion that these fragments really represent parts of the missing chapter 10 of the novel still do not subside.

Direction and genre. "Eugene Onegin" is the first Russian realistic socio-psychological novel, and, what is important, not prose, but a novel in verse. For Pushkin, it was fundamentally important when creating this work to choose an artistic method - not romantic, but realistic.

Starting work on the novel during the period of southern exile, when romanticism dominates the poet's work, Pushkin soon becomes convinced that the features of the romantic method do not make it possible to solve the problem. Although in terms of genre the poet is to some extent guided by Byron's romantic poem Don Juan, he refuses the one-sidedness of the romantic point of view.

Pushkin wanted to show in his novel a young man, typical of his time, against the broad background of the picture of his contemporary life, to reveal the origins of the characters being created, to show their inner logic and relationship with the conditions in which they find themselves. All this has led to the creation of truly typical characters that manifest themselves in typical circumstances, which is what distinguishes realistic works.

This also gives the right to call "Eugene Onegin" social novel, since in it Pushkin shows the noble Russia of the 20s of the XIX century, raises the most important problems of the era and seeks to explain various social phenomena. The poet does not simply describe events from the life of an ordinary nobleman; he endows the hero with a bright and at the same time typical character for a secular society, explains the origin of his apathy and boredom, the reasons for his actions. At the same time, events unfold against such a detailed and carefully written material background that “Eugene Onegin” can also be called a social and everyday novel.

It is also important that Pushkin carefully analyzes not only the external circumstances of the characters' lives, but also their inner world. On many pages, he achieves extraordinary psychological mastery, which makes it possible to deeply understand his characters. That is why "Eugene Onegin" can rightfully be called a psychological novel.

His hero changes under the influence of life circumstances and becomes capable of real, serious feelings. And let happiness bypass him, it often happens in real life, but he loves, he worries - that's why the image of Onegin (not a conventionally romantic, but a real, living hero) so struck Pushkin's contemporaries. Many in themselves and in their acquaintances found his features, as well as the features of other characters in the novel - Tatyana, Lensky, Olga - the image of typical people of that era was so true.

At the same time, in "Eugene Onegin" there are features of a love story with a love story traditional for that era. The hero, tired of the world, travels, meets a girl who falls in love with him. For some reason, the hero either cannot love her - then everything ends tragically, or she reciprocates, and although at first circumstances prevent them from being together, everything ends well. It is noteworthy that Pushkin deprives such a story of a romantic connotation and gives a completely different solution. Despite all the changes that have taken place in the lives of the heroes and led to the emergence of a mutual feeling, due to circumstances they cannot be together and are forced to part. Thus, the plot of the novel is given a clear realism.

But the innovation of the novel lies not only in its realism. Even at the beginning of work on it, Pushkin in a letter to P.A. Vyazemsky noted: "Now I am not writing a novel, but a novel in verse - a diabolical difference." The novel, as an epic work, implies the author's detachment from the events described and objectivity in their assessment; the poetic form enhances the lyrical beginning associated with the personality of the creator. That is why "Eugene Onegin" is usually referred to as lyric-epic works, which combine the features inherent in the epic and lyrics. Indeed, in the novel "Eugene Onegin" there are two artistic layers, two worlds - the world of "epic" heroes (Onegin, Tatyana, Lensky and other characters) and the world of the author, reflected in lyrical digressions.

Pushkin's novel written Onegin stanza , based on the sonnet. But the 14-line four-foot iambic Pushkin had a different rhyme scheme -abab vvgg deed lj :

"My uncle of the most honest rules,
When I fell ill in earnest,
He forced himself to respect
And I couldn't think of a better one.
His example to others is science;
But my god, what a bore
With the sick to sit day and night,
Not leaving a single step away!
What low deceit
Amuse the half-dead
Fix his pillows
Sad to give medicine
Sigh and think to yourself:
When will the devil take you?"

composition of the novel. The main technique in the construction of the novel is mirror symmetry (or ring composition). The way of its expression is the change of the positions occupied by the characters in the novel. First, Tatyana and Evgeny meet, Tatyana falls in love with him, suffers because of unrequited love, the author sympathizes with her and mentally accompanies her heroine. At the meeting, Onegin reads a “sermon” to her. Then there is a duel between Onegin and Lensky - an event whose compositional role is the denouement of a personal storyline and determining the development of a love affair. When Tatyana and Onegin meet in Petersburg, he is in her place, and all events repeat in the same sequence, only the author is next to Onegin. This so-called ring composition allows us to return to the past and creates the impression of the novel as a harmonious, complete whole.

