Why “Eugene Onegin,” about which we have known since school years that this is an encyclopedia of Russian life and an eminently folk work, and that it depicts “Russian society in one of the phases of its education, its development,” - why did this seem would such a socially significant novel not be adequately understood by the left wing of contemporary Russian social thought? Why, at different stages of the publication of the novel, A. Bestuzhev, K. Ryleev, N. Polevoy, N. Nadezhdin spoke out against the artistic principles of its author; Why was it precisely at a time close to the completion of the novel that young Belinsky announced the end of Pushkin’s period and the beginning of Gogol’s period of Russian literature?
Why did it take Belinsky more than 10 years to completely include “Eugene Onegin” in his worldview system, while, say, the works of Gogol and Lermontov were perceived by him, as they say, from sight?
Apparently, the novel somehow came into conflict with the socially radical language of its time - what exactly?
Obviously, we should talk first of all about ideological principles manifested in poetics, in the structure of “Eugene Onegin”
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The factual material related to the formulation of these questions is so widely known that it can be explained here almost by signs that are understandable to everyone. But it is all the more alarming that some habitual interpretations of this widely known factual material have a number of contractual omissions, which, say, at the level of school literary criticism, create a zone of persistent prejudices in society in relation to Pushkin’s poetry in general and in relation to the interpretation of “Eugene Onegin” in particular. This is all the more alarming now that the process of popular mythologization of Pushkin’s personality and work is taking place - a process that is, of course, good and requires special efforts of literary scholars in order to cleanse Pushkin’s creative image of prejudices. Let us say right away that this work has been actively carried out in recent years by Yu.M. Lotman (1), S.G. Bocharov (2), A.E. Tarkhov (3) and other researchers. Some of V.A.’s Boldino reports served the same purpose. Viktorovich (4).
Without pretending to cover a wide range of topics, I will try in my notes to reflect on the questions posed, bearing in mind only one, but extremely important structural element of the novel - its ending.
““Onegin” breaks like a stretched string, when the reader does not even think that he is reading the last stanza,” wrote A.A. Akhmatova (5). Indeed, this “suddenly” in the penultimate line is a monosyllabic word with four consonants, where the last “ug” is similar to the sound of a shot, after which the ensuing silence is especially felt - a silence that the reader does not even think about... But what exactly is the reader thinking about? ?
What was Pushkin’s reading contemporary thinking about when he found the novel in verse? What were the reader's expectations for the novel's ending?
“Suddenly” you can end the elegy: “Isn’t it true, you’re alone. You're crying. I am calm... But if..." - and no one reproaches the poet that his feelings are vague, and the poem seems to have no end. “Suddenly” you can finish the poem or not finish it at all and offer the reader “incoherent passages,” as the author himself defined the compositional feature of “The Bakhchisarai Fountain” - a brilliant game, proposed by romanticism, in the incompleteness of a work of art, in the incompleteness of the very picture of the world, which is in perpetual motion , in eternal development...
But a novel cannot be finished “suddenly”; it cannot be left unfinished.
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Pushkin himself knew the laws of the genre well, knew what the ending of the novel should be - he knew so well that he could freely be ironic about the fact that
...due his hero
Anyway, get married
At least kill me
And other faces of the building,
Having given them a friendly bow,
Get out of the labyrinth. (III, 397)
Irony is irony, and this is exactly how the plot intrigue should be unleashed, this is how the relationships of the characters end, this is how the story ends. And at the same time, the laws of the genre require that
...at the end of the last part
Vice was always punished
It was a worthy wreath. (VI, 56)
That is, the denouement of the intrigue must coincide with the resolution of the ideological conflict. The clash of ideas ends. Whether the wreath is good, or “vice is kind even in a novel, and there it triumphs,” that’s another conversation. It is important that only with the ending the novel is included in a certain “good - evil” system. Only with the ending does a word spoken in one language (the language of artistic images) begin to sound in another (the language of ethical concepts). An artistic fact becomes a moral fact - only with the ending.
