corresponding heroines in "don juan" and "evgenii onegin"

Corresponding Heroines in "Don Juan" and "Evgenii Onegin"Author(s): John GarrardSource: The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 73, No. 3 (Jul., 1995), pp. 428-448Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School ofSlavonic and East European StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4211859 .

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SEER, Vol. 73, No. 3, July 1995

Corresponding Heroines in

Don Juan and Evgenii Onegin

JOHN GARRARD

BYRON'S Don Juan and Pushkin's Evgenii Onegin have been linked like Siamese twins ever since Pushkin himself suggested the parallel just six months after he began Onegin in May of I 823 (the same month that saw Byron's final tinkering with Don Juan):

As for my own activities, I am writing notjust a novel, but a novel in verse - hell of a difference. Like Don Juan - pointless to think of publishing it; I'm just writing whatever comes into my head.'

However, to this day there has been no sustained analysis in any language of the relationship between the two works, an effort to address the interaction at a level above imitation or the listing of allusions or broad-gauge similarities and differences.2

The relationship between Don Juan and Onegin was not static, but a dynamic process. It started out as adaptation rather than imitation, then evolved through influence into full, creative independence. Push- kin took eight years, on and off, to complete Onegin. His view of Don Juan naturally changed over this lengthy period of gestation. Pushkin's skills in exposition matured. He transmogrified Byron's traditional satirical journey with its intruding narrator and episodic plot, abandoning Byron's satirical (often sarcastic) tone in favour of tolerant irony, and

John Garrard is Professor of Russian Literature at the University of Arizona. The author's greatest debt is to his wife Carol for reading drafts of this paper and for

making many valuable suggestions for its improvement. He is also grateful to Caryl Emerson and Savely Senderovich for reading an earlier draft and for their helpful comments. He wishes to thank George Gutsche, Kathleen Parthe, Christine Thomas, and Gregory Walker for generous bibliographical assistance. A preliminary version of this paper was read to a hospitable audience at the University of Glasgow in February I 993.

All translations from French and Russian are the author's.

1 Letter to Petr Viazemskii, in A. S. Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v desiati tomakh, 3rd edn, Moscow, I962-65, vol. X, I965, Pis'ma, p. 70. Quotations from Pushkin's correspon- dence hereafter are cited in my text as Pis'ma with page numbers.

2 Later commentators appear to draw upon Maurice Baring's brief summary of parallels and differences in An Outline of Russian Literature, London, I 9 I 5, pp. 79-80; reprinted in I92 I, 1929, and I933. D. S. Mirsky echoes Baring's remarks in his book Pushkin, [I926], New York, I963, p. 138.

In his pioneering I924 study Viktor Zhirmunskii set aside the relationship between Don Juan and Onegin as 'a special topic' that belonged to 'a second stage' of Byron's impact upon Pushkin, following the Southern poems. See V. M. Zhirmunskii, Bairon i Pushkin, [Lenin- grad, I924], Leningrad, 1978, p. 32 ('osobaia tema') and p. 2I8 ('vtoraia stadiia'). Presum- ably, Zhirmunskii intended to pursue his study of the relationship, but was prevented by the rise of Stalinist chauvinism.



CORRESPONDING HEROINES 429

Juan's sequence of discrete, picaresque adventures - for which he takes no responsibility - in favour of a tragic denouement. Pushkin's remark to Viazemskii that he is 'writing whatever comes into [his] head' hardly applies even to the first chapter of Onegin, although it describes well enough Byron's narrative posture throughout Don Juan. Byron got bored with his own creation and he just stopped writing it in medias res while working on Canto xvii.

