Kicking Byron Out of Russia: The Clash Between Sentamentalist and Romantic Themes in Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin

In the 1800’s, the vast and frozen empire of Russia found itself in what can only be described as an identity crisis. The actions of Tsar Peter the Great in the previous century, from the formation of St. Petersburg to the series of social reforms and institutions he put in place, had caused a rather universal Westernization of the nation that was quite unprecedented.

Peter saw the flourishing culture and economy beginning in Europe, and in the hopes of garnering similar prosperity for his country he founded schools, nurtured foreign trade and began a chain-of-events that would later lead Catherine the Great to create, by proxy, a Russian middle-class. The effects of these policy changes reached even the provinces, and the repercussions were multifarious.

On the one hand, much of the public did become educated, they were quite productive, and the economy did improve. But on the other, as the “very raison d’Ã?ªtre [of Peter’s reforms] was the turning of the country toward the West and Western Light,”¹ the people being so turned were left with a very perplexing question: What makes a Russian, Russian? Art, ever the apt mirror of society, was quick to reflect this cultural identity-shift with characteristic poignancy. But no one piece was so successful at illustrating the dichotomy and tension of the change as the pinnacle work of Russia’s most acclaimed author, Alexander Pushkin.

In Pushkin’s formative years, the literary metamorphosis had long begun to take shape. The awkwardly-worded adventure novels characteristic of the early Enlightenment had given way to the more language-centered, evocative tales of writers like Nikolai Karamzin. Poetry had also taken grand strides.

Folk ballads, fables and songs were still the most popular of poetic genres, but the forms had begun to be subverted and used for loftier intellectual purposes by bards such as Alexander Radishchev. Emotional, social and even political themes were joining moralistic ones for the first time ever in literature of all sorts. But despite how far the character of Russian writing had come, it was still for the most part only a reactionary imitation of the literature of certain Western European countries, specifically Britain and Germany².

With Eugene Onegin, Russia was at last given her first uniquely Russian literary work.

The plot of Pushkin’s verse novel is as simple as it is famous. The title character, Eugene, grows bored with the society of his native St. Petersburg, despite his success in it. He grows bored, in fact, with everything: love, literature, sport-indeed nothing in life seems to give him pleasure. The death of his uncle and last remaining relative lends him the idea to seek out provincial life, so he ventures out to his estate, deep in the country. He there befriends a fellow landowner, Vladimir Lensky, and through him meets Tatyana Larin, a dreamy young girl raised on tender literature, “shy as a savage, silent, tearful/ wild as a forest deer, and fearful,”³ who promptly falls madly in love with him.

She professes her adoration to Evgeny in a letter, but he spurns her attentions in favor of his jaded bachelorhood. Soon thereafter, Eugene kills Lensky in a lamentable duel and he leaves the provinces, separating him from Tatyana for a time. She mourns his absence for a while, but after a time she is married off to a Muscovite general at her mother’s wish. In the tricky way that fate is wont to be, it happens that Eugene encounters Tatyana again some years later in Moscow.

She is changed to his eyes, now at the very height of society, and he is suddenly smitten by this, the maturation of the soulful girl that once he knew. In an act of beautiful symmetry, he composes a letter to Tanya, expressing his devotion, but she will not have him. In perhaps the most oft-quoted passage of the novel she says to the lovelorn Onegin,

I love you (what’s the use to hide
behind deceit or double dealing?)
but I’ve become another’s wife-
and I’ll be true to him, for life.⁴

The tale closes on a devastated Eugene as he leaves Tatyana’s home.

That final scene has been the subject of intense debate by literary scholars since the its first publication in 1831. It has been criticized as being inconclusive, lacking as it does any sort of formal denouement⁵, and not presuming to specifically articulate any grand moral to the story. But most controversial of all is the behavior of Tatyana Larin in the ultimate verses. The very idea of the heroine of an apparent romance not riding off with the object of her affections in the end is downright peculiar, if not entirely nonsensical. Because of her very circumspect and honorable decision she has both been lauded as The Ideal Russian Woman, and entirely dismissed as unrealistic, helpless or brainwashed. Her actual character is neither so definitive nor so simple.