The double significance of artistic speech was obvious a long time ago. Moreover, it was believed that the novel was simply a school of morality. That is, through the language of ethics, the artistic fact was directly connected with the language of social behavior. A novel is a school, a writer is a teacher of life... But this subject can only be taught with a consistent theory - a “theory of human life”, a theory where “good - evil” are definite, clear concepts. Otherwise, what to teach? To present such a “theory” to society in artistic form was the task of the novel (6).
Strictly speaking, an equally clear, although perhaps not so broad, moral goal was assumed for every other literary genre. Literature was understood as a socially significant activity - significant directly, and not just because it fosters a sense of beauty, like painting or music.
It was assumed that the language of a work of art is subject to the same laws of logic as the language of morality is subject to them. And therefore, translation from language to language is quite possible - what’s so difficult if the logic is the same, the cause-and-effect relationship of events in the book and in life is the same - and the closer to life (to nature, as they said then), the better. And therefore, the speech of a literary work was simply necessarily translated into the language of politics, morality, and into the language of interpersonal relations. At the same time, one could even argue what exactly is more appropriate - to write odes or elegies. This is not a dispute of the 18th century - this is a dispute of those years when Pushkin began work on “Eugene Onegin”.
Literature could only be understood in this way by people who believed in the omnipotence of reason, who believed that life is strictly subject to the laws of logic, and that the work of an artist is subject to the same laws. One could always ask, for what purpose, for what thought did the writer take up his pen? A certain premise inevitably led to an equally certain conclusion: say, the heroes of a novel who behaved virtuously and wisely received payment with happiness; passions and vices inevitably led to punishment and grief. That is why the ending was important, it was in the finale that from the labyrinth of evidence the writer led the reader along with his heroes to the light of Truth, to the radiance of Truth, Reason, which for the people of that time - say, for the people of the Decembrist circle - was synonymous with the Absolute Good.
Reason is what invariably united the fragmented world of the novel in the finale. Without this final unity, the novel made no sense. Being free to choose behavior for his characters, sometimes pushing them to the most incredible actions throughout the entire plot, by the end the author was deprived of this freedom. The final idea always requires the development of the plot in a certain direction, it requires - as if in hindsight - a certain composition of the plot. (For example, in the famous novel by G. Fielding, a cheerful love adventure turns into an “Oedipal plot” towards the end, threatening to turn the entire novel into an irrational tragicomedy, and only at the very end the threat is revealed as a misunderstanding - and the author fully realizes the rational moralistic attitude.)
What seemed to us a clash of characters turns into a clash of ethical concepts; the seemingly immense world of the novel - if we look back at it from the last line of the “classic” ending - became a laconic, easy-to-understand moral formula...
It would seem that the concept of “formula” is not from an artistic language, but from the language of scientific theoretical thinking. But no, art also has such a function, which was subtly noted by A.N. much later than classical times. Ostrovsky in his Pushkin speech in 1880: “The first merit of the great poet is that through him everything that can grow smarter becomes smarter. In addition to pleasure, in addition to the form for expressing thoughts and feelings, the poet gives the very forms of thoughts and feelings (my discharge. - L.T.).” (7)
In other words, the finale as a category of artistic structure, as a means of translating artistic speech into the language of formulas, is so significant that any text from the very beginning was projected onto the possible outcome of the finale.
This projection was oriented depending on the reader’s worldview - at the beginning and throughout the movement of the plot. And in the end, these points of view on the world of the reader and the author coincided, or the reader was reoriented - the reader was “educated”, “learned life”.
“The position from which the picture of the world as a whole is oriented can be Truth (classical novel), Nature (enlightenment novel), People; finally, this general orientation may be zero (which means that the author refuses to evaluate the narrative).” (8) Let’s add here romantic values - Freedom and Love - and question the “zero” orientation, which, rather, should be understood as a “minus technique” or as orientation in a system inaccessible to one or another observer - and we get the basic the principles with which the romantics A. Bestuzhev and K. Ryleev approached the novel, who already in the first chapter felt the inconsistency of the narrative with their moral and artistic principles, and who were more drawn to the French philosophical and political tradition N. Poleva and N. Nadezhdin, who hoped that Pushkin’s novel will be written from socio-political positions close to them, for which the central concept was the concept of “people”.
