figure
Eugene Onegin
Onegin
also: Онегин, Евгений Онегин
The jaded, emotionally indifferent title character of Pushkin's verse novel Eugene Onegin, who famously fails to return Tatyana's love; invoked here as the model of romantic unresponsiveness that makes a heroine's unrequited love seem beautiful and interesting.
Reading notes
- The Duel §149 Onegin
The bored, emotionally hollow hero of Pushkin's verse novel; one of the 'superfluous man' types Laevsky claims kinship with.
- After the Theatre §4 Onegin
The title character of Pushkin's verse novel, who fails to return Tatyana's love and is admired for his very indifference; Nadya explicitly reasons from the Onegin-Tatyana dynamic to romanticize her own situation with Gorny.
- The Anniversary §113 Onegin, I will not conceal it, I love Tatyana madly!
See the allusions apparatus for this work: the sailor's drunken sung couplet is a garbled, folk-circulated pastiche of the Onegin-Tatyana story from Pushkin's "Eugene Onegin" (via Tchaikovsky's opera, whose Onegin far more famously fails to return Tatyana's love rather than declaring it "madly"), triggered purely by the coincidence that the wife's own name is Tatyana.