Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse: Text (Vol. 1)

by Aleksandr Pushkin, Vladimir Nabokov (Translator), Vladimir Nabokov (Introduction), Brian Boyd (Foreword by)

Overview

When Vladimir Nabokov's translation of Pushkin’s masterpiece Eugene Onegin was first published in 1964, it ignited a storm of controversy that famously resulted in the demise of Nabokov’s friendship with critic Edmund Wilson. While Wilson derided it as a disappointment in the New York Review of Books, other critics hailed the translation and accompanying commentary as Nabokov’s highest achievement. Nabokov himself strove to render a literal translation that captured "the exact contextual meaning of the original," arguing that, "only this is true translation." Nabokov’s Eugene Onegin remains the most famous and frequently cited English-language version of the most celebrated poem in Russian literature, a translation that reflects a lifelong admiration of Pushkin on the part of one of the twentieth century’s most brilliant writers. Now with a new foreword by Nabokov biographer Brian Boyd, this edition brings a classic work of enduring literary interest to a new generation of readers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691181011
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	07/31/2018
Series:	Princeton Classics , #620
Pages:	380
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) was a Russian-American writer known for his unique blend of erudition and playfulness. His novels in English include Lolita, Pale Fire, and Ada. He also wrote poetry, short stories, translations from Russian, and a memoir, Speak, Memory. Brian Boyd is professor of literature at the University of Auckland. He is the author of Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years and Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years (both Princeton).

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CHAPTER 1

Description of the Text

In its final form (1837 edn.) Pushkin's novel in verse (Evgeniy Onegin, roman v stihah) consists of 5541 lines, all of which, except a set of eighteen, are in iambic tetrameter, with feminine and masculine rhymes. The 5523 iambic lines (only three of which are incomplete) break up into the following groups:

Lines
Thus, in all there are 5523 iambic tetrameters. To this should be added:

(a) A master motto in French prose (composed by the author but presented as "tiré d'une lettre particulière").

(b) A song consisting of eighteen lines, in trochaic trimeter with long terminals, "The Song of the Girls" (in Three, between XXXIX and XL).

(c) A set of forty-four authorial notes.

(d) An appendix with some comments in prose on the fragments of Onegin's Journey.

Moreover, there are the following chapter mottoes: Chapter One, a line from Vyazemski; Two, a venerable pun, slightly improved (O rus! Horace; O Rus'!); Three, a line from Malfilâtre; Four, a sentence from Mme de Staël; Five, two lines from Zhukovski; Six, two (not adjacent but printed as such) lines from Petrarch; Seven, two lines from Dmitriev, one from Baratïnski, and two from Griboedov; Eight, two lines from Byron.

Most of the dropped stanzas are found in early editions or in MS. In some cases their omission may be regarded as a deliberate structural gap. A large mass of EO material rejected by Pushkin comprises dropped stanzas, variant stanzas, expunged continuations, samples from "Onegin's Album," stanzas referring to Onegin's Journey (the latter expanded into a chapter that was to come after Seven, thus turning the established Eight into a ninth chapter), fragments referring to a tenth chapter, and numerous canceled lines found in drafts and fair copies. I have translated in my notes all the most important and interesting rejections as given in various publications, but I am fully aware that no adequate study of original texts can be accomplished before all Pushkin's MSS preserved in Russia are photographed and made available to scholars, and this, of course, a cagey police state cannot be expected to do without some political reason — and I can see none yet.

For the basic text I have relied as completely as possible (that is, with the correction of obvious misprints, the worst of which are pointed out in my notes) on the last edition published in Pushkin's lifetime. This "third" edition, now exceedingly rare, was printed under the supervision of Ilya Glazunov, bookseller, and brought out in January, 1837 — certainly before January 19, when it was advertised for sale in the St. Petersburg Gazette (supp. 14, p. 114). This miniature volume (32) was praised in the "New Books" section of the literary review The Northern Bee (Severnaya pchela, no. 16, pp. 61–63), on January 21, for its pretty pocket format.

The fifth page of this edition reads:

Evgeniy Onegin roman v stihah.
(EO, a novel in verse. The work of Aleksandr Pushkin. Third edition. St. Petersburg. In the printing shop of the Office of Purveyance of State Papers.)