From her introduction in the second Canto onwards, despite Eugene’s status as the eponymous figure of the novel, it is Tatyana who is protagonist. She is the only character in the work with goals and aspirations that succeed in moving the plot along, and she is the only one whom we really get to know. Onegin’s biography and travels are presented at length, but “it is Tatyana whose innermost thoughts the reader is privy to.”⁶

Much attention is given to the emotional content of the heroine, while until the very end the reader knows no more of Onegin’s sentiments than that he is often very bored. This dichotomy serves to provide a near instantaneous affirmation of the gulf that lies between the two characters. But Pushkin’s poem is no mere romance, and the separation of Evgeny and Tanya is not simply the unhappy rift between would-be lovers. It is a vivid allegory of the changing face of Russian art and society in the nineteenth century.

The character of Tatyana is a true sentimentalist romance heroine in more than just paradigm⁷. She is emblematic of the entire passing culture of sentimentalism and pre-Byronic thought. Pushkin evokes this in her speech, her actions and even the very words that his narrator uses in descriptions of her. Sentimental and pastoral literature is characterized mostly by an overarching, “‘pleasantness’ which encompasses syntactical, lexical and rhythmical phenomena alike.”⁸ That sweet vocabulary and light structure employed by Karamzin and his ilk is ever-present in the parts of Onegin devoted to Tatyana:

She loved the balcony, the session
of waiting for dawn to blush,
when, in pale sky, the stars’ procession
fades from the view, and in the hush
earth’s rim grows light, and a forewarning
whisper of breeze announces morning,
and slowly day begins to climb.
In winter, when for longer time
the shades of night within their keeping
hold half the world still unreleased,
and when, by misty moon, the east
is softly, indolently sleeping,
wakened at the same hour of night
Tatyana’d rise by candlelight.⁹

Words like “forewarning,” “candlelight,” “misty,” “whisper” and “hush,” with their almost melodramatic tone, as well as attention to subjects like nature, dawn and nighttime are tell-tale characteristics of sentimentalism. In addition, the comma-glutted, descriptive sentences are a clear throw-back to pastoral poetry. Shown against a passage on Evgeny, the comparison seems even more evident.

Up to the porch our hero’s driven;
in, past concierge, up marble stair
flown like an arrow, then he’s given
a deft arrangement to his hair,
and entered. Ballroom overflowing…
and band already tired of blowing,
while a mazurka holds the crowd;
and everything is cramped and loud;
spurs of Chevalier Gardes are clinking,
dear ladies’ feet fly past like hail,
and on their captivating trail
incendiary looks are slinking,
while roar of violin contrives
to drown the hiss of modish wives.¹⁰

Verses on Onegin are far more brusquely worded and are on the whole less inclined towards imagery. Action moves to the forefront. Superfluous as his movements are, Eugene is nevertheless shown in an almost constant state of motion-a striking juxtaposition to Tatyana’s physical inertia and introspection.

This very thoughtfulness is another device of Pushkin’s which evinces Tatyana’s allegorical role. Where Evgeny acts, Tanya feels. What actions she does initiate in her own right are almost always linguistic. When she is overwhelmed by her love for the hero, she first tries to confide in her nurse and then ends in composing a letter. Her entire will in the novel is composed, not of the will to do, but of the will to think and say.

But Tatyana’s personality is not the most sentimental attribute of her characterization. The pre-romantic tradition held honor and duty as supreme and “thought that human beings from birth are kind, without detestation, treachery and cruelty.”¹¹ They valued integrity, quietude and love above all else. Bearing this in mind, the heroine’s behavior and speech in the final Canto of Onegin not only fail to seem peculiar but actually seem particularly apt. She scorns her life in Moscow in favor of her former, simpler life in touching language:

…all this flashy masquerading,
the glare, the fumes in which I live,
this very day I’d gladly give,
give for a bookshelf, a neglected
garden, a modest home…
…
and the churchyard where, new-erected,
a humble cross, in woodland’s gloom,
stands over my poor nurse’s tomb.¹²