It is well to remind ourselves that one writer can influence another by negative example as well as positive. Writers can and do learn from what they regard as the wrong-headed or not fully realized efforts of their forebears and contemporaries. This special type of influence is particularly common in many of Pushkin's works, although it can be seen most clearly in his frequent parodies. Pushkin was very fond of reworking and adapting, rather than borrowing wholesale. His response to Don Juan is a case in point, offering an example of influence at its deepest level, defined in another context as the moment when 'the achievement of one writer suggests to another the possibility of an enterprise so original as to obscure the very suggestive link'.3

Pushkin revealed the rapid evolution of his view of Don Juan and of his own work in progress in a letter he wrote to Aleksandr Bestuzhev on 24 March I 825. He denied that the first chapter of Onegin contained any 'satire', thus contradicting his own earlier statement in January- February I824, when he told his brother Lev that he should ignore Nikolai Raevskii's strictures on the first chapter of Onegin: 'He was expecting romanticism from me, instead found satire and cynicism, and did not really get the point' (Pis'ma, p. 8i). Pushkin also took Bestuzhev to task for drawing false parallels between Don Juan and Onegin:

I yield to no one in my admiration for Don Juan (I have read only the first five cantos), but it has nothing in common with Onegin. You speak of the Englishman Byron's satire and compare it with mine, and demand that I write the same kind of satire! No, my dear friend, you ask too much. And why do you speak of 'satire'? There is not a hint of it in Onegin. If I used satire, then the walls would come tumbling down [U menia by zatreshchala naberezhnaia]. The word 'satirical' should not have been included in my Preface. (Pis'ma, p. I 3 )

Pushkin is referring to a Preface that preceded the published version of Chapter i, where he directed the reader's attention to 'qualities rare in a satirical writer' and to 'the absence of an insulting personality and the observance of strict decorum in the comic

3 Donald Fanger, 'Influence and Tradition in the Russian Novel' in The Russian Novelfrom Pushkin to Pasternak, ed. byJohn Garrard, New Haven, 1983, p. 47.



430 JOHN GARRARD

description of manners'.4 The fact that Pushkin dropped the whole Preface in later editions supports the conclusion that he had decided to modulate the bantering tone and the rambling style of Byron's narrator in Don Juan.5

It is this same March I825 letter to Bestuzhev that must be the starting point for any serious effort to examine the relationship between Don Juan and Onegin. Pushkin himself suggests specifically where comparison is most appropriate:

Just wait until you see the other cantos . .. Ah, if only I could tempt you to visit me here at Mikhailovskoe! You would see that if you are going to compare Onegin and Don Juan, then you can do so only in one respect: Who is sweeter and more charming (gracieuse), Tat'iana orJulia? The first canto is simply a quick introduction, and I am pleased with it (which happens with me very rarely). (Pis'ma, p. I 3 )

The time of this letter is instructive. By March of I825 Pushkin had already completed both the second and third chapters (the third contains Tat'iana's crucially important letter to Onegin), and he was now hard at work on the fourth - far enough into Onegin to see where it was leading and to differentiate it from Don Juan.

What is so surprising is that Pushkin's specific comparison between Tat'iana and Julia was ignored not only by Bestuzhev, but by all succeeding generations of commentators.6 What we discover when we follow Pushkin's advice is a striking paradox. The most profound catalyst in Pushkin's interaction with Byron's poem lies in the fact that it was the exception to Byron's usual narrative stance that struck the Russian poet most forcefully and proved to be most fruitful. Julia's letter to Juan (Canto i) offers the only occasion when Byron abandons the intrusive narrative voice which has always been said to mark the most significant aspect of Don Juan's impact on Onegin. For a few

4The Preface is reproduced by Iurii Lotman in Kommentarii, Leningrad, 1983, p. I I8. Some critics, notably in the Soviet period, have suggested that Pushkin is making a veiled

reference to political satire, since Bestuzhev was part of the movement that erupted into the Decembrist Revolt a few months later in I825. Yet it seems just as reasonable to view Pushkin's rejection of the very satire that he had earlier seen offending Nikolai Raevskii as evidence ofhis own changing perception of Onegin.

5 Dmitry Cyzevsky's suggestion that the first chapter of Onegin recalls Beppo was probably borrowed from Pushkin's rejected Preface, and it remains questionable. See his edition of Onegin, Cambridge, Massachusetts, I953, repr. I967, p. 208. Only in I830, when he had virtually completed Onegin, did Pushkin turn his hand to the sarcasm and farce that characterize Beppo, and to a lesser extent Don Juan. He probably intended his Domik v Kolomne to show that he could write that kind of narrative poem if he wished. The same pleasure in experimenting with various genres and modes lay behind the composition at the same time of his closet drama Kamennyi gost', a 'straight' retelling of the Don Juan myth, which possesses nevertheless a high quotient of originality, with features found in no other version.

