Eugene Onegin

22 Jun, 2017 890 Other literatures

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.

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Guests

  • Andrew Kahn No other episodes
    Professor of Russian Literature at the University of Oxford and Fellow of St Edmund Hall
  • Emily Finer No other episodes
    Lecturer in Russian and Comparative Literature at the University of St Andrews
  • Simon Dixon 6 episodes
    The Sir Bernard Pares Professor of Russian History at University College London

Reading list

  • Pushkin. A Comparative Commentary
    John Bayley (Cambridge University Press, 1971) Google Books →
  • The Pushkin Handbook
    David Bethea (ed.) (University of Wisconsin Press, 2005) Google Books →
  • Pushkin: A Biography
    T. J. Binyon (HarperCollins, 2002)
  • The Other Pushkin: A Study of Alexander Pushkin's Prose Fiction
    Paul Debreczeny (Stanford University Press, 1983) Google Books →
  • Taboo Pushkin: Topics, Texts, Interpretations
    Alyssa Dinega Gillespie (ed.) (University of Wisconsin Press, 2012) Google Books →
  • Boris Godunov: Transpositions of a Russian Theme
    Caryl Emerson, C. (Indiana University Press, 1986) Google Books →
  • Pushkin and Romantic Fashion: Fragment, Elegy, Orient, Irony
    Monika Greenleaf (Stanford University Press, 1994) Google Books →
  • The Oxford Handbook of European Romanticism
    Paul Hamilton (ed.) (Oxford University Press, 2016) Google Books →
  • Cambridge Companion to Pushkin
    Andrew Kahn (ed.) (Cambridge University Press, 2006) Google Books →
  • Pushkin's Bronze Horseman
    Andrew Kahn (Duckworth, 1998)
  • Pushkin's Lyric Intelligence
    Andrew Kahn (Oxford University Press, 2012) Google Books →
  • Russian Literature: A Very Short Introduction
    Catriona Kelly (Oxford University Press, 2001) Google Books →
  • Pushkin's Tatiana
    Olga Peters Hasty (University of Wisconsin Press, 1999) Google Books →
  • Pushkin and the Queen of Spades
    Alice Randall (Houghton Mifflin, 2004) Google Books →
  • Distant Pleasures: Alexander Pushkin and the Writing of Exile
    Stephanie, Sandler (Stanford University Press, 1989)
  • Commemorating Pushkin: Russia's Myth of a National Poet
    Stephanie Sandler (Stanford University Press, 2004) Google Books →
  • Strolls with Pushkin
    Andrei Sinyavsky (trans. Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy and Slava I. Yastremski) (Yale University Press, 1993) Google Books →
  • Fiction and Society in the Age of Pushkin: Ideology, Institutions, and Narrative
    William Mills Todd III (Harvard University Press, 1986)

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Programme ID: b08tvjjq

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08tvjjq

Auto-category: 891.7 (Russian literature)

Hello (First sentence from this episode) Hello, Alexander Pushkin, born in 1799, is seen as the Shakespeare of Russian literature and his novel in verse, Eugene Onegin, as his masterpiece.