“Eugene Onegin” by Alexander Pushkin
Alexander Pushkin was born in Moscow in 1799 to an old aristocratic family. From a young age he demonstrated an exceptional talent for writing and was quickly acknowledged as a poetic prodigy by prominent older writers.
At the age of 18 he was appointed into the government service, but for the majority of the time he lived a dissipated life at the capital St. Petersburg while continued writing light verses. His narrative poem “Ruslan and Lyudmila” (published in 1820) brought him widespread fame as a leading figure in Russian poetry.
At about the same time, however, several of his mildly seditious verses got him into trouble and eventually led to his banishment from the capital. It is during this so-called “southern exile” (to Ekaterinoslav, Kishinev, Odessa) that he composed several narrative poems and began his novel inverse, “Eugene Onegin.” After several more conflicts with the government, Pushkin was condemned once again, this time to a new period of exile at his family’s estate of Mikhailovskoe. It was there that he wrote some of his lyric poetry, completed his verse drama “Boris Godunov”, and continued working on “Eugene Onegin.”
And then the Decembrist Revolt of 1825 happened. Although some of his friends were imprisoned and even executed, Pushkin was not implicated in the affair, and in 1826 he was pardoned by the new Tsar Nicholas I and was permitted to return to society in Moscow, but still not given free rein to move back to the high society circles in St. Petersburg. Finally, at autumn 1830, while stranded at his estate of Boldino, he completed “Eugene Onegin” after 8 years.
This novel is a reflection of this painful experience, where due to him being physically kept away from St. Petersburg that he loved, he poured his nostalgia and frustration into the story. In general, the fictitious story is about a wealthy and bored St. Petersburg socialite, named Eugene Onegin, who lived a dissipated life. Without giving much spoiler: he rejects a young woman’s love, did something gruesome to his best friend, but later realizes his 2 devastating mistakes a little too late, where in an ironic twist of fate the characters eventually swap positions in their circumstances to create an interesting ending.
The story is told across 8 chapters through a unique, rhythmic poetic structure that would become known as the “Onegin stanza.” It maps out a stark contrast between the glamorous high-society life of St. Petersburg and the quiet and boring Russian countryside (that look similar like his exiled places).
It also has the theme of a superfluous, intelligent, capable man, who wastes his life in cynicism and lacking a true purpose in his life. It is a deliberately blurry line between the character of Eugene Onegin and Pushkin’s own character, giving this book semi-autobiographical elements, despite the larger narratives of these 2 lives that are very different.
Because get this, in real life Alexander Pushkin was also notoriously rebellious, tempestuous, reckless, and deeply unconventional. He was one-eighth African, which made him look different than the other Russians and he used that to his advantage and became a womanizer who kept a famous “Don Juan list” chronicling the dozens of women he pursued, seduced, or fell in love with. He was a drunk, who loves to drink heavily in shady local taverns. He was a hot-headed gambler who often lost vast sums of money that he didn’t have.
He also openly hung out with political radicals, constantly clashed with authority, while through his underground satirical poems he often mock corrupt high-ranking officials and the Tsars themselves, which is why he eventually got exiled, twice. And historians even estimated that he was involved in around 29 duel challenges, the last of which killed him at a young age of 37, leaving a staggering debt of roughly 150,000 rubles (millions in today’s money), which Tsar Nicholas I astonishingly paid off out of respect for his literary genius.
This is what’s so fascinating about Pushkin, his literary genius is complemented by a wealth of experience and observational knowledge that can only be obtained by living an extraordinary life. Just like Ernest Hemingway’s or Paulo Coelho’s crazy life stories. Hence, the depths of their novels.
Decades later after his death, Alexander Pushkin became the single greatest literary inspiration for both Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky, with both legendary authors viewed Pushkin as the spiritual father of all Russian literature. Many even pay the highest respect towards Pushkin by placing him in Russian literature at par with what Shakespeare is to English literature and Goethe to German literature.
And this book, “Eugene Onegin”, is considered by all as Pushkin’s greatest ever work.
THE CHAOS THEORY 