‘Far too much of contradiction’ [‘Protivorechiy ochen mnogo’]

Abstract

Devoted to Pushkin’s novel in verse Eugene Onegin [Evgeny Onegin], the article is a sequel to the author’s previous article ‘What! From outback steppe villages…’ [‘Kak! Iz glushi stepnykh seleniy…’] (Voprosy Literatury, 2019, No. 5) on the same theme. The scholar sets out to reconstruct those facts of the protagonist’s and his relatives’ biography that can only be discovered by detailed historical analysis of the text in comparison with the historical and cultural realia of Pushkin’s days. Such in-depth analysis throws new light on the complicated relationships of the novel’s main characters, determined by a psychological as well as socio-cultural subtext that was immediately recognizable by Pushkin’s contemporaries, but which is lost on later generations. Based on her earlier studies of Russian Catholicism and the problems of the historical reconstruction of literary texts, E. Tsimbaeva proposes a tentative spiritual and intellectual portrait of Onegin’s mother, whom Pushkin never mentions directly. The scholar sees her goal in broadening the reader’s understanding of the poet’s original design as well as the stages of, and reasons for, subsequent alterations acknowledged by Pushkin himself in his mention of ‘contradictions’ in the final draft.