The sixth page bears the master motto ("Pétri de vanité," etc.), the seventh, the beginning (ll. 1–12) of the Prefatory Piece, and the eighth, its end (13–17).

The numbered pages contain eight chapters, headed by mottoes (One, pp. 1–40; Two, pp. 41–69; Three, pp. 71–105; Four, pp. 107–38; Five, pp. 139–69; Six, pp. 171–202; Seven, pp. 203–40; Eight, pp. 241–80); Pushkin's "Notes," pp. 281–93; and "Fragments of Onegin's Journey" with some comments, pp. 295–310.

After this come two blank pages and the cover, with the modest line, Izdanie Glazunova, "Published by Glazunov."

For further details on this edition see "The Publication of EO," item 24.

The novel is mainly concerned with the emotions, meditations, acts, and destinies of three men: Onegin, the bored fop; Lenski, the minor elegiast; and a stylized Pushkin, Onegin's friend. There are three heroines: Tatiana, Olga, and Pushkin's Muse. Its events are placed between the end of 1819, in St. Petersburg (Chapter One), and the spring of 1825, in St. Petersburg again (Chapter Eight). The scene shifts from the capital to the countryside, midway between Opochka and Moscow (Chapter Two to the beginning of Seven), and thence to Moscow (end of Seven). The appended passages from Onegin's Journey (which were to be placed between Chapters Seven and Eight) take us to Moscow, Novgorod, the Volga region, the Caucasus, the Crimea, and Odessa.

The themes and structural devices of Eight echo those of One. Each chapter has at least one peacock spot: a young rake's day in One (XV–XXXVI), the doomed young poet in Two (VI–XXXVIII), Tatiana's passion for Onegin in Three, rural and literary matters in Four, a fatidic nightmare and a name-day party in Five, a duel in Six, a journey to Moscow in Seven, and Onegin's passion for Tatiana in Eight. Throughout there is a variety of romantic, satirical, biographical, and bibliographical digressions that lend the poem wonderful depth and color. In my notes I have drawn the reader's attention to the marvelous way Pushkin handles certain thematic items and rhythms such as the "overtaking-and-hanging-back" device (One), interstrophic enjambments (Tatiana's flight into the park and Onegin's ride to Princess N.'s house), and the little leitmotiv of a certain phrase running through the entire novel. Unless these and other mechanisms and every other detail of the text are consciously assimilated, EO cannot be said to exist in the reader's mind.

Pushkin's composition is first of all and above all a phenomenon of style, and it is from this flowered rim that I have surveyed its sweep of Arcadian country, the serpentine gleam of its imported brooks, the miniature blizzards imprisoned in round crystal, and the many-hued levels of literary parody blending in the melting distance. It is not "a picture of Russian life"; it is at best the picture of a little group of Russians, in the second decade of the last century, crossed with all the more obvious characters of western European romance and placed in a stylized Russia, which would disintegrate at once if the French props were removed and if the French impersonators of English and German writers stopped prompting the Russian-speaking heroes and heroines. The paradoxical part, from a translator's point of view, is that the only Russian element of importance is this speech, Pushkin's language, undulating and flashing through verse melodies the likes of which had never been known before in Russia. The best I could do was to describe in some of my comments special samples of the original text. It is hoped that my readers will be moved to learn Pushkin's language and go through EO again without this crib. In art as in science there is no delight without the detail, and it is on details that I have tried to fix the reader's attention. Let me repeat that unless these are thoroughly understood and remembered, all "general ideas" (so easily acquired, so profitably resold) must necessarily remain but worn passports allowing their bearers short cuts from one area of ignorance to another.

The "Eugene Onegin" Stanza

Here are two samples I have written after the meter and rhyme sequence of the EO stanza. They first appeared (with a different last line) in The New Yorker for Jan. 8 1955.

What is translation? On a platter A poet's pale and glaring head,
The EO stanza, as a distinct form, is Pushkin's invention (May 9, 1823). It contains 118 syllables and consists of fourteen lines, in iambic tetrameter, with a regular scheme of feminine and masculine rhymes: ababeecciddiff. The abab part and the ff part are usually very conspicuous in the meaning, melody, and intonation of any given stanza. This opening pattern (a clean-cut sonorous elegiac quatrain) and the terminal one (a couplet resembling the code of an octave or that of a Shakespearean sonnet) can be compared to patterns on a painted ball or top that are visible at the beginning and at the end of the spin. The main spinning process involves eecciddi, where a fluent and variable phrasing blurs the contours of the lines so that they are seldom seen as clearly consisting of two couplets and a closed quatrain. The iddiff part is more or less distinctly seen as consisting of two tercets in only one third of the entire number of stanzas in the eight cantos, but even in these cases the closing couplet often stands out so prominently as to cause the Italian form to intergrade with the English one.