Pushkin, of course, understood perfectly well what reader expectations he was dealing with, and therefore the work on “Eugene Onegin” was surrounded by so many declarations that were clearly polemical in nature: in the text of the novel, in the preface, in private letters, the poet persistently proclaims completely different, the exact opposite of the expected - without pedagogical obligations - relationship with the reader: “I am writing motley stanzas of a romantic poem...”; “There’s nothing to think about printing; I write carelessly”; “Receive the collection of motley heads...”; “I reviewed all this strictly: there are a lot of contradictions, but I don’t want to correct them...”; “Far-sighted critics will, of course, notice the lack of a plan...” etc., etc. The “sum of ideas”, the need for which the poet knew, does not seem to be promised here. At best, it is a sum of paintings, a motley collection of portraits, fleeting sketches of morals. Here there is no one to lead out of the labyrinth to the end, and there is no labyrinth itself. An intrigue with an elementary symmetrical plot structure, well developed in the fable “How a crane and a heron went to woo each other.” Contemporaries were perplexed: maybe morality is not more complicated than a fable? Is this really brilliant chatter, as Byron’s “Beppo” seemed then?
At least, in his last address to the reader, Pushkin himself recommends himself as precisely this kind of interlocutor:
Whoever you are, oh my reader,
Friend, foe, I want to be with you
To part now as friends.
Sorry. Why would you follow me
Here I did not look in careless stanzas,
Are they rebellious memories?
Is it a rest from work,
Living pictures, or sharp words,
Or grammatical errors,
God grant that in this book you
For fun, for dreams,
For the heart, for magazine hits
Although I could find a grain.
Then we'll part, sorry! (VI, 189)
As Pushkin foresaw, the “far-sighted critics” responded. They completely denied the novel any “sum of ideas”: “Onegin” is a collection of separate, incoherent notes and thoughts about this and that, inserted into one frame, from which the author will not compose anything that has its own separate meaning “(9),” wrote one of them, not even waiting for the end of the novel, as soon as its seventh chapter was published. “Funny chatter” (10) - said another. “Society chatter, and Pushkin is a boudoir poet” (11), concluded the third, having already read the entire novel...
Should we be strict with these judgments? Let us remember that critics believed that a novel is always a “theory of human life.” And already at that time they knew: theory is power. And they remembered how the theories of the French materialists (theorists - as V.A. Zhukovsky called them (12) led to the revolution. After all, although they did not directly want a repetition of the French experience, they still wanted the good of their fatherland and, having perceived the French as tracing the concept of “people” in its social meaning, in its opposition to power (13), they seriously talked about the nationality of literature as its opposition to power, aristocracy. It was not without reason that one of the far-sighted critics, N. Polevoy, was not satisfied with the “History of the Russian State” , conceived “The History of the Russian People.” There is no need that the plan turned out to be beyond the possibilities - the polemical tendency is obvious. After all, both N. Polevoy and N. Nadezhdin, apparently, seriously believed that it was the novel, like no other genre, that was given the ability to aestheticize the great. ideas, and that Pushkin, like no other poet, was given the opportunity to write a great novel - a novel where Reason would unite disparate pictures of life. They felt the tendency that A.N. later so well expressed. Ostrovsky, saying that “the poet gives the very formulas of thoughts and feelings.” They were waiting for formulas. But there were no formulas - there was “a collection of motley chapters.” They saw that Pushkin was not with them. They considered themselves spokesmen for the interests of the people. It seemed to them that Pushkin was not with the people.
Note that the conversation was simultaneously about the rigor of the genre and the social significance of the literary work. It was believed that both concepts were inextricably linked, and therefore, when a few years later V.G. Belinsky, a thinker much more socially concerned than the “far-sighted critics,” set out to introduce Pushkin’s novel not only into the sphere of public morality, but directly into the sphere of political consciousness of the era; he began precisely by talking about the genre.