6 One scholar has actually disagreed with Pushkin and argued without explanation that it would have been 'fairer' to compare Tat'iana with Haidee rather thanjulia. See The Letters of Alexander Pushkin, trans. byJ. Thomas Shaw, Madison, Wisconsin, I967, p. 281.




stanzas, as Julia writes her letter, Byron allows one of his characters to emerge from the narrator's monologue and speak in her own voice.

Julia's letter was a late addition, a set piece, and that may help explain the anomaly both in tone and attitude: the letter reads like one of Byron's finest lyrics.7 Elsewhere in Don Juan Byron's dominating narrator does not permit anyone else, least of all the female characters, such freedom. It is, consequently, their letters that link the adulterous twenty-three-year-old wife in Seville with the eighteen-year-old virgin in the backwoods of provincial Russia, at the eastern margins of European civilization and culture. These two corresponding heroines, Julia and Tat'iana, demonstrate a surprising number of deep structure parallels and echoes that need to be interpreted, not simply listed, if we hope to understand the true nature of Pushkin's response to Don Juan.

In his letter to Bestuzhev Pushkin not only suggests a specific comparison between his Tat'iana and Byron's Julia, but also offers clues as to the real source of that comparison and the reason why his suggestion has been ignored for so long. If Pushkin admires Don Juan so much, why is it that he has only read the first five cantos, less than one third of the sixteen cantos that had already been published a year earlier? The answer is that Pushkin had to rely on a French translation because his English never rose above the remedial. In a November i 825 letter to Prince Viazemskii, Pushkin mentions specifically his lack of English as an obstacle to reading Byron's Don Juan in the original:

What a. marvel Don Juan is! I know only the first five cantos; [but even] after reading the first two, I immediately told Raevskii that it was Byron's chef d'oeuvre. I was delighted to see later that Walter Scott shared my opinion. I need to learn English - and that is one of the disadvantages of being exiled: I lack the means to study the language, although I should have long since. (Pis'ma, p. I 90)8

Pushkin's repeated reference to reading only five cantos and the added allusion to the first two cantos points to Pushkin's source: Amedee Pichot, the French translator of Byron. The first edition of his prose translations of Byron's works, including the first two cantos of Don Juan, began to appear in I 8 I 9 and had certainly reached Russia the following year. The second edition reproduces the first two cantos of Don Juan from the first edition; the fourth edition contains the complete translation of Byron's poem, but Pushkin read only the first five cantos

7Jerome J. McGann in his edition of Byron, The Complete Poetical Works, 7 vols, Oxford, I980-93 (hereafter Byron), vol. v, I986, p. 665, notes that Byron wrote Julia's letter and dispatched it to his publisher Murray on the very same day (8 December i8i8), after completing most of Canto i the previous September. I am indebted to DrJ. D. Bone of the University of Glasgow for bringing this point to my attention.

Future references to Don Juan in my text are by volume and page number to this edition. 8 The reference to Walter Scott should not be taken to suggest that Pushkin was able to

read Scott in English; he learned of the British writer's opinion only at second hand.



432 JOHN GARRARD

in volume vi, which appeared in I823, during the crucial time when Onegin took on its decisive shape and tone. It seems he read the remaining cantos only much later, if at all, since he quickly became as bored with the work as Byron himself.

As early as June I 824 Pushkin expressed his clear preference for the first two cantos:

Byron's genius faded with his youth. In his tragedies, even in Cain, he had already ceased to be the fiery demon who created The Giaour and Childe Harold. The first two cantos of Don Juan are superior to those that follow ... (Pis'ma, p. 92)

By the phrase 'to those that follow' Pushkin was referring not to the whole poem, but to the first five cantos. In fact, it was only in December I825 that Pushkin obtained the remaining cantos in Pichot's edition, 'through the good offices of his friends Annette Vulf and Anna Kern', as Nabokov reminds us in his annotated edition and translation of Onegin.9

Thus, when dealing with the possible influence of Don Juan, we are speaking of Pushkin's response not to Byron's original, but to Pichot's French prose translation. Furthermore, Pushkin's stated preference for the first two cantos is a clear warning against a blanket comparison between Onegin and the whole of Byron's work. 10

Although Pushkin was first introduced to Byron and to Don Juan by the Raevskii children on his way to southern exile, it was Pichot who offered Pushkin the possibility of a fruitful engagement with Byron's narrative poem - as indeed was the case with the vast majority of Europeans, since French was the lingua franca at that time, just as English is today. Pichot's Byron came out in no less than eight editions during the I820S, constantly being updated to include the English

9 Eugene Onegin. A Novel in Verse by Aleksandr Pushkin, translated and with a commentary by Vladimir Nabokov, 4 vols, revised edn, Princeton, 1975 (hereafter Eugene Onegin), II, p. I 6 I.