But still she refuses to violate her marriage vows and leave. Even had she said nothing of her enduring love for Eugene in that final meeting, it would have been evident in her tears and nostalgic words, yet in the end she holds her ideals, her honor, above even love itself and refuses his entreaties with the heavy punctuation of her abrupt departure from the scene.
Eugene is here left “thunder-struck,”¹³ touched at last by a situation he is in no position to control-his love rejected as once he rejected love. And here the nineteenth century critic V. Belinsky might beg support for his position that “Onegin was neither cold, nor unfeeling, nor callous [as some critics have said]…poetry lived in his soul.”¹⁴ Belinsky’s famed opinion falls in opposition to those who have played up the similarities between Pushkin’s Onegin and the English Romantic poet, George Gordan Lord Byron’s work, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. In his aptly-titled essay, “Eugene Onegin: An Encyclopedia of Russian Life,” he argued vehemently that

Not only the content but the spirit of Byron’s poems [sic] precludes the possibility of any significant resemblance between them and [Onegin]. Byron…did not so much aspire to portray contemporary mankind as to pronounce judgment upon its past and present history.¹⁵

Belinsky can be said to have a point in that Pushkin’s aims seem loftier than those of Byron, but while Alexander Pushkin is certainly not Lord Byron, Belinsky’s contention that Eugene is “not Childe Harold,”¹⁶ seems a little too hasty.

The influence of the English romantics, Byron among them, upon the work of Pushkin is certainly palpable, and never more so than in Eugene Onegin. It was after all, Lord Byron who created of himself the archetype of the jaded socialite beset by ennui-and Onegin fits that description pretty well. But there is an added dimension to Pushkin’s hero that makes Belinsky partly right. Eugene is indeed Childe Harold, but he is also, like Tatyana, emblematic of something more. The Russian quest for identity in the nineteenth century bore fruit to two major changes in popular thought: “the change from the ideology of the Age of Reason to romanticism and idealism, and the disintegration of the new world view, or rather views.” The latter change had the distinction of leaving “little in the realm of ideas left to bequeath.”¹⁷

In plainer words, the particular Byronic Romanticism that Russian society adopted embraced emotions and ideals in the abstract, but simultaneously undermined them, leaving the people clutching a vapid, immoral void. A whole class of European dilettante fops was born into Russian clothes. These men proclaimed to be above ordinary cares and amusements of life in favor of ideals, but in point of fact they had none, and in the haut monde of the 1800’s these fellows reigned supreme. It is they, Childe Harold’s eager pupils, for whom Evgeny Onegin is emblem and hero.

The tension of the dichotomy between this rising hypocritical trend in Russian society and its sincere, albeit underdeveloped, predecessor is the keystone of Alexander Pushkin’s verse novel. That the author-or at any rate, his narrator-thought this encroaching Byronism lamentable is evident both in the outcome of the plot, and in a few, more concrete references made throughout the work.

Just prior to Tatyana’s soul-bearing epistle to her love, there are two stanzas (based loosely upon Tatyana’s reading material) that serve both to highlight the incredible disparity between the respective characters of the hero and heroine¹⁸ and to illuminate their allegorical roles:

Lending his tone a grave inflection,
the ardent author of the past
showed one a pattern of perfection
in which the hero’s mould was cast.
He gave this figure-loved with passion,
wronged always in disgraceful fashion-
a soul of sympathy and grace,
and brains, and an attractive face.
Always our fervid hero tended
pure passion’s flame, and in a trice
would launch into self-sacrifice;
always before the volume ended
due punishment was handed down
to vice, while virtue got its crown.

Today a mental fog enwraps us,
each moral puts us in a daze,
even in novels, vice entraps us,
yes, even there its triumph grows.
Now that the British Muse is able
to wreck a maiden’s sleep with fable,
the idol that she’ll most admire
is either the distrait Vampire,
Melmoth, whose roaming never ceases,
Sbogar, mysterious through and through,
the Corsair, or the Wandering Jew.
Lord Byron with his shrewd caprices,
dressed up a desperate egoism
to look like sad romanticism.¹⁹

Especially in the latter (twelfth) stanza, a great deal of disdain is shown on the part of the narrating entity for the Byronic trend’s effect on Russian society. It not only downplays ideals, but all higher thinking in general. Readers become drawn to fantastic stories with “vice” played up in place of “virtue,” and they never stop to analyze the result. Heroes become characters with nothing to recommend them at all, much like Eugene himself.

Later, when Tatyana searches Eugene’s study, she finds that all he read during his stay in the country were books featuring

…contemporary man
…represented rather truly,
that soul without a moral tie,
all egotistical and dry,
to dreaming given up unduly,
and that embittered mind which boils
in empty deeds and futile toils.²⁰

This provides another specific criticism by the narrator persona on the society Eugene grotesquely represents, as well as a vital illustration of Eugene himself.