The difficulty was that Pushkin’s novel really did not fit the established canons of the genre. And then Belinsky began by revising the canons themselves. If previously the word “novel” required the rhyme “seductive deception” and Abbe Huet in his treatise “On the Origin of the Novel” warned that a novel is necessarily a fictional story, and pointedly contrasted it with genuine stories (14), then Belinsky defined the novel differently: “ A novel and a story... depict life in all its prosaic reality, regardless of whether they are written in verse or prose. And therefore “Eugene Onegin” is a novel in verse, but not a poem...” (15)
There is a riddle here: what is life in all its prosaic reality? How do we recognize it, by what sign?
How can we distinguish it from fictional life? After all, say, an everyday detail or everyday, reduced vocabulary is only a means of creating an artistic image, and not a principle; these means were also known to the classicist literature of the time of Abbot Huet, and later was there life in all prosaic reality, say, in the novels of Goethe and Rousseau? At Stern's? Fielding's? Or was it not there at all? Is this the concept of “reality” that Pushkin has in mind when he speaks of the drama’s fidelity to historical reality? Is this how he understands the word “novel” when he says that “by the word novel (discharge of A.S. Pushkin - L.T.) we mean a historical era developed in a fictional narrative” (XI, 92).
How can we connect these concepts: the novel, on the one hand, and life in all prosaic reality, on the other? By what logic?
V.G. Belinsky gives us this guiding logic, this system-forming principle, here it is: “Evil is hidden not in a person, but in society” (16) - this is said in connection with “Eugene Onegin”, and that says everything. A person is a victim of social injustice, and if, together with everyday details and everyday language, you find this principle in a novel, it means that here is life in all its prosaic reality. (However, it is possible without much everydayism - as in “A Hero of Our Time.”) And the faces are real, that is, characters that are created by reality, and not by the idealizing imagination of the poet. And therefore, they can be studied as a social reality, and not as the reality of a literary text.
“Eugene Onegin”, according to V.G. Belinsky, a novel about how society influences a person. And this process here, in the novel, can also be studied.
The novel is not a school where the teacher and students sit in the same classroom opposite each other. Now the novel is a study of reality, a social, if not sociological, laboratory. The author studies society, studies how a researcher bent over a microscope studies a drop of swamp water. (17)
So the novel is no longer a moral school. At the end of the last part, artistic images do not form a system of ethical concepts. Moreover, in modern society such a system is simple and impossible: the very language in which contemporaries speak about morality is the language of evil. Who is here to teach and what? We must reject language, we must reject society itself. The whole sum of ideas lies in the negation of the sum of any positive ideas. The whole point of the ending is the complete impossibility of any kind of ending.
Reason, which was an external, objective force for classical thinking, is now lost in public life (and was it ever there?). The poet does not possess it to the proper extent. Belinsky, like many other contemporaries, was sure that Pushkin as a poet was great where he simply embodied his contemplations into beautiful living phenomena, but not where he wanted to be a thinker and solve problems. Reason is now something else - a synonym for theorizing thinking, which does not extract its "formulas" from life, but brings them into "life", into a work of art from the outside, from another, perhaps historical reality - say, from the French philosophical tradition of the 18th century. century, and in the “analysis” seeking confirmation of it. By the way, we note that it is precisely the philosophical tradition about which Pushkin himself said that “nothing can be the opposite of poetry” (XI, 271).
According to Belinsky, “Eugene Onegin” is a novel, but a novel of a new type, a novel without end. No vice is punished here and no one is taught a lesson. According to Belinsky, there is no final victory of one idea over another - a victory, which, of course, is determined by the author’s position, the author’s choice. And all this is not there because the author has no choice: “What is this? Where is the novel? What is his thought? And what kind of novel is this without end?.. What happened to Onegin later??? We don’t know, and why should we know this when we know that the powers of this rich nature are left without application, life without meaning, a novel without end?” (18).