Nabokov re-established for contemporary readers the fact that Pushkin used the Pichot prose translation, although he did not explore the impact that a French intermediary might have had, except to note echoes in Pushkin's phrasing. He provides a useful review of the various editions of Pichot's Byron which began as a joint project with Eusebe de Salle, published anonymously at first, then under a pseudonym 'A. E. de Chastopalli' (II, pp. I 59- 6i). For his edition of Onegin Nabokov used the second and fourth editions of Pichot's translation. I use the fourth edition, published in eight volumes, I 822-25 by 'A. P .... t' and entitled Oeuvres de Lord Byron. Quotations of Evgenii Onegin in the text will be by Arabic numerals for chapter number and Roman numerals for stanza number.

Nabokov suggests plausibly (I, p. 70) that Pushkin's frequent reference to Onegin by the Russian loanword poema (long narrative poem) may have been suggested in part to him by Pichot's phrase poeme romantique in his translation of Byron's Childe Harold. 10 This hypothesis casts some doubt on the suggestion that Tat'iana 'unites the areas of

human existence that Byron assigns, broadly speaking, to three separate women in Don Juan: Haidee, the child of nature; Aurora Raby, "who looked more on books than faces"; and (as Tatiana's social hypostasis matures) Lady Adeline, the perfect hostess.' See William Mills Todd III, 'Eugene Onegin: "Life's Novel"' in Literature and Society in Imperial Russia I80o-i954, ed. W. M. Todd, Stanford, I978, p. 209. Lady Adeline Amundeville does not appear until Canto xiii and Aurora Raby until Canto xv.




poet's latest works. Byron's last mistress, Teresa Guiccioli, was typical in her reliance on Pichot: 'Not being able to read English, Teresa had seen little of Byron's poetry until he sent her a French translation of Don Juan [i.e., Pichot]'.11

At first glance Julia appears to have nothing in common with Tat'iana. She is shown in scenes that smack of old-fashioned French farce, opera buffa, even of commedia dell'arte, protesting her innocence to Don Alfonso as he and his feckless retainers search her bedroom (while Juan himselflies on the bed, 'packed' within a pillow).Julia ticks offthe number of foreign suitors she had resisted, notably a Russian with a comical name (Strongstroganoff) that Pushkin would have seen through: Stroganov was a notorious womanizer in the late eighteenth century (i, 148).

Pushkin must have greatly enjoyed these scenes, but he was touched more profoundly by the unusually gentle treatment afforded toJulia by Byron, who includes a long and affectionate description of her, begin- ning in stanza 55. When Juan and Julia finally become lovers, Byron avoids the archetypal fantasy of a more experienced, often older woman initiating a younger man or boy into the joys of sex. Rather we are shown Julia as a lonely woman, unloved and yet trying to remain faithful. She struggles to resist, but finally loses the battle, in Byron's celebrated couplet:

A little still she strove, and much repented, And whispering 'I will ne'er consent'- consented. (I, 1I7)12

The essential point here is that Byron's gentle tongue-in-cheek concern for Julia's efforts to remain faithful to an older husband (I, IO9) becomes more tender in Pichot, who very often omits (intentionally or not) the undercutting jab or punchline that Byron found irresistible. For example, Byron writes ofJulia:

... she in sooth, Possess'd an air and grace by no means common: Her stature tall - I hate a dumpy woman. (i, 96)

" See Leslie A. Marchand, Byron. A Portrait, New York, 1970, p. 334. Teresa was shocked by Byron's rather harsh treatment of some of his female characters.

12 Pichot: '. . . elle resista un moment encore, gemit de son imprudence, et ce fut en disant tout bas: Je ne consentiraijamais! qu'elle consentit.'