Also an essential feature of the composition is the presence digressions in the novel. With their help, the image of a lyrical hero is created, which makes the novel lyrical.

Heroes of the novel . The protagonist, after whom the novel is named, is Eugene Onegin. At the beginning of the novel, he is 18 years old. This is a young metropolitan aristocrat who received a typical secular education. Onegin was born into a wealthy but bankrupt noble family. His childhood was spent in isolation from everything Russian, national. He was brought up by a French tutor who,

So that the child is not exhausted,
Taught him everything jokingly
I did not bother with strict morality,
Slightly scolded for pranks
And he took me for walks to the Summer Garden.”

Thus, Onegin's upbringing and education were rather superficial.
But Pushkin's hero nevertheless received that minimum of knowledge that was considered mandatory in the nobility. He “knew Latin enough to understand epigraphs”, remembered “jokes of the past from Romulus to the present day”, had an idea about the political economy of Adam Smith. In the eyes of society, he was a brilliant representative of the youth of his time, and all this thanks to impeccable French, elegant manners, wit and the art of holding a conversation. He led a lifestyle typical of the youth of that time: he attended balls, theaters, restaurants. Wealth, luxury, enjoyment of life, success in society and among women - that's what attracted the protagonist of the novel.
But secular entertainment was terribly tired of Onegin, who had already "yawned among the fashionable and ancient halls for a long time." He is bored both at balls and in the theater: “... He turned away, and yawned, and said: “It’s time for everyone to change; I endured ballets for a long time, but I was tired of Didlo” ”. This is not surprising - the hero of the novel took about eight years to go to social life. But he was smart and stood well above the typical representatives of secular society. Therefore, over time, Onegin felt disgust for an empty, idle life. “A sharp, chilled mind” and satiety with pleasures made Onegin disappointed, “the Russian melancholy took possession of him.”
“Planning in spiritual emptiness,” this young man fell into a depression. He tries to find the meaning of life in any activity. The first such attempt was literary work, but “nothing came out of his pen”, since the education system did not teach him to work (“hard work was sickening to him”). Onegin "read, read, but all to no avail." True, our hero does not stop there. On his estate, he makes another attempt at practical activity: he replaces corvée (obligatory work on the landowner's field) with quitrent (cash tax). As a result, the life of the serfs becomes easier. But, having carried out one reform, and that one out of boredom, “just to pass the time,” Onegin again plunges into the blues. This gives V. G. Belinsky reason to write: “The inactivity and vulgarity of life choke him, he doesn’t even know what he needs, what he wants, but he ... knows very well that he doesn’t need it, that he doesn’t want it. what is so satisfied, so happy selfish mediocrity.
At the same time, we see that Onegin was not alien to the prejudices of the world. They could only be overcome by contact with real life. Pushkin shows in the novel the contradictions in Onegin's thinking and behavior, the struggle between the "old" and the "new" in his mind, comparing him with other heroes of the novel: Lensky and Tatiana, intertwining their destinies.
The complexity and inconsistency of the character of the Pushkin hero is revealed especially clearly in his relationship with Tatiana, the daughter of the provincial landowner Larin.
In the new neighbor, the girl saw the ideal that had long been formed in her under the influence of books. The bored, disappointed nobleman seems to her romantic hero He is not like other landlords. “The whole inner world of Tatyana consisted in a thirst for love,” writes V. G. Belinsky about the condition of a girl who was left to her secret dreams all day long:

For a long time her imagination
Burning with grief and longing,
Alkalo fatal food;
Long hearted languor
It pressed her young breast;
The soul was waiting ... for someone
And waited ... Eyes opened;
She said it's him!

All the best, pure, bright awoke in Onegin's soul:

I love your sincerity
She got excited
Feelings long gone.