The sequence itself, ababeecciddiff, as a chance combination of rhymes, crops up here and there in the course of the rambling, unstanzaed, freely rhymed verse that French poets used for frivolous narrative and badinage in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Among them by far the greatest was La Fontaine, and it is to him that we must go for Pushkin's unconscious source. In La Fontaine's rhymed Contes (pt. III, Paris, 1671), poems of the licentious fable type, I have found two passages — and no doubt there are more — where among the rills and rillets of arbitrarily arranged rhymes the ababeecciddiff sequence chances to be formed, much as those mutations that evolution pounces upon to create an insular or alpine species. One such sequence occurs in the pentapodic La Courtisane amoureuse, 11. 3–16 (miracles, Catons, oracles, moutons, même, Polyphème, assis, soucis, joliette, eau, fuseau, fillette, un, commun), the other is represented in the tetrapodic ll. 48–61 of Nicaise, a slightly salacious piece of 258 lines. The opening "Que" refers to "trésors" in l. 47 — these being masculine good looks and youth:

Que ne méprise aucune dame,
To a Russian ear the last two lines are fascinatingly like Pushkin's clausules.

La Fontaine's free alternations had a tremendous impact on Russian techniques; and long before the sporadic ababeecciddiff sequence became fixed as a species in the EO stanza Russian versificators, when following their French masters, would now and then, in the process of literary mimicry, evolve that particular pattern. An irregularly rhymed poem in iambic tetrameter, Ermak, composed in 1794 by Ivan Dmitriev (whom his good-natured friend, the historian Karamzin, extravagantly called the russkiy Lafonten), is a case in point. In this Siberian eclogue we find the sequence ababeecciddiff at least twice: 11. 65–78 (the beginning of the Ancient's sixth speech in his dialogue with the Young One) and 11. 93–106 (part of the Ancient's seventh speech). Twenty-five years later (1818–20) Pushkin used the same sequence in his very Gallic, freely rhymed tetrametric fairy tale, Ruslan and Lyudmila (e.g., Canto Three, 11. 415–28), finished in 1820, three years before EO was begun.

In choosing this particular pattern and meter for his EO stanza Pushkin may have been toying with the idea of constructing a kind of sonnet. The stanza, indeed, may be regarded as (1) an octet consisting of two quatrains (abab and eecc) and a sestet consisting of two tercets (idd and iff), or (2) three quatrains (abab eecc iddi) and a couplet (ff). French tetrapodic sonnets and English tetrametric ones were, of course, common beginning with the end of the sixteenth century; the form has been termed the Anacreontic sonnet. It was parodied by Molière in Le Misanthrope (1667; act I, SC. ii); Shakespeare handled it once (Sonnet CXLV), and Charles Cotton a number of times. The French rhyme scheme might go, for instance: abba ecce ddi fif (Malherbe's A Rabel, Peintre, sur un livre de fleurs, 1630, referring to MS illustrations of flowers made by Daniel Rabel in 1624); the English one: bcbc dfdf ggh jjh (Cotton's "What have I left to doe but dye," pub. 1689).

Shakespeare's tetrametric rarity has the sequence: bcbc dfdf ghgh jj; make-hate-sake-state, come-sweet-doom-greet, end-day-fiend-away, threw-you.

