Who is Onegin

(Onegin bench in the Pushkin Manor Preserve Museum)

Gao Lin/Wen

Yepgheny Onegin (hereinafter referred to as "Onegin") used to be a book in Russia that would be used by young girls for divination. When they are distracted by something, they will pick up "Onegin", turn one of the pages casually, and then most of them will find their own answer. This fact can explain two things, the first is that the russian girl feels that the auspicious things are mostly written in "Onegin", such as the ball, such as the banquet, such as the pale and melancholy Petersburg wanderer; the second is that in the past when the publishing industry was not developed, every girl who can be upset about this kind of thing will have a copy of "Onegin" at her hand.

Such a well-known "Onegin", even from the perspective of twenty-first century readers, can still find a lot of shining points. For example, Pushkin's description of revelry and banquets, such as Pushkin's analysis of the inner activities of a bored person, and then through the sarcasm of Pushkin, a wise man, who is a person of various provinces, and the beautiful pastoral scenery and the simple Dagjana.

But why, now, when we talk about such an almost ubiquitous book, we talk about specific details, but rarely discuss it from the perspective of the whole story? In fact, the reason is very simple, that is, the plot of "Onegin" as a novel is indeed a bit too simple. Onegin is similar in many places to Byron's Don Juan, but it's fair to say that Don Juan's story is much richer than Onegin's.

The whole plot of "Onegin" is that a stray son of Petersburg comes to the manor of the province in order to inherit the property, refuses to fall in love with his girl Dagiana, but because of boredom to seduce the fiancée of a good friend, Dagiana's sister. As a result, a duel ensued, and he killed his only friend, Lenski, and had to run away to avoid trouble. Many years later, Onegin returned to Petersburg and found that the girl he had rejected had become a noble lady of high society, and the story should have been turned around here, but Pushkin put aside his pen and let everything stop abruptly. Pushkin certainly had a reason for doing this, but it had two consequences. The personal image of the first Onegin has since become irretrievable. In Tchaikovsky's opera version, Onegin is basically an unquestioned villain. And even the nineteenth-century critics could only excuse Onegin from his time, his situation, his despair.

From this point of view, Onegin became the first literary genealogy in Russian literature that began thereafter. Onegin was the first in a series of "superfluous men" between Bicholin and Oblomov. Although Onegin's actions can only be understood and sympathized with if they rise to the level of the times and society. But Pushkin's simple story has something very interesting to think about. For example, the simplest question is "Why did Onegin, a winner in life, go to the countryside to inherit the property, sit at someone else's house and drink a glass of juice, and then be favored by his sister Dagiana?" The film versions of Onegin from earlier years were played by Ralph Fiennes, and this question can certainly be explained by Voldemort's face. But the appearance can certainly make people impulsive, after all, Dagiana's sister at the dance can't hold on to Onegin. But Dagiana's love for Onegin was a little too strong, and too enduring. This makes people want to find some reasons outside of the appearance. And once we're going to find a little deeper reason, that leads us to a more interesting question—that's Onegin's dead uncle.

Onegin's uncle appears only once in the entire book, and Onegin hears in Petersburg that his uncle is dying, and then, with a strong dislike for serving the sick and an infinite yearning for inheritance, he reluctantly embarks on a journey to the heart of Asia. When he arrived, the uncle was already in a coffin. The new old man looked at it with disgust and then ordered the coffin to be nailed and sent away, which is the only scene in the book by Onegin's uncle.

But in fact, the influence of her uncle in this story is not so simple, how did Dageana first meet Onegin? She went to Uncle Onegin's manor library to look for books, and only then did she meet the new owner of the manor. How did she explain why she was here? She said the former owner of the manor allowed her to borrow books from the manor's library. And the book Dagiana borrowed from the old Onegin's library must not be a tacky book. Otherwise, with Onegin's sarcastic character, he would have said a few words about it, but the prodigal son of St. Petersburg didn't say anything, and he even had a little curiosity about Dagiana. This shows that Dagiana is reading a book that interests Onegin. Onegin's idea was "The daughter of a small country landowner actually looks at this?" But this was not in Onegin's style, so he simply did not say anything, and ordered the people to continue to allow Dagiana to read books in the library that had already belonged to him. What does this have to do with Onegin's uncle?

Dagiana was indeed the daughter of a small country landowner, and his parents were impatient in Onegin's eyes. This was evident from the time he went to Dageana's house for juice, so Dagjana's interest in books was clearly not from her parents. So from the time Onegin traveled around the various landlords in the manor county, who could influence Dageana's literary interests? Apparently none, because Onegin felt that the landlords of the county were fools. So who played this role? Only the one who is not present! It is the person who was nailed into the coffin and moved away as soon as he appeared on the scene - Onegin's uncle!

From this detail, it can be seen that the old Onegin at least had literary taste. When he lived on his estate, he would also buy many books read by the enlightened nobles and influence the girls of the neighbors, which showed that he was probably a person who was no different from Onegin. Onegin's feelings about his neighbors are his feelings about his neighbors, and in this sense, "Onegin" is actually a "Father and Son", but the fathers did not officially appear.

If you want to look at this father who has not officially appeared, another question is very important: what era is this old guy? This requires first figuring out what era Onegin himself was. - And this is precisely what Pushkin did not give a positive account of. "Onegin" was written around 1825, and many details also reflect that its story took place around 1825, such as Onegin's love of using British cosmetics, using British small listening, and liking fashionable light carriages, etc., which shows that this should be a matter of the Restoration period. But I don't think this alone can be assumed that Onegin himself lived before 1825, for the simple reason that there was a Decembrist uprising in 1825. Pushkin could not have definitively written about the life of an enlightened Petersburg high-society aristocrat before 1825. The reason is also very simple, with Onegin's person, it is not normal not to participate in the secret committee, and it is even more abnormal that he does not even have the shadow of the secret committee in his life.

