45 pages • 1 hour read
Alexander PushkinEugene Onegin
Fiction | Novel/Book in Verse | Adult | Published in 1832A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Character Analysis
Eugene Onegin
In his introduction, the narrator insists that Onegin is a charming, charismatic man who is praised by his peers in the Russian elite. At the same time, however, the narrator reveals that Onegin is eager for his uncle to die because he is simply bored of caring for the dying man. Onegin loathes the people and the parties of the Russian high society, meaning that the same people who praise him do so under the pretense that he is their friend. Instead, Onegin has adopted a cynical view of the world and made it his own. Though he hides this point of view from most people, he absolutely dislikes the society in which he lives. He considers the people around him to be hollow creatures of comfort who have nothing interesting or substantial to say. When Onegin moves to the rural community, he hopes that the change of scenery will allow him to meet new, more interesting people. This is not the case. He quickly becomes disillusioned with them, and his cynical view of Russian society is ratified.
Onegin’s cynical view of the world highlights the difference between the private and public versions of himself that he presents to others. In reality, Onegin is a cynical man who hides his vulnerability and his emotions from the world. In Saint Petersburg, he creates an identity for himself that is a mirror of the society he loathes. He plays the part of a wild, debauched, and charming man as a parody of the society itself. That he is praised for being such a person only validates his belief that the society is worthless. In the rural areas, he constructs a new identity. As Tatyana discovers, he builds a personality out of literary figures. He assembles traits, qualities, and quirks from the novels he reads, as evidenced by all the notes in the margins. These competing and different identities make Tatyana feel as though she does not know the true Onegin. Even though she believed that she loved him, she now sees him as a phantom or an illusion. This realization gets to the heart of Onegin as a character. His alienation is so total that he cannot allow anyone who is a member of the society he hates to truly understand him. He fears emotional contact from the outside world because it might alter or challenge his longstanding views. Due to fear, he protects himself by creating a false identity within a world that he does not like.
Onegin eventually becomes the tragic literary figure he once tried to parody. After reluctantly killing his friend, he returns from a self-imposed exile and discovers that Tatyana has matured into a beautiful and captivating woman. However, the lessons he taught her during his explosive speech have been internalized. She has adopted his cynical, defeated view of the world and, as a result, she does not believe that Onegin’s love for her is worth leaving her husband. She accepts that she must adhere to the etiquette and expectations of the society that Onegin loathes because she does not want to be the naive, lovestruck little girl who once declared her love for Onegin, only to be dramatically turned away. In declaring his love for Tatyana, Onegin revealed his true self for a moment. When his mask fell away, however, Tatyana rejected him. After her rejection, her husband walks into the room and Onegin must immediately return to his constructed persona. He is doomed to hide behind his mask forever.
Tatyana Larin
Tatyana Larin represents the central tension in Eugene Onegin. She is caught in a tug-of-war between naivety and cynicism, between social expectation and romanticism that leads her along a tragic path. She is only a young girl at the beginning of the story, but she falls in love with the older, more cynical Onegin after just one meeting. Tatyana’s first experience of love is outlandish and whimsical. She becomes utterly obsessed with the man she hardly knows, to the point where she writes a love letter to him and then immediately flees to the garden when he comes to visit the house. She is right to be nervous, as Onegin explodes at her with a loud, forceful condemnation of love and naivety. He accuses her of being hopelessly invested in an idea of love that cannot and does not truly exist. The speech is devastating for the young girl. The man she thought she loved has not only dismissed the validity of her emotions but the very idea of love itself. She eventually finds herself disillusioned with the idea of love. She adopts Onegin’s cynical view of the world and leaves her naive youth behind. Though she struggles to adjust at first, she accepts her mother’s advice that she marry for practical rather than romantic reasons. Years later, she matures into a version of Onegin. The lessons have become fully internalized and she now lives in a society that she dislikes but in which she is nevertheless forced to play by the rules. Tatyana’s progression through the story shows the corrosive influence of Onegin’s beliefs by dismantling an innocent young girl and rebuilding her into a practical but alienated woman.
