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.
Symbols & Motifs
The Seasons
Throughout Eugene Onegin, the narrator references the changing of the seasons. Spring turns into summer, fall turns into winter, and the cycle keeps going even amid the tragedies and revelations that the characters encounter. Of the four seasons, the most frequently referenced are winter and spring. For the narrator, the Russian winter—and particularly the winter in the rural areas—symbolizes pain and struggle. There is an inherent bleakness and stillness to the snow-covered scenery that hinders progress, whether in terms of a blocked road or a stunted character development. Facing a crossroads in her future, for example, Tatyana explores the wintry countryside. Her youthful view of love is as desolate as the trees around her. She does not know what she believes any longer and is struggling to grow.
However, winter cannot last forever. As Tatyana reflects on Onegin’s words to her and the future that lies ahead, she accepts that she must move on. Winter becomes spring, and the snows begin to melt away, along with Tatyana’s fear and reluctance. Tatyana accepts that she must look toward a future that is not defined by her naive views of love or romance. The melting of the snow and the arrival of spring open up new opportunities: She travels with her mother to Moscow, where she meets and then marries an older man. With each cycle of death (winter) and rebirth (spring), however, she loses another small part of her innocence and naivety. She hardens and becomes more cynical as the years pass, eventually internalizing everything that Onegin told her. In the text, the narrator uses spring as a symbol of rebirth, but it is not necessarily positive. Though Tatyana is born anew, her view of the world has transformed from a place of innocence to that of cynicism.
In a broad sense, the cycle of the seasons represents the passage of time. At the beginning of every chapter, the narrator provides an update and an indication of the time of the year in which the following events take place. These allusions to the seasons are inevitable, hurtling forward into the future like Onegin’s sleigh along the roads of Saint Petersburg. No matter what happens in the lives of the characters, whether they die in duels or have their romantic advances rejected, time moves relentlessly forward. The change of the seasons forces the characters to bow to the same practicality with which they must face everything else. Onegin can criticize society, Lensky can dream of a better future, and Tatyana can crave a supernatural explanation for the inexplicable. None of them, no matter how cynical, naive, or optimistic they might be, can do anything to stop the passage of time. The characters must accept that they are beholden to forces greater and more powerful than themselves.
Russian Infrastructure
In the opening chapter of Eugene Onegin, the narrator assures his audience that he does not fear the tsar’s censors. He is adamant that he will not refrain from criticizing the Russian state out of fear that his work might be withheld or altered. In addition to being patently untrue (Pushkin burned the most satirical passages of his poem), Eugene Onegin is only broadly satirical in its opening chapters. During these passages, the narrator limits his criticisms of Russia to the vapidity of the elite society and the unsatisfying nature of the nevertheless lavish social events. The satire of the society is subtle, until the narrator begins to criticize the infrastructure of the Russian state. He blames the terrible, crumbling roads of Russia for many injuries and deaths. He uses this crumbling infrastructure as a broad symbol of Russian cultural decline, suggesting that the empire itself is in as sorry a state as its network of potholed roads. The narrator’s move into criticism of the Russian state only occurs deep into the novel but, once it begins, it is as explicit and as unrestrained as the narrator promised.
The Russian road network is also used for travel. The opening chapter contains the most detailed descriptions of travel along these roads as Onegin hurtles from one party to another on the back of his sleigh. For Onegin, these moments of travel are a release. He hates the parties and the people he meets at parties, therefore the roads provide Onegin with both freedom and restriction. These moments of freedom between parties give him time for self-reflection that he does not get anywhere else. Though the inherent symbolism of a road suggests that he could escape and travel beyond the intended destination, Onegin’s journeys are defined by their end. He embarks on the Russian road network for freedom but knows that these moments are fleeting.
The infrastructure of Russia is also used in a broader symbolic fashion. After writing to Onegin to tell him about her love, Tatyana finds herself at an impasse. Onegin’s dramatic rejection of her romantic advances, coupled with the death of Lensky at Onegin’s hand, leaves her with an unsure future. She is caught between the naivety of her youth and the cynicism of a man like Onegin. To exaggerate the emotional impasse of this point in her life, the narrator describes the walks Tatyana takes along the long, crumbling roads around her family’s estate. Tatyana is trying to look ahead and decide what kind of person she wants to be. However, she cannot see the end of the road, just as she cannot see her eventual destination in life. Ultimately, she puts aside her naivety and decides to follow her parents’ advice. She agrees to a practical marriage to a good but not great man. Like the crumbling roads that nonetheless get her to her destination, she accepts the flaws in the society and agrees to play by the rules. She accepts her role in the declining society because she fears anything else would be simply naive.
Literature
During the narrator’s chapter openings, the narrator compares Onegin to prose and Lensky to poetry. The symbolic difference between the men’s choice in texts also speaks to their difference in character. The hardened, cynical Onegin prefers economic textbooks and Byron’s stories of powerful heroes. The whimsical, optimistic Lensky is a romantic who indulges himself with German poetry as well as writing his own similar poems. The two friends have different outlooks on life, but they are working toward the same goal. They are both intelligent, literary men, just as both poetry and prose are literary modes that work toward an exploration of the human condition. The characterization of the two men by the narrator is deliberate, finding a way to express their opposition and their unity through the symbol of literature.
Literary tastes are also used as a symbolic shorthand for intelligence. In the novel, very few characters read or discuss literature. Those who do—Onegin, Lensky, and Tatyana—are presented as more intelligent than the majority of the disinterested, alienated ranks of the Russian elite. Their interest in literature distinguishes them from everyone else and allows the narrator to forge an empathetic bond between the audience and the characters. The audience is presented with a world in which reading a poem, a novel, or any other book is a sign of intelligence. Already reading the narrator’s poem, the audience is therefore included among these symbolically intelligent characters.
Literature is also a key factor in the construction of identity. Once Onegin leaves the small community in the aftermath of the duel, Tatyana visits his house. There, she explores his library and reads through his private collection of books. For the first time, she glimpses beyond the mask Onegin presents to the world every day. Rather than the constructed persona that she and everyone else knows, she realizes that he is a far more vulnerable person. In the margins of Onegin’s novels are the blueprints of his constructed identity. He has assembled a version of himself from the scattered ideas that he has found in literature. In this sense, the version of Onegin that she knows is a literary construct. He is Russia, glimpsed through the refracted ideas of foreign literature. Because of this, Tatyana is the first person to realize Onegin’s true cynicism. He does not believe that he needs to present an authentic version of himself to the world. Instead, he is a compendium of ironic footnotes and observations, thrust into the world to entertain his true self at the expense of everyone else. Literature, to Onegin, is a symbolic distraction, a way to give meaning to a meaningless life, but one that—like so much else—fails to bring him satisfaction.
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By Alexander Pushkin
