Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse (Oxford World's Classics) Read online

  Albani’s glory: Francesco Albani (1578–1660): Italian painter much admired in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

  Chapter 6

  La sotto … dole: ‘There, where the days are cloudy and short | Is born a race that has no fear of death.’

  Regulus: the Roman general Marcus Atilius Regulus, who, upon his capture by the Carthaginians, was sent to Rome to deliver harsh terms for peace; whereupon he returned to his captors as he had promised and was executed.

  Véry’s: Café Véry, a Parisian restaurant.

  Delvig: Baron Anton Delvig (1798–1831), minor poet and one of Pushkin’s closest friends, his classmate at the Lyceum in Tsarskoe Selo.

  Lepage’s deadly pieces: Jean Lepage (1779–1822), famous Parisian gunsmith.

  Chapter 7

  Lyóvshin’s crew: students of works by Vasily Lyovshin (1746–1826), author of numerous tracts on gardening and agriculture.

  iron bust: A statuette of Napoleon.

  The bard of Juan and the Giaour: Byron.

  Autómedons: Autómedon was the charioteer of Achilles in the Iliad.

  Petróvsky Castle: the chateau not far from Moscow where Napoleon took refuge from the fires in the city.

  ‘Archival dandies’: young men from well-connected families who held cushy jobs at the Moscow Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

  Vyázemsky: Prince Pyotr Vyazemsky (1792–1878), friend of Pushkin.

  Grand Assembly: the Russian Assembly of Nobility, a Moscow club for noblemen.

  Chapter 8

  Lycée: the lyceum established by Alexander I at Tsarskoe Selo for young aristocrats. Pushkin attended the boarding-school there between 1811 and 1817, and to the end of his life remained deeply attached to his friends of those years. It was at the lyceum that he composed his first poems.

  Derzhávin: Gavrila Derzhávin (1743–1816): the most outstanding Russian poet of the eighteenth century. In the year before he died, Derzhávin attended a school examination at which the 16-year-old Pushkin recited one of his poems, which the old man praised.

  Lenore: the heroine of the romantic ballad by Gottfried Bürger (I747–94).

  Tauris: an ancient name for the Crimea. Pushkin’s visit to the Crimea and his earlier stay in the Caucasus (to which he refers in a line above) were commemorated in two of his so-called ‘southern’ poems, The Prisoner of the Caucasus and The Fountain of Bakhchisarai.

  Nereids’: sea-nymphs, daughters of the sea-god Nereus.

  sing the savage steppe’, an allusion to the narrative poem The Gypsies, yet another of Pushkin’s southern works.

  my garden: Pushkin’s country place at Mikhailovskoe, to which he was confined by the government from August 1824 to September 1826 and where he resumed work on Eugene Onegin.

  Demon of my pen!: a reference to his poem ‘The Demon’, in which he speaks of having been haunted in his youth by an ‘evil genius’, a spirit of negation and doubt who mocked the ideals of love and freedom.

  Chatsky: the hero of Griboedov’s comedy Woe from Wit (1824). Chatsky, after some three years abroad, turns up on the day of a party at the Moscow house of the girl he loves.

  Shishkov: Admiral Alexander Shishkov (1754–1841), the leader of the Archaic group of writers, was a statesman and publicist who attacked both Gallicisms and liberal thought in Russian letters.

  epigram of style: an allusion to some possible epigrammatic play on the word ‘vulgar’ and the last name of Faddei Bulgarin (1789–1859), a literary critic and notorious police informer who was hostile to Pushkin.

  Nina Voronskáya: an invented name for a stylized society belle. Russian commentators on the poem have suggested various real-life prototypes.

  badge on those two maids-in-waiting: a court decoration with the royal initials, given to ladies-in-waiting of the empress.

  Prolázov: the name (derived from prolaza, roughly ‘sycophant’ or ‘social climber’) appears only in posthumous editions. According to Nabokov it was often attached to ridiculous characters in eighteenth-century Russian comedies and in popular pictures.

  Saint-Priest. Count Emmanuel Sen-Pri (1806–28), the son of a French émigré and a noted caricaturist.