In general, such a politicized attitude towards an artistic fact is historically conditioned. In Russia there is only one public institution for the expression of broad public opinion - literature. And the writer cannot help but feel this responsibility. And in this, Polevoy, Nadezhdin, and Belinsky were undoubtedly right in their attitude towards Pushkin. But they could not see that Pushkin’s novel was truly deeply socially oriented. And Belinsky, having written a brilliant philological essay about a Russian woman, using the same lexical material that Pushkin used to create the character of Tatyana, simply ignored the Christian social and moral ideas that were so dear to Pushkin.
Moreover, he passed by one of the possible versions of the interpretation of the ending of the novel: by the version that the novel quite naturally and consistently ends with the scene of the explanation of Onegin and Tatyana - and in this ending, in full accordance with the canons of the novel, all plot contradictions are reconciled, and the moral principle of this reconciliation there is love and self-sacrifice. This version was revealed by F.M. Dostoevsky: “Tatyana... already with one noble instinct felt where and what the truth is, which was expressed in the finale of the poem...” (19).
For the first time, Dostoevsky translated the artistic language of “Eugene Onegin” as closely as possible to the original into the language of journalism and for the first time restored the right of Reason - this time of Folk, Moral Wisdom - to reconcile contradictions: “... humble yourself, proud man... The truth is not outside of you, but in yourself. You will conquer yourself, pacify yourself - and you will become free as never before...” (20).
And here we could put an end to it if Dostoevsky’s analysis ended with the words cited above, but it ends with the word “secret.”
What exactly is a secret?
Is it not precisely that the meaning extracted by Dostoevsky from Eugene Onegin is not yet the highest level of meaning? The moral pathos seems to be clear, but “... poetry is higher than morality...” (XII, 229).
How so? Is it not this mystery of Pushkin, the mystery of Pushkin, that Dostoevsky bequeathed to us to unravel:
“...poetry is higher than morality...”
If this is so, then the mystery of the ending of Eugene Onegin still remains unsolved.
Notes
1 See: Lotman Yu.M. A novel in verse by Pushkin “Eugene Onegin”. Tartu, 1975.
2 See: Bocharov S.G. Poetics of Pushkin. M., 1974.
3 See: Pushkin A.S. Evgeny Onegin. A novel in verse. Entry Art. and comment. A. Tarkhova. M., 1980.
4 See: Viktorovich V.A. Two interpretations of “Eugene Onegin” in Russian criticism of the 19th century // Boldin Readings. Gorky, 1982. P. 81. Same. On the problem of artistic and philosophical unity of “Eugene Onegin” // Boldin Readings. Gorky, 1986. P. 15.
5 Akhmatova A.A. About Pushkin. L., 1977. P. 191.
6 For example, the author of a review of chapters 4 and 5 of Eugene Onegin, published in issue 7 of Son of the Fatherland for 1827, page 244, literally understood the social function of the novel as a “theory of human life.”
7 Ostrovsky A.N. Complete set of works. M., 1978. T. 10. P. 111.
8 Lotman Yu.M. The structure of a literary text. M., 1970. P. 324.
9 Moscow Telegraph. 1830. Part 32. No. 6. P. 241.
10 Bulletin of Europe. 1830. No. 7. P. 183.
11 Galatea. 1839. Part IV. No. 29. P. 192.
12 See: Letters from V.A. Zhukovsky I.A. Turgenev // Russian archive. 1885. P. 275.
13 In the 18th century, in the Russian public consciousness, this meaning of the concept “people” is only outlined in the lexeme “simple people” (see the article “People” in the Dictionary of the Russian Academy. St. Petersburg, 1792. Part 3). It was fully established only in the texts of A.N. Radishcheva (see Lotman Yu.M. Rousseau and Russian culture of the 18th - early 19th centuries // Rousseau J.J. Treatises. M., 1969. pp. 565-567).
14 Yue P.-D. Treatise on the emergence of the novel // Literary manifestos of Western European classicists. M., 1980. P. 412.
