Eugene Onegin

In Our Time

BBC

History

4.6 • 9.2K Ratings

🗓️ 22 June 2017

⏱️ 49 minutes

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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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0:00.0	This is the BBC.
0:30.0	I'm going to put a lensky on Yegans friend.
0:32.0	And Yegans kills lensky in a duel.
0:34.0	I'm in a Yegans eventually falls in love with Tatiana.
0:36.0	It's too late.
0:38.0	She has married someone else.
0:40.0	Pushkin wrote this verse novel over almost eight years,
0:42.0	while exiled, mostly while exiled within the Russian Empire.
0:46.0	Serializing it and then publishing it whole in St. Petersburg in 1833.
0:50.0	Just four years before he too was killed in a duel one morning in 1837.
0:54.0	His reputation grew under the tsars and reached the stratosphere in Soviet Russia.
0:58.0	Where he became the national poet.
1:00.0	With me to discuss Pushkin's Eugene and Yegans,
1:02.0	Andrew Kahn, professor of Russian literature at the University of Oxford
1:04.0	and fellow St. Edmund Hall.
1:06.0	Emily Finer, lecturer in Russian and comparative literature at the University of St. Andrews.
1:10.0	And Simon Dixon, the subordinate pairs professor of Russian history at University College London.
1:16.0	Simon Dixon, can you give us some context about the Russian world
1:20.0	into which Pushkin was born?
1:22.0	Well, yes.
1:24.0	The big question for Russia in Pushkin's lifetime was how could an autocratic monarchy cope with the challenge posed by the French Revolution?
1:34.0	In other words, how does Tsars, who in theory have no restriction on their power,
	...

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