See Lord Byron, Oeuvres de Lord Byron, 4th edn, edited and corrected by A. P .... t [Amedee Pichot], 8 vols, Paris, i 822-25. The first five cantos of Don Juan are found in vol. vi i823. Future quotations from Pichot are to this edition by Canto in Roman and stanza in Arabic numerals. This was the edition used by Pushkin, although he had read the first two cantos of Byron's poem in Pichot's second edition. I shall have more to say later about Pushkin's critical response to the above famous lines.

Pushkin must have been helped with the original English to some extent, or have been told about Byron's English, because he imitates Byron's Hudibrastic rhymes, particularly in the first chapter of Onegin.

14



434 JOHN GARRARD

Pichot smooths out these lines, especially the last phrase: .... en un mot, Julia etait douee d'une physionomie et d'une grace au-dessus de toute expression . . . Je n'aime pas les femmes trop petites.'13

The loss of the harsh word 'dumpy' completely changes the tone. What is more, the phrase 'd'une grace au-dessus de toute expression' (far more expressive than the stereotypical English understatement 'by no means common') must attract our interest, given Pushkin's inser- tion of the French word 'gracieuse' into the Russian text of his letter commending to Bestuzhev a comparison between Julia and Tat'iana. This same word seems to have resonated in Pushkin's mind from reading Byron's description (in Pichot's French) ofJulia's charmingly revealed shoulders as she reproaches the cuckolded Don Alfonso: 'Les ondes de sa noire chevelure ombragent comme une voile ses joues humides and pales; mais ses boucles nombreuses ne peuvent cependant cacher tout-a-fait les contours gracieux de ses epaules . . .' (i, I57; it is only one 'glossy shoulder' in Byron).14

It is not enough, however, merely to note the echo. Here is an instructive example of Pushkin's adaptation, of his reworking of Byron's setting and tone. Pushkin moved the phrase from bedroom farce in Don Juan to a very different bedroom scene: the silent, but emotionally charged moment when Tat'iana has concluded her letter to Onegin:

TaTbHHa TO B34OXHeT, TO OXHeT; HlHCbMO ApO>KHT B ee pyKe; 06AaTKa pO3OBa5I COXHeT

Ha BocHaAeHHOM 3bIKe. K nAelly roAoByIIImKoH cKAoHHAacb. Copo'Ka AerKaL criyCTHAaCb C ee HpeAeCTHOro nAema ... (3, XXXII) 15

The repeated reference to Tat'iana's shoulder (a repetition of words not favoured in English style, but perfectly normal in Russian) and the use of the adjective 'charming' in the last line ('prelestnogo plecha') recalls Pushkin's own word 'gracieuse' in the Bestuzhev letter and draws attention to 'gracieux' in Pichot's phrase 'les contours gracieux de ses epaules'.

13 ' . . in a word,Julia was endowed with a countenance and grace beyond all describing ... I do not like women who are too short.' 14 Byron's original reads as follows: '. . . as a veil,/ Waved and o'ershadowing her wan

cheek, appears/ Her streaming hair; the black curls strive, but fail,/ To hide the glossy shoulder, which uprears/ Its snow through all. . .'. 15 'Tat'iana sighs and moans, moans and sighs;/ The letter quivers in her hand;/ The

rose-coloured seal feels dry/ Upon her fevered tongue./ Her head sinks upon her shoulder./ Her light chemise has slipped/ From her charming shoulder.' The diminutive golovushka again suggests a 'charming' or 'sweet' head.




Beyond such verbal echoes, we have evidence that Pushkin spent considerable time visualizing this scene. On a rough draft of Tat'iana's letter he sketched a young woman in a chemise that has slipped to reveal her left shoulder while she rests her head dolefully on her right hand.16 One can never be sure at this remove, but the drawing does suggest that Pushkin had conjured up the image of Byron's Julia as he read Pichot and was portraying his own heroine. This notion receives support from the fact that Byron's Julia also writes a letter in her moment of greatest heartbreak - just before she is banished to a convent by her irate husband. And so we find Pushkin drawing upon two very different scenes involvingJulia to create one scene involving Tat'iana.