  Gibbon and Rousseau … Fontenelle he scoured: the listing device is a favourite of Pushkin’s. Besides Rousseau, this catalogue of Onegin’s reading includes: Edward Gibbon (1737–94), the English historian; Sébastien Chamfort (1740–94), French writer famous for his maxims and epigrams; Alessandro Manzoni (1785–1873), Italian novelist and poet of the Romantic school; Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803), the German philosopher; Mme de Staël (1766–1817), the French writer (whose novel Delphine was listed earlier as one of Tatyana’s favourites); Marie F. X. Bichat (1771–1802), French physician and anatomist, the author of Recherches physiologiques sur la vie et la mort; Simon Tissot (1728–1797), a famous Swiss doctor, author of the treatise De la santé des gens de lettres; Pierre Bayle (1647–1706), French philosopher, author of the famous Dictionnaire historique et critique; Bernard Fontenelle (1657–1757), French rationalist philosopher and man of letters, author of Dialogues des morts.

  Benedetta: ‘Benedetta sia la madre’ (Blessed be the mother), a popular Venetian barcarolle.

  Idol mio: ‘Idol mio, piu pace non ho’ (My idol, I have peace no longer), the refrain from a duet by Vincenzo Gabussi (1800–46).

  ‘Some are no more, and distant… others’: though probably written in 1824, these lines were taken almost immediately as an allusion to Pushkin’s friends among the executed or exiled Decembrists (participants in the ill-fated revolt of December 1825).

  Sadi: the thirteenth-century Persian poet.

  Appendix

  Camenae: water-nymphs identified with the Greek Muses.

  Katenin: Pavel Katenin (1792–1853). A minor poet and critic, whose Recollections of Pushkin were published in the twentieth century.

  Makáriev Market: a famous market fair held in midsummer in the town of Makariev, to which it moved in 1817 from Nizhni Novgorod.

  Terek: a river in the Caucasus.

  Kúra‘s and Arágva ‘s banks: refers to two mountain rivers in the Caucasus.

  Beshtú: (or Besh Tau): a five-peaked mountain eminence in the northern Caucasus.

  Mashúk: one of the peaks in the northern Caucasus.

  Orestes with his friend here vied: a reference to the tale of Orestes and his friend Pylades, who argued over which of them would be sacrificed to the goddess Artemis, each wishing to die in the other’s place. In the end both escaped, along with the temple priestess, who turned out to be Iphigenia, Orestes’ sister.

  Mithridates: King of Pontus, who in 63 BC, after being defeated by Rome, ordered one of his soldiers to kill him. Pushkin visited his alleged tomb while travelling in the Crimea in 1820.

  Adam Mickiérwicz: Polish national poet (1798–1855), who spent almost five years in Russia, where he made the acquaintance of Pushkin. His visit to the Crimea in 1825 provided material for his Crimean Sonnets.

  Cypris: Venus or Aphrodite.

  Bakhchisarai: the reference is to a fountain in the garden of the Crimean Khan’s palace. See Pushkin’s narrative poem ‘The Fountain of Bakhchisarai’.

  Zaréma: the jealous wife of the Khan, one of the heroines in Pushkin’s poem ‘The Fountain of Bakhchisarai’.

  Morali: (or Moor Ali): apparently a Moorish seaman or pirate, whom Pushkin met during his stay in Odessa.

  Tumánsky: a minor poet who served along with Pushkin as a clerk to the governor of Odessa.

  Automne: César Automne, a well-known restaurateur in Odessa.

  Ausonia: Italy.

  SELECTION OF OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

  SERGEI AKSAKOV

  A Russian Gentleman

  ANTON CHEKHOV

  Early Stories

  Five Plays

  The Princess and Other Stories

  The Russian Master and Other Stories

  The Steppe and Other Stories

  Twelve Pla
ys

  Ward Number Six and Other Stories

  A Woman’s Kingdom and Other Stories

  FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY

  An Accidental Family

  Crime and Punishment

  Devils

  A Gentle Creature and Other Stories

  The Idiot

  The Karamazov Brothers

  Memoirs from the House of the Dead

  Notes from the Underground and The Gambler

  NIKOLAI GOGOL

  Village Evenings Near Dikanka and Mirgorod

  Plays and Petersburg

  ALEXANDER HERZEN

  Childhood, Youth, and Exile

  MIKHAIL LERMONTOV

  A Hero of our Time

  ALEXANDER PUSHKIN

  Eugene Onegin

  The Queen of Spades and Other Stories

  LEO TOLSTOY

  Anna Karenina

  The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories

  The Raid and Other Stories

  Resurrection

  War and Peace

  IVAN TURGENEV

  Fathers and Sons

  First Love and Other Stories

  A Month in the Country

  APOLLINAIRE,

  Three Pre-Surrealist Plays

  ALFRED JARRY, and MAURICE MAETERLINCK

  HONORÉ DE BALZAC

  Cousin Bette

  Eugénie Grandet

  Père Goriot

  CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

  The Flowers of Evil

  The Prose Poems and Fanfarlo

  DENIS DIDEROT

  This is Not a Story and Other Stories

  ALEXANDRE DUMAS (PÈRE)

