Puskin’s Evgeny Onegin

It is difficult to find a work that has had a greater impact on Russian literature than A. Pushkin’s novel in verse Evgeny Onegin. Hundreds if not thousands of works in various languages have been devoted to the novel. Nevertheless, many puzzles remain. How should we understand Pushkin’s words: “I am writing not a novel, but a novel in verse – a diabolical difference”? How is the “Onegin stanza” constructed, why is it necessary? What literary works, Russian and foreign, must be known in order to read Pushkin’s text? Where in the novel is the boundary between tragedy and parody? What in the novel could Pushkin’s contemporaries understand at once, which for us requires clarification and detailed commentary? Why does Tchaikovsky’s famous opera not so much help, but hinder our understanding of Pushkin’s original work? What have writers such as Vissarion Belinsky, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, the Russian Formalists, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Yuri Lotman seen and not seen in Evgeny Onegin, and why? We will try to answer these and many other questions through a “slow reading” of Pushkin’s novel in verse and other writings by Pushkin, his contemporaries, and his later critics.