Eugene Onegin
In Our Time: Culture
BBC
4.5 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 22 June 2017
⏱️ 50 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Alexander Pushkin's verse novel, the story of Eugene Onegin, widely regarded as his masterpiece. Pushkin (pictured above) began this in 1823 and worked on it over the next ten years, while moving around Russia, developing the central character of a figure all too typical of his age, the so-called superfluous man. Onegin is cynical, disillusioned and detached, his best friend Lensky is a romantic poet and Tatyana, whose love for Onegin is not returned until too late, is described as a poetic ideal of a Russian woman, and they are shown in the context of the Russian landscape and society that has shaped them. Onegin draws all three into tragic situations which, if he had been willing and able to act, he could have prevented, and so becomes the one responsible for the misery of himself and others as well as the death of his friend.
With
Andrew Kahn Professor of Russian Literature at the University of Oxford and Fellow of St Edmund Hall
Emily Finer Lecturer in Russian and Comparative Literature at the University of St Andrews
and
Simon Dixon The Sir Bernard Pares Professor of Russian History at University College London
Producer: Simon Tillotson.
Transcript
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| 0:47.0 | Hello Alexander Pushkin born in 1799 is seen as the Shakespeare |
| 0:52.4 | of Russian literature and his novel in verse |
| 0:54.5 | usually on Yeagin as his masterpiece. It's the story of on Yeagin a disillusioned |
| 0:59.2 | fop of Tatiana who loves him but is not loved in return and the young poet |
| 1:03.6 | Lensky on Yegan's friend and Yegan kills Lenzky in a jewel and when and |
| 1:07.8 | Yegan eventually falls in love with Tatiana it's too late she has married |
| 1:11.5 | someone else Pushkin wrote this verse novel over almost eight years, |
| 1:15.8 | while exiled, mostly while exiled within the Russian Empire, |
| 1:19.2 | serializing it and then publishing it whole in St Petersburg in 1833 just four years before he too was killed in a |
| 1:26.2 | duel one morning in 1837. His reputation grew under the Tsars and reached a stratosphere |
... |
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