Here again, however, Belinsky, in his constant quest to uphold Onegin’s character as positive, protests. To him, the resemblance “attests even more to [Eugene’s] moral superiority,” as he must have seen the relation between himself and those heroes, unlike so many others who were also accurately portrayed therein, but who would refuse to admit to it.²¹ But if Eugene recognizes himself in the mirror of his reading material, he makes no sign of it. Tatyana discovers the novels in his estate in the provinces, indicating that they were his chosen literature during the relatively early stages of the novel. He was reading them as he rejected Tatyana’s love, and all of her idealistic sentimentalism with it, as he senselessly provoked his supposed “friend,” Lensky, into the duel which took his life. If he realized that the men on his bookshelf were accurate representations of himself, and that their characteristics were not good ones he certainly did not care enough to do anything to fix the problem. It seems somehow more likely that he read such works because of an unconscious empathy for the characters which led only they among all heroes of literature to be interesting enough to egoistic Onegin to merit hearing their tales.

It seems indeed, that the only men Eugene sees fit to associate with are men much like himself. The only relationships resembling friendship that Eugene appears to have are with the uninvolved narrator (who professes to have much in common with his Onegin) and with Vladimir Lensky for whom one of the aspects of his multifaceted role is precisely to be foil to Eugene. Here again Belinsky, terminal optimist, wants to say that Onegin is a good character-this time simply because he befriends the young Lensky, idealistic poet and lover. But if the reader will kindly remember, Onegin goads that selfsame dreamy friend by idly pursuing Tatyana’s sister, Olga, who just happens to be the love of Lensky’s life. This taunt does not end well, either. Lensky challenges Eugene to a duel in his anger, and he ends up rather dead. Onegin flees his conscience and presumably waxes remorseful for a time, but in truth the narrator shows more disquiet at his death than Eugene ever does.

Lensky’s character, however, is indeed a fascinatingly complex one with respect to the hero and heroine of the novel. He serves as a double-foil, doppelganger to not merely Eugene but to Tatyana as well. His position both in life and in the plot of the poem mirrors that of Evgeny, but his personality is diametrically opposite-which is to say that it mirrors Tatyana perfectly:

He was too young to have been blighted
by the cold world’s corrupt finesse;
his soul still blossomed out, and lighted
at a friend’s word, a girl’s caress.
In heart’s affairs, a sweet beginner,
he fed on hope’s deceptive dinner;
the world’s Ã?©clat, its thunder-roll,
still captivated his young soul.²²

As such, he serves as the only real link between Tanya’s sentimentalism and Onegin’s Byronic cynicism. So it is worth note that not long after Tatyana’s youthful confession of her ardor, Eugene strikes down and kills that very connection.

This death is the true turning-point in the plot. Despite his intense reaction to this event, Evgeny remains quite unchanged thereafter. He flees the provinces for parts never made specifically clear, but when the reader is reacquainted with him, years later, his essential temperament is completely intact. Tatyana, though, is another matter entirely. Lensky’s untimely demise serves as a catalyst for her character, in a sense, killing-off the truly sentimentalist aspects of her role. But rather than being wounded or marred, she instead evolves into another mode of being. Her character in the final Canto of Onegin is emblematic of a subset of Russian society and culture that does not exist, but that is Pushkin’s conception of what Romanticism should be.

She visits Eugene’s estate in an act of nostalgia and becomes enlightened. She sees his study, and for the first time understands who and what he really is:

…Just an apparition,
a shadow, null and meaningless,
a Muscovite in Harold’s dress,
a modish second-hand edition,
a glossary of smart argot…
a parodistic raree-show?²³

Her love is undiminished, but it is tempered now by the knowledge of the unbridgeable gulf that lies between them. Thus, when she is married off in Moscow, she is able to assume the role of dutiful wife and society doyenne without reservation and in fact with strength, for even when her duty and honor are tested by Eugene, in the end she remains loyal-to both herself and the culture that she is a part of.