And from the now well-known definition of "superfluous people"—"people who feel materially attached to reality and don't know how to solve it"—despair of reality is the root of their behavior. In this sense, Onegin is a complete superfluous person. The so-called "superfluous" refers to those who, according to Dubrov's explanation, feel helpless about reality but do not know how to solve it. But if Onegin had been an enlightened aristocrat before 1825, how could he have such superfluous despair? At that time, the Decembrists' Southern Committee advocated a republic, and the Northern Committee advocated constitutionalism. What can they seem helpless about? Their direction is clear, their banner is clear, and they have the most missing things for the remaining people, that is, confidence and hope, sincere belief that "Russia will wake up from its sleep." If Onegin was really Pushkin's contemporary, he would not be like Onegin. His interest at the time should have been to participate in conspiracies and contact officers. Even if he failed in 1825 and was driven back to the countryside, he showed an angry heroism rather than one's one-sided boredom.

In other words, it was precisely because Pushkin wanted to avoid censorship and to avoid being burned by writing about himself in a straight line. So he describes himself living in a world without secret committees and without uprisings. And such a world existed in Russia for only two years, one at the end of the eighteenth century, the era of the fathers of the Decembrists, or the 1830s and 1840s, the children of the Decembrists.

That is to say, Pushkin himself, a contemporary of the Decembrists, when he wanted to write about himself living in a society without Decembrists, he either portrayed Onegin as his father, who had not yet had the Decembrists at that time, or wrote him as his own son, because in 1825 they were too young to have the opportunity to run to the square to die. And Onegin would obviously not be a late-18th-century man, so he could only be a descendant of Pushkin, a man who lived in an era when the Decembrists had been suppressed.

The Decembrists' Uprising took place in the course of Pushkin's writing of Onegin, who described Onegin in the image of the nobility with whom he was familiar. He avoided specific times and dates, but did not hide his own despair at the failure of the Decembrists' uprising. Pushkin and Lermontov, one of the decembrists' contemporaries, the other the children of the Decembrists. Pushkin was a generation of confident people who believed that Russia could be liberated through revolution. Lermontov was a poet after the defeat of the Decembrists. He felt helpless and confused about reality, he was overwhelmed and bored. Pushkin did not dare to express his anger and disappointment head-on, so he chose despair and wandering, which is the best portrayal of the spirit of the next generation.

That is to say, Onegin is not actually Pushkin himself, although his lifestyle and taste are from pushkin's era, but his mental state is not, and Onegin's mental state is the same as Thatcherin's Bi Qiaolin in "Contemporary Heroes". When Pushkin tried to avoid suspicion, he accidentally wrote Onegin as the poster child for the next generation.

Then it is self-evident what age Onegin's uncle was. He was Pushkin's contemporary, and could even be seen as a clone of Pushkin himself. He lives in the dreary countryside and feels that the landlords around him are fools, he sees the girlfriend of the neighbor, don't forget that the neighbor has two girls, Dagiana and Olga, but he thinks olga is also a fool, so he only prefers Dagiana. He allowed Dagiana to go to his library to read them, and he influenced the girl who stood out in his eyes, and Dagiana herself was probably not uninterested in old Onegin.

This explains why when a bouncing version of the old Onegin appears in front of her—not forgetting that Onegin inherited his uncle's possessions, as open-minded, as literary as he was, as suffocating as the air around him—Dageana falls in love with Onegin.

Dagiana was interested in the elder Onegin, but she was still young, so she didn't know what she was doing. But would the old Onegin not know? What kind of person was the old Onegin? Think about it, the literary counterpart of Turgenev and Lermontov's generation is Uncle Pavel in "Father and Son". They did not catch up with the revolution and felt desperate and wandering, intelligent but inactive. Who were their parents? Of course, it was Pushkin's generation that participated in the conspiracy, and even the generation that participated in the uprising of 1825. At a young age, their generation fought in the Great Patriotic War of 1812, all the way to Paris, and then wanted to liberate their homeland.

This generation is the little Petit in "War and Peace" in literature. If Petty the Younger had survived the battlefield, he would have been the most typical father of the first generation of superfluous people, and if he had lived to participate in the Decembrists' revolt in 1825, and then be exiled back to his estate, he might have come to the end of his life as Onegin's uncle.

Such a person who had been a hero in the anti-Napoleonic Wars, who had been bombarded by a grenade in Regent's Square, and who was in love between every fight, would not understand what Dageana was thinking? So why did he take the secret to the grave? Because he was tired, he was old. He's been through so much that he's now coming to the end of his life. His life had become an irreparable tragedy since 1825, and he had left the future to the next generation.

In this sense, Onegin is a veritable first-generation superfluous. Not only is Onegin the first in this literary chain, but the image of Onegin has also been inadvertently molded by Pushkin into a typical superfluous person. Because Pushkin's own image is shared by his uncle in the coffin and Onegin, who can still duel and fall in love. Pushkin separated his future self from his life as he went on. He imagined another self in literature, but did not shy away from his own fate, the fate of his friends was actually predestined. In this sense, Onegin is also a book that carries on from top to bottom. Pushkin and Marlinsky are carried away at the opening, and a new generation from the dull years takes to the stage.