15 Belinsky V.G. Complete set of works. M., 1955. T. 7. P. 401.
16 Ibid. P. 466.
17 Around the same time, when V.G. Belinsky was working on articles about Onegin, A.I. Herzen wrote: “The use of a microscope must be introduced into the moral world, it is necessary to examine thread by thread of the web of daily relationships that entangles the strongest characters, the most fiery energies...” And further in the same place: “... every past fact must not be praised, not blamed, but analyze it like a mathematical problem, i.e. try to understand - you can’t explain it in any way” (Herzen A.I. Complete Works. M., 1954. T. 2. P. 77-78). Belinsky noticed these Herzenian thoughts: “...A kind of notes and aphoristic reflections, full of intelligence and originality in view and presentation” - that’s what he called them in a review of the “Petersburg Collection”, where they were published (Belinsky V.G. Ibid. T 9. P. 577).
18 Belinsky V.G. Right there. T. 7. P. 469.
19 Dostoevsky F.M. Complete set of works. L., 1984. T. 26. P. 140.
This peculiar ending “without end,” even more unconventional for the genre of a novel than the ending of “Boris Godunov” was unconventional for a dramatic work, confused not only critics, but even Pushkin’s closest literary friends. Since the “novel in verse” was not brought to the usual, so to speak, “natural” plot boundaries—the hero is “alive and unmarried”—many of the poet’s friends urged him to continue his work (see sketches of Pushkin’s poetic responses dating back to 1835 to these proposals). True, now we know that Pushkin himself began, apparently, immediately after finishing his novel, in the same Boldino autumn of 1830, to continue it: he began to sketch out the famous “tenth chapter”; but was forced to burn what he wrote due to his sharp political unreliability. However, we do not know how firm Pushkin was in his intention to continue the novel, nor how far he advanced the implementation of this intention. However, the most striking example of this kind is the ending of Eugene Onegin:
* She left. Evgeniy stands,
*As if struck by thunder.
* What a storm of sensations
* Now he is immersed in his heart!
* But a sudden ringing sound rang out,
* And Tatyana’s husband showed up
* And here is my hero,
* In a moment that is evil for him,
* Reader, we will now leave,
* For a long time... forever...
As for the incompleteness of the fate of its main character in the romance, as we could just see, this is quite in the spirit of many, many Pushkin endings; At the same time. It was precisely this incompleteness that gave the poet the opportunity to put the final touch, exceptional in its ideological and artistic weight and expressiveness, on that image-type of the “superfluous person” that first appeared in the person of Onegin. Belinsky understood this perfectly, and in this respect he managed to approach Pushkin’s novel not from traditional positions: “What is this? Where is the novel? What is his thought?’ And what kind of novel is this without end?” asked the critic and immediately answered: “We think that there are novels, the idea of which is that there is no end in them, because in reality itself there are events without a denouement, existence without a goal, vague creatures, incomprehensible to no one, even to ourselves..." And further: "What happened to Onegin later? Did his passion resurrect him for a new suffering more consistent with human dignity? Or did she kill all the strength of his soul, and his joyless melancholy turned into dead, cold apathy? - We don’t know, and what use do we need to know this when we know that the powers of this rich nature are left without application, life without meaning, and the romance without end? Knowing this is enough to make you not want to know anything else..."
The fact that Pushkin's novel in its present form is a completely holistic and artistically complete work is most clearly evidenced by its compositional structure. Just as most of Pushkin’s contemporaries did not feel the remarkable compositional organization of Boris Godunov, many of them
And in “Eugene Onegin” they were inclined to see not a holistic artistic organism - “not an organic being whose parts are necessary for each other” (review of the Moscow Telegraph critic about the seventh chapter of “Eugene Onegin”), but an almost random mixture, a mechanical conglomerate scattered pictures from the life of noble society and the lyrical reasoning and thoughts of the poet. In this regard, one of the critics even directly noted that Pushkin’s poetic novel can continue indefinitely and end at any chapter.
In fact, we saw that already by the beginning of Pushkin’s work on “Eugene Onegin,” a “lengthy” “plan of the whole work” had formed in his creative consciousness. And we can say with confidence that throughout the very long period of Pushkin’s work on the novel, this plan, although changing - and sometimes changing quite significantly - in the details of its development, remained unchanged in its main outlines.
