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.
Literary Devices
Juxtaposition
In a novel filled with contrasts, the introduction of Eugene Onegin reveals a key character trait using juxtaposition—a technique in which two contrasting images or ideas are placed in close vicinity of one another to emphasize their differences. During the opening verses of Eugene Onegin, the narrator creates a clear juxtaposition between the public and the private personas of the titular protagonist. The story begins with Onegin complaining about his uncle’s refusal to die. This selfish complaint made in private contrasts with the public image of Onegin as charming and charismatic. Onegin’s public persona is that of a popular man who flits between social events out of a sheer lust for life, while his private persona states that he is bored of these parties and bored of the social scene. The juxtaposition between Onegin’s public and private personas creates the sense of a man out of place. He is not a simple, honest character but someone who contains hidden—and not necessarily refined—multitudes. As such, juxtaposition demonstrates that Onegin’s role in the novel is to explore the society that he seemingly hates, as a form of satire.
The satirical use of juxtaposition occurs again after Onegin leaves Saint Petersburg. After the long-awaited death of his uncle, Onegin inherits a country estate and has an opportunity to escape from the crushing cycle of social events he claims to hate. At first, he enjoys the countryside. The peaceful open space of the rural areas is juxtaposed against the hectic chaos of the city and his loathed social schedule. During this initial period, Onegin is close to being content. The contrast between rural and urban life gives him a chance to relax and indulge his escapist tendencies. Very quickly, however, the juxtaposition begins to evaporate. The people Onegin meets in the countryside are extensions of their urban counterparts: He believes that the intellectually incurious country folk are no different and no better than the intellectually incurious people in the city. In this respect, the initial juxtaposition followed by the descent into wretched familiarity satirizes the society itself. Onegin is haunted by dull people wherever he goes, meaning that he will struggle to find happiness in the hollow world that he inhabits.
Repetition
A tragic element of the life of Eugene Onegin is that he is caught in cycles that he is doomed to repeat, which make him miserable. Words, lines, scenes, emotions, actions, and events are repeated over the course of the story. An example of these cycles of repetition is the opening of the story, in which Onegin hurtles across the city of Saint Petersburg, attending a cycle of social events that he claims to dislike. He goes to the same parties, where he sees the same people, and talks about the same topics. This repetition takes a great toll on Onegin’s state of mind, leaving him disillusioned with his life and the country in which he lives. When Onegin moves to the countryside, he hopes to break the cycle. However, he finds a similar social scene extant in the rural areas. When Lensky insists that he attend Tatyana’s name day party, Onegin is once again swept up in the social scene that he loathes. He cannot escape the repetition of parties and inane chatter, no matter what he does. After killing Lensky and sending himself on a self-imposed exile, Onegin embraces and subjects himself to the repetition to punish himself for killing his friend.
On a literary level, the poem is built around repetition. The Onegin stanza is a poetic form made up of 14 lines with a rhyming pattern and a defined meter. The novel in verse is made up of nearly 400 verses built from the Onegin stanza, across eight chapters. Just as Onegin the character is caught in a cycle from which he cannot escape, the entire narrative is caught inside a poetic form that constantly reminds the reader of the inevitability of the cycle perpetuating itself. In this respect, Eugene Onegin uses form and the Onegin stanza specifically to create a sense of inescapability and fate. The repetition of the form illustrates the cyclical nature of time and acts as a signal of foreboding that the tragedies of the past will continue to manifest as the tragedies of the future.
One of the most prominent uses of repetition in Eugene Onegin is how the dynamic between Onegin and Tatyana is repeated. In the first instance, the young and naive Tatyana falls in love with the distant and cynical Onegin. She writes him a letter declaring her love and then pines for him, to the point where she nearly makes herself sick. When he rejects Tatyana and dismisses her love as naivety that can never be realized, she is changed forever by the experience. She accepts that she might have to marry a man she does not love and becomes more ideologically attuned to Onegin’s cynical ways. After Onegin’s return from abroad, he is a changed man. At the same time, Tatyana has matured into a beautiful but distant figure. Onegin falls in love with her, and the dynamic from earlier in the novel is repeated. Almost action for action, Onegin repeats Tatyana’s romantic endeavors. He falls in love with her from afar and then writes her a letter in which he declares his love. Her lack of a response threatens to make him ill, until he eventually confronts her, and she rejects him. The repetition of the doomed love story between Onegin and Tatyana is a cycle in which both characters are trapped. Their misfortune is to never fall in love at the right moment, having therefore doomed themselves to live without one another. The repetition of their romantic pursuits hints at their similarities and suggests that they might be perfect for one another. The repetition of the same tragic ending to both pursuits demonstrates the fickleness of fate.
Byronic Hero
A Byronic hero is a character archetype that can be found in many romantic poems, as well as other literary genres. The name derives from the poet Lord Byron, whose life and work coalesced into a public conception of a swashbuckling, charming, cynical, and proud man. This type of character—found in poems such as Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and Don Juan—became known as the Byronic hero. In Eugene Onegin, the protagonist has been described by critics as a Byronic hero. His brooding and solitary nature echoes many of the traits of Byron’s protagonists, as does his rejection of tradition and social etiquette. For example, he does not shy away from his duties, and he accepts Lensky’s challenge to a duel, even though he knows that there is a good chance that he will kill his friend.
When describing Onegin as a Byronic hero, however, there is a degree of self-awareness that colors any such conversation. As Tatyana discovers when she peruses Onegin’s library, Onegin is aware of the role of literary archetypes and traits. Onegin is an admirer of Byron, the narrator references the poems of Byron numerous times, and Tatyana finds Byron’s poems in Onegin’s library. Throughout the novel, Onegin carefully crafts different public and private personas. His private, vulnerable persona hides behind a public mask that, as Tatyana realizes, is assembled from Onegin’s trove of literature. To describe Onegin’s public persona as Byronic is to acknowledge that Onegin has read Byron and deliberately mimicked the behavior of Byron’s protagonists, hoping that the rest of the world will regard him as a Byronic hero. There is a cynicism to his Byronic tendencies, as they are not necessarily his sincere character traits. Rather, Onegin is self-aware. He is consciously performing the role of the Byronic hero to hide his true self from the world.
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By Alexander Pushkin