While Tatyana embodies many of the novel’s tensions, she is also unique in her reverence for the most mystical side of life. Whereas her peers are terrified of the idea of fortune telling or forecasting, Tatyana embraces the supernatural. Though she ultimately decides against following through on her attempt at fortune telling, she goes further than anyone else. She even seeks out books on dream interpretation after one particularly vivid nightmare. Unlike Onegin or Lensky, Tatyana’s search for knowledge ascends into more mystical planes, suggesting that she is not limited to scientific or traditional explanations. This willingness to entertain new ideas is markedly different from the cynical Onegin, who might mock her for her attempts to divine the future or read into her dreams as spiritual visions. As an older woman, however, Tatyana leaves behind this interest in the supernatural. Her interest is just another part of her that is destroyed by Onegin’s speech. She leaves behind so much of herself that she is almost unrecognizable as an adult.
Despite the profound change that Onegin’s speech has on Tatyana, she does not bear him any ill will. Though he has broken down her innocence and her naivety, robbing her of a romantic idea of love and forcing her along a more practical, unemotional path, she accepts that this was an important moment in her development. When Onegin falls in love with her, he writes her a letter and then comes to her. She has the chance to do to Onegin exactly what he did to her, many years ago. However, Tatyana chooses not to exact revenge on Onegin. Instead, she mirrors the most tragic elements of his life. Just as Onegin was resigned to taking part in the duel with his friend, she is resigned to her marriage. She cannot and will not break with social etiquette and leave her husband, even if she still loved Onegin. She turns him down not out of spite but out of resignation, fully becoming the person he forced her to become.
Vladimir Lensky
Vladimir Lensky functions as a foil to Onegin yet is also as a vital counterpart. If Onegin is presented as the cynical critic of the society, then Lensky explores a similar criticism from the point of view of the optimist. Lensky is a romantic and a poet. He is invested in the idea of the world as a beautiful place. Whereas Onegin sees the flaws in society, the sheer romanticism of Lensky’s worldview means that he insists on finding the beauty. Both men are fundamentalists but respect one another’s capacity for insight. Onegin might believe that Lensky’s pursuit of beauty is naive, but he values Lensky’s sincerity and intellectualism.
Part of Onegin’s respect for Lensky derives from their shared criticism of the society they inhabit. Like Onegin, Lensky does not like the social etiquette that governs so many interactions in Russia. He believes that this system of manners and expectations is destructive and performative, providing nothing of value with regard to his pursuit of beauty. However, Lensky, the critic of society, is still bound by these same rules. When Onegin insults Lensky by dancing with Olga at a party, Lensky turns to this same system of social etiquette for a means of expressing his desire for revenge and violence via a duel—a formalized version of violence that is permitted by the same system of manners that Lensky claims to loathe. Given the strength of his feeling, however, he goes against his prior criticism and embraces the social etiquette. The romantic poet who pursued love betrays himself by embracing negative emotion and embracing the social rules he once rejected. Lensky’s decision to challenge Onegin to a duel is not just tragic and fateful, but it is a betrayal of the values that once defined him.
Before the duel, Lensky writes a long poem in which he asks Olga to visit his grave after his possible death. In this respect, he is already framing himself as a tragic literary figure who would rather imagine a poetic demise than a gallant victory. Lensky gets what he wants. He loses the duel and is buried near the mill. Olga and Tatyana visit his grave, just as he asked. His poem becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, in which he turned himself into the tragic subject of his own story. Whereas Onegin’s fate is to occupy the society he loathes in a purgatorial whirlwind of guilt and shame, Lensky at least finds some kind of peace in death. He becomes the poetic, romantic figure who is brought down by his own tragic flaws.
Related Titles
By Alexander Pushkin