Pushkin reworks further details from Don Juan that suggest he was thinking of Julia as he created Tat'iana's character and sought to establish her place in the narrative system of Onegin. Once again, however, it is the changes Pushkin made that reveal the creative dynamism of his response to Byron. He says that he has Tat'iana's original letter in his keeping (we must assume that Onegin gave it to Pushkin the narrator in Odessa). Byron too refers to 'the following copy of [Julia's] letter' (i, I9I). Tat'iana writes her letter in French, and Julia could well have done the same, because Byron had noted earlier thatJulia thought in French:

Butjust suppose that moment should betide, I only say suppose it - inter nos - (This should be entre nous, forJulia thought In French, but then the rhyme would go for nought.) (i, 84)

Pichot's translation is not quite so explicit, but gets the idea across that Julia thinks in French: '(C'est entre nous que je veux dire, car Julia ne pensait pas en latin, et j'ai ete esclave de ma rime.)"17 Like Julia, Pushkin also thought in French. He may well have composed Tat'iana's letter in French in his own mind first. Nabokov remarks that it translates easily back from Russian and melds four French translations of Pushkin's original into his own ideal Urtext.18

The language of Tat'iana's letter, which Pushkin sets off as a separate section, abandoning the Onegin stanza - as though he sensed that Julia's letter had been a later, separate set piece itself - is very similar to Julia's in its oral vividness and semantic simplicity, as in its

16 The sketch is reproduced byJ. Douglas Clayton in Ice and Flame. AleksandrPushkin's Eugene Onegin, Toronto, I 985, p. 137.

The verbal echo of 'prelestnyi' from Pichot's 'gracieux' offers strong confirmation of the argument that Pushkin was not reading Don Juan in the original, since Byron has 'glossy shoulder'. It is hard to imagine that Pushkin would not have been inspired to find a suitable equivalent in Russian to this striking adjective. 1 '(I really mean entre nous, forJulia did not think in Latin, and I was a slave to my rhyme.)' 18 Eugene Onegin, ii, pp. 387-89.



436 JOHN GARRARD

tone of resignation and despair. In his edition of Onegin Nabokov (II, 399) detects a link between Pushkin's lines:

OHa 3apH He 3aMeMaeT, CHAHT C nOHHKme1o rAaBoH

14 Ha HIH4CbM0 He HanipaeT CBoe i nemaTH BbIpe3HoH. (3, xxxI1) 19

and a couplet from Julia's letter: 'I have no more to say, but linger still, And dare not set my seal upon this sheet. . .' (i, i97)20

But it is important to set such verbal echoes in an interpretative context. In Don Juan we have Julia's own words, but in Onegin we are given the narrator's description. This reinforces the important point that it was Pushkin who had read Don Juan, not his fictional character Tat'iana. She remains at this stage unaware of the parallels between herself and Julia; she still thinks of herself more in terms of the French romances she devours.

Byron assumes the personality ofJulia and speaks in her voice, and so Pushkin could participate in her emotions directly, rather than through the narrator's mocking paraphrase. HenceJulia's letter estab- lishes a poetic environment that looks forward to the setting and tone of Tat'iana's famous letter-writing scene. Like Pushkin, we see Julia, a tragic and still figure, penning her farewell to the young man whom she loved and by whom she has been ruined. The scene has a lapidary quality, like a tableau vivant or the scene on a Greek vase, and its stillness and silence are all the more arresting because of the noise and chatter that preceded them. For the only time in Don Juan we hear the beating of a human heart, unmediated by a narrator intent on taking his own temperature every few lines:

'They tell me 'tis decided; you depart: 'T is wise -'t is well, but not the less a pain; I have no further claim on your young heart, Mine is the victim, and would be again. . .' (I, I92)

The elisions communicate the choked voice of one overcome by pain. Pichot cannot convey this vivid immediacy in prose, and indeed he lowers the emotional tone by not using the more intimate 'tu' form of address and by translating the letter as reported speech:

On me dit qu'il est decide que vous allez partir, &crivait-elle aJuan. Vous faites sagement ... vous faites bien; mais ce n'en est pas moins un chagrin

19 'She takes no note of the dawn,/ Sits with head drooping/ And does not press upon the letter/ Her graven seal.' 20 Pichot translates: 'Je n'ai plus rien a dire, etje ne puis quitter la plume;je n'ose poser mon

cachet sur ce papier.'




pour moi. Je n'ai plus de droit desormais sur votre jeune coeur; le mien est seul victime et consentirait a l'etre encore.21

Perhaps Pichot's version again had an impact on Pushkin's chosen manner of narrating Tat'iana's scene.