  The Black Tulip

  The Count of Monte Cristo

  Louise de la Vallière

  The Man in the Iron Mask

  La Reine Margot

  The Three Musketeers

  Twenty Years After

  ALEXANDRE DUMAS (FILS)

  La Dame aux Camélias

  GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

  Madame Bovary

  A Sentimental Education

  Three Tales

  VICTOR HUGO

  The Last Day of a Condemned Man and Other Prison Writings

  J.-K. HUYSMANS

  Against Nature

  JEAN DE LA FONTAINE

  Selected Fables

  PIERRE CHODERLOS DE LACLOS

  Les Liaisons dangereuses

  MME DE LAFAYETTE

  The Princesse de Clèves

  GUY DE MAUPASSANT

  A Day in the Country and Other Stories Mademoiselle Fifi

  PROSPER MÉRIMÉE

  Carmen and Other Stories

  BLAISE PASCAL

  Pensées and Other Writings

  JEAN RACINE

  Britannicus, Phaedra, and Athaliah

  EDMOND ROSTAND

  Cyrano de Bergerac

  MARQUIS DE SADE

  The Misfortunes of Virtue and Other Early Tales

  GEORGE SAND

  Indiana

  The Master Pipers

  Mauprat

  The Miller of Angibault

  STENDHAL

  The Red and the Black

  The Charterhouse of Parma

  JULES VERNE

  Around the World in Eighty Days

  Journey to the Centre of the Earth

  Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas

  VOLTAIRE

  Candide and Other Stories

  Letters concerning the English Nation

  ÉMILE ZOLA

  L’Assommoir

  The Attack on the Mill

  La Bête humaine

  Germinal

  The Ladies’ Paradise

  The Masterpiece

  Nana

  Thérèse Raquin

  Till Eulenspiegel: His Adventures

  Eight German Novellas

  GEORG BÜCHNER

  Danton’s Death, Leonce and Lena, and Woyzeck

  J. W. VON GOETHE

  Elective Affinities

  Erotic Poems

  Faust: Part One and Part Two

  E. T. A. HOFFMANN

  The Golden Pot and Other Tales

  J. C. F. SCHILLER

  Don Carlos and Mary Stuart

  LUDOVICO ARIOSTO

  Orlando Furioso

  GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO

  The Decameron

  MATTEO MARIA BOIARDO

  Orlando Innamorato

  LUIS VAZ DE CAMÕES

  The Lusíads

  MIGUEL DE CERVANTES

  Don Quixote de la Mancha

  Exemplary Stories

  DANTE ALIGHIERI

  The Divine Comedy

  Vita Nuova

  BENITO PÉREZ GALDÓS

  Nazarín

  LEONARDO DA VINCI

  Selections from the Notebooks

  NICCOLÒ MACHIAVELLI

  Discourses on Livy

  The Prince

  MICHELANGELO

  Life, Letters, and Poetry

  PETRARCH

  Selections from the Canzoniere and Other Works

  GIORGIO VASARI

  The Lives of the Artists

  JANE AUSTEN

  Catharine and Other Writings

  Emma

  Mansfield Park

  Northanger Abbey, Lady Susan, The Watsons, and Sanditon

  Persuasion

  Pride and Prejudice

  Sense and Sensibility

  ANNE BRONTË

  Agnes Grey

  The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

  CHARLOTTE BRONTË

  Jane Eyre

  The Professor

  Shirley

  Villette

  EMILY BRONTË

  Wuthering Heights

  WILKIE COLLINS

  The Moonstone

  No Name

  The Woman in White

  CHARLES DARWIN

  The Origin of Species

  CHARLES DICKENS

  The Adventures of Oliver Twist

  Bleak House

  David Copperfield

  Great Expectations

  Hard Times

  Little Dorrit

  Martin Chuzzlewit

  Nicholas Nickleby

  The Old Curiosity Shop