In Pushkin’s novel, dedicated to depicting the life of Russian society in its development, very abundant and varied “variegated” material flowed from this developing life itself, which could not have been foreseen in advance by the author. But the poet never passively surrendered to the influx of life impressions, did not float with the flow of the new material brought in, but, like a mature master, freely owned and disposed of it, embraced it with his “creative thought”, subordinated it to both his main artistic concept and that “ plan form” - a thoughtful compositional drawing - in which this plan, again from the very beginning of work on it, was presented to him.
That this was exactly the case is confirmed by the clarity of the architectural design, the harmony of the compositional lines, the proportionality of the parts, the harmonious correspondence of the beginning and end of the work, which, as we already know, constitute the features of Pushkin’s compositions, which, of course, are not present in “Eugene Onegin.” could arise by chance and independently of the creative will of the author, so to speak, by themselves.
The main images of the novel, with all the individual vitality of each of them, are of such a generalized, typified nature that this allows Pushkin to build the plot of his work, which recreates the broadest picture of Pushkin’s modernity, on the relationships between only four persons - two young men and two young girls . The rest, the persons included in the novel as not everyday background, but its - to one degree or another - participants (there are also very few of them: Tatyana's mother and nanny, Zaretsky, the general - Tatyana's husband), have purely episodic significance.
Equally characteristic of the socio-historical reality recreated in Pushkin’s novel is the image of Tatyana. The final formula that determines her life path - to be “faithful” to her marital duty - undoubtedly guided the wives of the Decembrists who followed their husbands to hard labor in Siberia. The image of Olga, ordinary in all respects, is more universal. The inclusion of this image in the novel is undoubtedly dictated not only by the desire for the indicated plot symmetry.
The greatest novel in verse by Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin, “Eugene Onegin,” amazes with its depth and ambiguity. In my opinion, after reading this work, everyone will have in their soul exactly what the reader would like to extract and understand for himself. Therefore, for some, Onegin is a cruel and traitor who destroyed a young and innocent poet. And for some, Evgeny himself will be an unhappy young man who is completely confused in his relationships, aspirations and goals in life. Some will feel sorry for the main character, while others, on the contrary, will be convinced that he got what he deserved.
The final part of this novel is structured in a very unpredictable way. First of all, the wedding of Tatiana and the noble prince. Despite the fact that Tatyana’s feelings for Evgeniy have not faded away, she understands perfectly well that they will never be together, because he, rather cruelly, but also generously, rejected her pure, innocent and passionate love. Therefore, at the insistence of her mother and essentially against her will, the young girl nevertheless agrees to a very successful marriage. She does not love her husband, but she respects him immensely and will never go against his will.
However, fate, quite ironically, after a few years, brings two failed lovers together again - Tatyana and Evgeniy. It is clear that the girl has found peace and a stable family life. And just as soon as everything began to get better for her, the old love of her life appears - Evgeniy.
Outwardly, Tatyana remains cold and reserved with the young man. I have no doubt that this cost her enormous mental and physical strength. But the girl remains restrained to the end and does not demonstrate her affection or even just interest in Onegin. And here such behavior awakens long-forgotten feelings in Evgenia. He begins to realize to himself that despite everything he loves Tatyana and would like to be with her. However, it took him too long to realize this. Onegin writes a passionate letter with a declaration of love to the girl, begging her to leave her husband and be with him.
It is surprising that as soon as Tatyana became cold, indifferent and unavailable, Onegin’s feelings for her awoke. It turns out that the young man was only interested in those girls who could be described as “the forbidden fruit is sweet.”
And here Tatyana shows herself as a faithful and noble wife. She does not even respond to Onegin’s letters, so as not to once again compromise her high position in society. Evgeny Onegin cannot live like this and comes to Tatyana himself. He found her upset and upset while reading his love letter.
