The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

To duel and gamble meant to assert one’s individual initiative and thus to act, and feel, more free – even though, paradoxically, the outcome was utterly out of one’s control. Staking everything on a single bullet (or card) opened a person to arbitrariness and fate. Pushkin participated passionately in both duels of honor and games of chance. He favored high-stakes games and tended to lose heavily (his known losses at cards amount to 80,000 rubles, his wins to a mere 7,000); he had a reputation for playing honestly and for paying his large debts “conscientiously, even when his opponents cheated.”8 In Pushkin’s most famous short story, “The Queen of Spades” (1833), the cautious hero Germann ends up in a madhouse after he fails to win on three cards (three, seven, ace) that he had been promised, in a dream, would yield him a fortune. He played them as per the instructions – but at the last moment, inexplicably, the ace turns into a Queen of Spades. Germann’s error had not been gambling. It was his refusal to gamble, that is, his trying to fix in advance the results of a game of chance. Such calculation always struck Pushkin as servile and dishonorable.

“Chance, in Pushkin’s view, was the servant of the greater thing that he called fate.”9 This seeming paradox lies at the heartof Pushkin’s creative art and personal worldview (the poet was morbidly superstitious); it unites spontaneity and constraint in a fashion peculiar to this poet. Symmetry, often of dazzling complexity, governs his worlds. Events are balanced and circular; for all the easy banter, nothing is forgotten and no escape is possible from the choices and accidents that each hero must answer for. Exemplary here is Pushkin’s novel in verse, Eugene Onegin, a perfectly proportioned genre hybrid. It partakes equally of novel and poem. The “novelistic” factors include a chatty and digressive narrator, abundant everyday detail, protagonists who mature over several years, and unimpeded conversation that fits effortlessly into lines of verse. The novel cuts off at mid-scene in a most capricious manner. Onegin is on his knees in Tatyana’s boudoir. She has just rejected his advances and left the room. Her husband has just clinked his spurs in the doorway. At that moment “most dire for the hero,” the narrator chooses to withdraw from the story. If the well-made novel ends with a wedding or a death, Pushkin gives us neither. The novelistic dimension encourages openness, surprise, uncertainty.

Representing the poetic aspect is, first of all, the Onegin stanza itself, the novel’s structural “paragraph.” As tightly coiled as the novel is garrulous and expansive, this stanza is remarkably flexible: a fourteen-line verse unit in iambic tetrameter, with a regular scheme of feminine and masculine rhymes, arranged in three differently rhymed quatrains (first alternating, then pair, finally “ring”

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construction) followed by a rhyming couplet (AbAb CCdd EffE gg).10 Pushkin invented the stanza in May 1823, intrigued by Byron’s verse narratives and most likely also inspired by the freely rhymed salacious verse of the seventeenth-century French fabulist La Fontaine. With several notable interruptions, eight chapters (over 5,000 lines) of these sturdy, intricately rhymed stanzas propel the plot of Eugene Onegin forward with an intoxicating and self-confident momentum. Each stanza-paragraph has a characteristic pace or spin: the opening quatrain and ending couplet are sedate and urbane; the middle stretch is blurred, excited, suggestive; the ending couplet snaps the paragraph shut.

The poeticality of Eugene Onegin pertains not only to its formal structure. Events also unfold in a mirrored way, although displaced in time. And meanwhile the unfolding story is punctuated by the narrator’s repeated assertions – tinged but not tainted by irony – that no act is evil or good in itself but that timing is all: he or she is “blessed” who manages to live through life’s challenges in the right order, at the right age, for the right length of time. This neoclassical sense of the proper place for things, the proper “pitch,” pace, and rhythm that help us to see how one episode in a life might fit into a balanced and justified whole, is as crucial to Pushkin’s writings in prose fiction and history as it is in a line of his verse. But what is this right order, and from what perspective can we know it?