Lensky’s death lends emblem to the inevitable passage of the pre-Romantic mode of thought in Russia, and also of the status of poetry as the “highest” mode of literature. Sentimentalism and encroaching Romanticism were not the only opposing forces in nineteenth century Russian culture. On the more literary side, with which Pushkin was most certainly well-acquainted, poetry was gradually losing the popularity war with the sudden appreciation of prose. The cultural howl perhaps best expressed by Marlinskij as “Prose! prose!-Water, plain water!” ²⁴ was beginning to take its toll on even Pushkin’s celebrity. Not only does he kill off the only real poet in his novel, but he explicitly says:

…Divine decree
may wind up my career as poet;
perhaps, though Phoebus warns, I’ll see
installed in me a different devil,
and sink to prose’s humble level:
a novel on the established line
may then amuse my glad decline.²⁵

And indeed in subsequent years he wrote many short stories in prose. But they were not, as the pessimism of this verse suggests “on the established line”-they were quite unique in their own right-quite poetic even.

For though Lensky’s murder seems to be a triumph of the romantic, Byronic, and prosaic elements in the novel over the sentimental, emotional and ideal, in all actuality it is not. For though Tatyana outgrows her sentimentalism, she retains her poetry, and

although a broader range of possibilities is open to Eugene than to Tatiana, it is she who successfully attains from within her restricted compass a productive alternative to the limited choices suggested by her surroundings and her readings.²⁶

In the end it is she, this ideal Romantic ideology, that we respect-for her virtue as much as for her versatility. Eugene and all of his blasÃ?©, Byronic ennui is simply left to wander, lovelorn and “thunder-struck” out of the house of Russia, replaced as he is by something infinitely more dignified, honorable and true than he has ever been or ever will be. The entire novel suggests the importance of being poetic.

Perhaps the basic underlying question of the novel is not simply the stages of development, but how a poet (or the poetic in man) can develop to maturity and remain, or once more become, poetic.²⁷

2. Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, “Notes on the Emergence of the Russian Intelligentsia,” Art and Culture in
   Nineteenth Century Russian Literature, p5. Indiana University Press. Bloomington, Indiana.
   1983.
4. Evelyn Bristol, A History of Russian Poetry, pp 45-104. Oxford University Press. New York. 1991.
6. Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin, trans. John Bayley, p75 (2, XXV, v-viii). Penguin Books. New
   York. 1977.
8. Pushkin, p231 (8, XLVII, xii-xv).
10. Vissarion Belinsky, “Eugene Onegin: An Encyclopedia of Russian Life,” Russian View’s of Pushkin’s
    Eugene Onegin, p23. Indiana University Press. Indianapolis. 1988.
12. J. Douglas Clayton. Ice and Flame: Aleksandr Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, p115. University of Toronto
    Press. Buffalo. 1985.
14. Bristol, p113.
16. K. Skipina, “On the Sentimental Tale,” Russian Prose, p28. Ardis Publishers. Ann Arbor, MI. 1985.
18. Pushkin, p77 (2, XXVIII).
20. Pushkin, p47 (1, XXVIII).
22. “http://www.fplib.org” Russian Literature of the XVII Century. “Friends and
    Partners” Foundation. 2004.
24. Pushkin, p230 (8, XLVI, vi-x and xiii-xv).
26. Pushkin, p231 (8, XLVIII, ii).
28. Belinsky, p28.
30. Belinsky, p22.
32. Belinsky, p31.
34. Riasanovsky, p19.
36. Olga Peters Hasty, Pushkin’s Tatiana, p69. The University of Wisconsin Press. Madison, WI. 1999.
38. Pushkin, pp89-90 (3, XI-XII)
40. Pushkin, p188 (7, XXII, ix-xiv).
42. Belinsky, p28.
44. Pushkin, p66 (3, VII, i-viii)
46. Pushkin, p189 (7, XXIV, x-xv)
48. as quoted by Boris Eikhenbaum, “Pushkin’s Path to Prose,” Alexander Pushkin, p121. Chelsea House
    Publishers. Philadelphia. 1987.
50. Pushkin, p90 (3, XII, ii-vii)
52. Hasty, p48.
54. J. Thomas Shaw, “The Problem of Unity of the Author-Narrator’s Stance in Puskin’s Evgenij Onegin,”
    p35-as quoted by Caryl Emerson, “Tatiana,” A Plot of Her Own: The Female Protagonist in
    Russian Literature, p15. Northwestern University Press. Evanston, Illinois. 1995.