The young man throws himself at her feet and begs her to leave everything and everyone and leave with him. Tatyana honestly admits that she still loves Evgeniy, and his proposal is what she has dreamed of all her life, and it could well have come true several years ago. But now this is completely impossible, she is married to another person and is ready to be faithful only to him until the end of her days. At this point, Tatyana leaves and her husband appears. Evgeny Onegin is in complete shock. Perhaps for the first time in his life, a girl refused him. It turns out that Tatyana and Evgeniy seem to have switched places. Previously, Eugene could so easily deny feelings to any beauty. And here Tatyana herself also abandoned him. In my opinion, the ideological meaning is precisely that Onegin realizes and understands how painful he was to his fans who loved him “in their own skin.” All those emotions that he had sown around him were now coming back to them as well.
As you know, the denouement of Pushkin’s novel in verse (or rather, its main plot outline, contained in eight chapters) is built on the principle of an “anti-finale”; it negates all literary expectations determined by the flow of the plot within the genre framework of the novel narrative. The novel ends suddenly, unexpectedly for the reader and even, as it were, for the author himself:
<...>And here is my hero
In a moment that is evil for him,
Reader, we will now leave.
For a long time... forever. Behind him
Quite we are on the same path
Wandered around the world. Congratulations
Each other with the shore. Hooray!
It’s long overdue (isn’t it?)!
According to the logic of the standard novel plot, the heroine’s declaration of love for the hero should have led either to their union or to dramatic actions that would stop the normal course of their lives (death, leaving for a monastery, flight outside the “inhabited world” outlined by the novel space, and etc.) . But in Pushkin’s novel, “nothing” follows Tatyana’s decisive explanation and declaration of love for Onegin (“nothing” from the point of view of the predetermined literary scheme).
The finale of Onegin was created by the famous Boldinskaya in the fall of 1830. Pushkin found himself suddenly locked in Boldino, where he had come to organize his affairs before his marriage, by cholera quarantines. On the eve of another decisive change in his life, he found himself imprisoned in forced solitude, in alarming uncertainty about the fate of his bride, who remained in Moscow, and his friends.
The subtext of the final stanza of “Eugene Onegin” refers to the picture of the circle of friends as the Last Supper, similar to the one depicted in the letter to V.L. Davydov and in one of the fragments of the tenth chapter. An indispensable component of this image is the poet’s reading of his poems, as a “sacred” text that affirms a new communion. In the tenth chapter, “Noels” play this role (“Pushkin read his noels”); in the final stanza of the eighth chapter, this role is played by the “first stanzas” of the novel, which the poet reads to his friends.
This friendly feast, a “celebration of life,” was interrupted; many of its participants (including V.L. Davydov, exiled to Siberia) left without finishing their glass. Their book of life (“novel”) remained unread, just as Pushkin’s novel, the beginning of which was created before their eyes, remained unread for them. In memory of this interrupted reading feast, Pushkin now ends his novel unexpectedly, “suddenly” parting with his hero. Thus, Pushkin’s novel acquires the symbolic role of a “book of life”: its course and sudden break symbolically contained the fate of “those” who witnessed its beginning. This poetic idea gives a touch of “prophetic” meaning to the famous lines:
<...>And the distance of a free romance
Me through a magic crystal
I couldn't discern it clearly yet.
(That is, at that time the meaning of the prophecy/prophecy contained in his “book of fate” was still “unclear” to the poet).
There was a certain compositional logic in the fact that Pushkin refused to include his “chronicle”, conceived as the Tenth Chapter, in the novel. The heroes of the “chronicle” are invisibly present in the conclusion of “Eugene Onegin” - they are present in the symbolic image of its “interrupted” ending and in the words of the author’s farewell to his work.
“Eugene Onegin” ended at a turning point for Pushkin, on the eve of a sharp change in his life. At this moment, he casts a retrospective glance at an entire era of his life, the chronological framework of which was approximately outlined by the time he worked on the novel. The poet is, as it were, the last to leave the symbolic feast, parting, following his fellow participants at the communion feast, with the “celebration of life” - the era of the 1820s.