Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse by Alexander PushkinMy rating: 0 of 5 stars
I don't think I can fairly rate this book as I have a harder time getting into poetry, or even narrative poetry in this case, compared with regular prose. Reading Eugene Onegin feels like reading one of Homer's poems, but with a heavy dose of Russian culture. Pushkin's significance to Russian literature is basically equivalent in the same sense (apparently in schools over there they even have to memorize parts of it?), although it's harder to pick up from just going off an English translation. That said, from an English perspective, the translation I read (Mitchell) did an impressive job with the rhymes it came up with and keeping the structure consistent with that of the original poem, so I can only imagine how much better it sounds to native Russian speakers.
As with a lot of Russian lit, knowing the historical context helps a lot in appreciating this work, and I think for some people reading about it might even be considerably more interesting than the poem itself (Nabokov's got a multi-volume translation of it that apparently sucks, but comes with an awesome self-researched encyclopedic volume of footnotes... note to look into it sometime). The characters are pretty archetypal and act in accordance with the popular Western-Russian social stereotypes of the time almost exactly to a fault, especially with Onegin being the somewhat careless Byronic hero. It's apparent that much of the tragedy in this story stems from how these standard social conventions and expectations don't work well in reality, something that Pushkin was probably trying to say about the culture he lived in. And from a modern point of view, I think most people would say that Onegin deserved what he got.
They say Anna Karenina is Tolstoy's version of what would've happened if Tatiana had made the opposite choice at the end of the day... I'm curious to see how that pans out. Sounds like it'd be just as depressing (or even moreso).