But Eugene Onegin does not accept Tatiana's love, explaining that he is "not created for bliss", that is, for family life. Indifference to life, passivity, “desire for peace”, inner emptiness suppressed sincere feelings. Subsequently, he will be punished for his mistake by loneliness.
In Pushkin's hero there is such a quality as "the soul of direct nobility." He sincerely becomes attached to Lensky. Onegin and Lensky stood out from their environment with their high intelligence and disdain for the prosaic life of their neighbors-landlords. However, they were completely opposite people in character. One was a cold, disappointed skeptic, the other an enthusiastic romantic, an idealist.

They get together.
Wave and stone
Poetry and prose, ice and fire...

Onegin does not like people at all, does not believe in their kindness, and destroys his friend himself, killing him in a duel.
In the image of Onegin, Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin truthfully portrayed an intelligent nobleman who stands above secular society, but does not have a goal in life. He does not want to live like other nobles, he cannot live otherwise. Therefore, disappointment and longing become his constant companions.
A. S. Pushkin is critical of his hero. He sees both trouble and Onegin's guilt. The poet blames not only his hero, but also the society that formed such people. Onegin cannot be considered an exception among the youth of the nobility, this is a typical character for the 20s of the XIX century.

Tatyana Larina - Pushkin's favorite heroine - is a vivid type of Russian woman of the Pushkin era. Not without reason, among the prototypes of this heroine, the wives of the Decembrists M. Volkonskaya, N. Fonvizina are mentioned.
The very choice of the name "Tatiana", not illuminated by the literary tradition, is associated with "remembrance of antiquity or girlish". Pushkin emphasizes the originality of his heroine not only by choosing a name, but also by her strange position in her own family: “She seemed like a stranger in her own family.”
Two elements influenced the formation of Tatyana's character: bookish, associated with French romance novels, and folk-national tradition. "Russian soul" Tatyana loves the customs of "dear old times", she has been captivated by scary stories since childhood.
Much brings this heroine closer to Onegin: she is alone in society - he is unsociable; her dreaminess and strangeness are his originality. Both Onegin and Tatyana stand out sharply against the background of their environment.
But not the "young rake", namely Tatyana becomes the embodiment of the author's ideal. The inner life of the heroine is determined not by secular idleness, but by the influence of free nature. Tatyana was brought up not by a governess, but by a simple Russian peasant woman.
The patriarchal way of life of the “simple Russian family” of the Larins is closely connected with traditional folk rites and customs: there are pancakes for Shrovetide, singalong songs, and round swings.
The poetics of folk divination is embodied in Tatyana's famous dream. He, as it were, predetermines the fate of the girl, foreshadowing a quarrel between two friends, and the death of Lensky, and an early marriage.
Endowed with an ardent imagination and a dreamy soul, Tatyana at first glance recognized in Onegin the ideal, the idea of ​​which she had drawn from sentimental novels. Perhaps the girl intuitively felt the similarity between Onegin and herself and realized that they were made for each other.
The fact that Tatyana was the first to write a love letter is explained by her simplicity, gullibility, ignorance of deceit. And Onegin’s rebuke, in my opinion, not only did not cool Tatyana’s feelings, but strengthened them: “No, poor Tatyana burns more with desolate passion.”
Onegin continues to live in her imagination. Even when he left the village, Tatyana, visiting the master's house, vividly feels the presence of her chosen one. Here everything reminds of him: the cue forgotten on the billiards, "and the table with the faded lamp, and the pile of books", and Lord Byron's portrait, and the cast-iron figurine of Napoleon. Reading Onegin's books helps the girl to understand the inner world of Eugene, to think about his true essence: “Isn't he a parody?”
According to V.G. Belinsky, "Visits to Onegin's house and reading his books prepared Tatyana for rebirth from a village girl into a secular lady." It seems to me that she has ceased to idealize "her hero", her passion for Onegin has subsided a little, she decides to "arrange her life" without Yevgeny.
Soon they decide to send Tatyana to Moscow - "to the fair of brides." And here the author fully reveals to us the Russian soul of his heroine: she touchingly says goodbye to the "merry nature" and "sweet, quiet light." Tatyana is stuffy in Moscow, she strives in her thoughts “to the life of the field”, and the “empty world” causes her sharp rejection:
But everyone in the living room takes
Such incoherent, vulgar nonsense;
Everything in them is so pale, indifferent,
They slander even boringly...
It is no coincidence that, having married and becoming a princess, Tatyana retained the naturalness and simplicity that distinguished her so favorably from secular ladies.
Having met Tatyana at the reception, Onegin was amazed at the change that had happened to her: instead of "a timid girl, in love, poor and simple," there was an "indifferent princess", "a stately, careless legislator of the hall."
But internally, Tatyana remained as internally pure and moral as in her youth. That is why she, despite her feeling in Onegin, refuses him: “I love you (why dissemble?), But I am given to another; I will be faithful to him forever.
Such an ending, according to the logic of Tatyana's character, is natural. Whole by nature, faithful to duty, brought up in the traditions of folk morality, Tatyana cannot build her happiness on the dishonor of her husband.
The author cherishes his heroine, he repeatedly confesses his love for his "sweet ideal". In the duel of duty and feeling, reason and passion, Tatyana wins a moral victory. And no matter how paradoxical the words of Küchelbecker sound: “The poet in the 8th chapter looks like Tatyana himself,” they have a lot of meaning, because the beloved heroine is not only the ideal of a woman, but rather a human ideal, the way Pushkin wanted to see him.