In the EO stanza the only departure from an Anacreontic sonnet is the arrangement of rhymes (eecc) in the second quatrain, but this departure is a fatal one. One shift back from eecc to ecec would have the EO stanza remain within the specific limits of the Anacreontic sonnet. Actually, 11. 5–8 of the EO stanza are not a quatrain at all, but merely two couplets (of which the masculine one, 7–8, is sometimes a discrete element, similar in intonation to 13–14). The intrusion of these two adjacent couplets and the completely arbitrary interplay of phrase and pause within the eecciddi part of the EO stanza combine to make it sound quite different from the most freakish tetrametric sonnet, even if, as in a number of cases, the cut is that of a sonnet (e.g., three quatrains and couplet, as in st. II and eight others in Chapter One; octet and two tercets, as in One:VI; two quatrains and two tercets, as in One: XVI, a rare case); or if, as in one striking case, the rhymes of the octet are limited to two, as in the Petrarchan typical subspecies of the sonnet (see Four: XXXI: píshet–molodóy–d?shet–ostrotóy, usl?shit–píshet–zhivóy–rekóy', vdohnovénn?y–svoegó–kogó–dragotsénn?y –tebé–sud'bé; see also Commentary).

A device introducing a good deal of variation is the enjambment, which can be intrastrophic or interstrophic. In the first case, we find an extreme example in which the usually autonomic first quatrain is unexpectedly and brilliantly run into the second, with the phrase sometimes stopping abruptly in the middle of l. 5 (e.g., Five: I, XXI; Six: III; Seven: XV). In the second case, the whole stanza is run into the next one, and the phrase is pulled up short in the very first line (see Three: XXXVIII–XXXIX, and Eight: XXXIX–XL).

On the other hand, we find certain stanzas in which our poet takes advantage of the couplet intonation to make a mechanical point, or he overdoes the tabulatory device by listing emotional formulas, or cataloguing objects, in monotonous sequences of three-word verses. This is a drawback characteristic of the aphoristic style that was Pushkin's intrinsic concession to the eighteenth century and its elegant rationalities.

(Continues…)

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Table of Contents

FOREWORD BY BRIAN BOYD, ix,
TRANSLATOR'S FOREWORD BY VLADIMIR NABOKOV, xxv,
"EO" REVISITED, xxxi,
METHOD OF TRANSLITERATION, xxxiii,
CALENDAR, xl,
ABBREVIATIONS AND SYMBOLS, xli,
Translator's Introduction,
DESCRIPTION OF THE TEXT, 3,
THE "EUGENE ONEGIN" STANZA, 9,
THE STRUCTURE OF "EUGENE ONEGIN", 15,
THE GENESIS OF "EUGENE ONEGIN", 60,
PUSHKIN ON "EUGENE ONEGIN", 68,
THE PUBLICATION OF "EUGENE ONEGIN", 74,
PUSHKIN'S AUTOGRAPHS: BIBLIOGRAPHY, 84,
Eugene Onegin,
A Novel in Verse by Aleksandr Pushkin,
PREFATORY PIECE, 91,
NOTES TO "EUGENE ONEGIN", 311,
FRAGMENTS OF "ONEGIN'S JOURNEY", 321,

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Nabokov has not merely rendered the most precious gem of Russia's poetic heritage into limpid, literal poetic translation. He has given Pushkin's wondrous lines the glow and sparkle of their Russian original."—Harrison E. Salisbury, New York Times

"Nabokov's translation and commentary, taken together, can best be considered as asui generiswork of art—perhaps his ultimate masterpiece."—J. Thomas Shaw, Slavic and East European Journal

"What Nabokov has done is to throw a bridge between Russian and American culture, a bridge built out of his all-informative commentary and agonizingly honest translation."—Virginia Quarterly Review

Editorial Reviews

"Nabokov has not merely rendered the most precious gem of Russia's poetic heritage into limpid, literal poetic translation. He has given Pushkin's wondrous lines the glow and sparkle of their Russian original."--Harrison E. Salisbury, New York Times

"Nabokov's translation and commentary, taken together, can best be considered as asui generiswork of art--perhaps his ultimate masterpiece."--J. Thomas Shaw, Slavic and East European Journal

"What Nabokov has done is to throw a bridge between Russian and American culture, a bridge built out of his all-informative commentary and agonizingly honest translation."--Virginia Quarterly Review

From the Publisher

Covers the period of 1973 to 1985 and includes books, dissertations, serial publications and production and reviews. Non-English language scholarship and criticism is included in separate sections. Falen (Russian, U. of Tennessee) provides a unique translation of Pushkin's verse novel, utilizing contemporary American English to bring forth the gracefulness and liveliness of Pushkin's poetry. An introduction discusses how Falen's translation compares with those of his predecessors, followed by a general analysis of the poem. Paper edition (unseen), $12.95. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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