The idea of ​​the work and its embodiment in the novel "Eugene Onegin"

"Eugene Onegin" is a novel with a unique creative destiny. Especially for this work, A. S. Pushkin came up with a special stanza that had not previously been seen in world poetry: 14 lines of three quatrains with cross, adjacent, ring rhymes and a final couplet. Used in this novel, she received the name "Onegin".

The exact dates for the creation of the work are known: the beginning of work - May 9, 1823 in the southern exile, the end of the novel - September 25, 1830 In Boldin autumn. In total, work on this work continued for seven years, but even after 1830 the author made changes to the novel: in 1831, the last, eighth, chapter was rewritten, and Onegin's letter to Tatiana was also written.

The original intent of the novel has changed significantly. The plan for writing "Eugene Onegin", compiled and written down by Pushkin, initially included nine chapters, divided by the author into three parts.

The first part consisted of 3 chapters-songs: Spleen, Poet, Young lady (which corresponded to chapters 1, 2, 3 of the novel in the final version). The second part included 3 chapters-songs called Village, Name Day, Duel (which is identical to chapters 4, 5, 6 of the printed novel). The third part, completing the novel, included 3 chapters: Moscow (Song VII), Wandering (Song VIII), Great Light (Song IX).
Ultimately, Pushkin, adhering to his plan, wrote two parts, placing excerpts from Chapter VIII in an appendix to the novel and calling it Onegin's Journey. As a result, chapter IX of the novel became the eighth. It is also known that Pushkin conceived and wrote Chapter X on the emergence of secret Decembrist societies in Russia, but then burned it. Only seventeen incomplete stanzas remain of it. Confirming this idea of ​​the author, our great classic in 1829, a year before the end of the novel, said that the main character must either die in the Caucasus or become a Decembrist.

"Eugene Onegin" is the first realistic novel in Russian literature. The very genre of this realistic work is original, which the poet himself in a letter to P.A. Vyazemsky called "a novel in verse." This genre allowed the author to combine the epic depiction of life with deep lyricism, the expression of the feelings and thoughts of the poet himself. A.S. Pushkin created a unique novel, which in form resembles a casual conversation with the reader.

Such a manner of presentation in the novel allowed Pushkin to comprehensively show the life and spiritual searches of the hero of his novel as a typical representative of the Russian noble intelligentsia of the 20s. XIX century. The action of the novel includes the period from 1819 to 1825, showing a picture of the life of the nobility and common people in the first half of the 19th century in the capitals and provinces on the eve of the Decembrist uprising of 1825. A. S. Pushkin reproduced in this novel the spiritual atmosphere of society, in which a type of nobleman was born, who shared the views of the Decembrists and joined the uprising.