In being sent to a convent, Julia is condemned to virtual prison and isolation for life. But the references to her situation are all the more pathetic because she does no reproach Juan at all, but only herself:

'You will proceed in beauty, and in pride, Beloved and loving many; all is o'er For me on earth, except some years to hide My shame and sorrow deep in my heart's core. . .' (i, i96)22

There is no Hudibrastic bravado here, but rather a mingling of heartbreak and courageous resignation. The semantic level is not elevated, but vibrates with the feeling of Byron's loveliest lyrics. For once we have plenty of concrete detail; even the shopworn 'heart's core' acquires a freshness because the narrator has relentlessly applied it to himself; now Julia associates her own heart's core with a shame for which she accepts responsibility. Through Julia Byron has achieved the authentic note of tragedy, but briefly; Don Juan's usual signature is either melodrama or sentiment undercut by a self-conscious smirk.

Byron rounds off the delicate effect he has created with a beautiful stanza that has an almost tactile sense of paper and pen. One notes with pleasure the extension of a simileJulia had earlier used to describe her 'feminine' brain:

'As turns the needle trembling to the pole It ne'er can reach, so turns to you, my soul.' (I, I95)23

But Byron then undercuts the very effect he has achieved: This was DonJuan's earliest scrape; but whether I shall proceed with his adventures is Dependent on the public altogether. . . (i, I99)24

Nor can Byron resist telling us what happens to Julia's letter. AsJuan leaves Seville for Cadiz by boat, he is seasick. Retching over the side, he accidentally spills vomit on Julia's gilt-edged paper with its fine

21 'They tell me it is decided that you are going to leave, she wrote tojuan. You do wisely. . . you do well; but it is no less a sorrow for me. Henceforth I have no right to your young heart; only mine is the victim and will agree to remain so.' 22 Pichot: 'Vous parcourrez la carriere des honneurs et des plaisirs; vous serez aime, et vous

aimerez: tout est fini pour moi sur la terre, sauf quelques annees, pendant lesquelles je vais cacher au fond de mon cceur ma honte et mes chagrins.' 23 Pichot's translation is rather humdrum, but it does get the basic idea across:'.. . comme

l'aiguille qui se tourne toujours vers le p6le, mon coeur toujours epris est fixe sur une id6e cherie.' 24 Again Pichot's prosaic version: 'Telle fut la premiere intrigue de donjuan. Continuai-je

le recit de ses aventures? C'est ce qui dependra du public.'



438 JOHN GARRARD

vermillion seal. It matters not that Juan is only sixteen years old, inexperienced, unwell; the choice has been made by Byron and the juxtaposition of tones isjolting. It was almost certainly this episode that William Hazlitt had in mind when he remarked (shortly before Byron's death) on the poet's tendency to 'travestie himself':

A classical intoxication is followed by the splashing of soda-water, by frothy effusions of ordinary bile. After the lightning and the hurricane, we are introduced to the interior of the cabin and the contents of wash-hand basins. 25

The contrast with Pushkin could not be sharper. After the seasick scene, Byron can refer to a 'copy' of Julia's letter (i, I9I). Pushkin's narrator, however, treasures Tat'iana's original letter as 'sacred'. Further, he takes care to integrate the letter into his plot, rather than leave it hanging - another significant change. He also gives us not only Tat'iana as a provincial young lady, but allows her to develop and become a married woman of substance and good judgement.

Each letter marks a turning point in its writer's life. Julia bids farewell to a lover, almost to life itself, while Tat'iana declares her love in a risky, 'unladylike' fashion - given the prevailing conventions of that time. What is to be the fate of each heroine? Here we have the essential difference between the two poets' handling of female characters in similar circumstances.Juan never writes back toJulia; the rest is silence. When Juan is pillowed on Haidee's bosom in the next canto, the narrator expresses some surprise:

ButJuan! had he quite forgotten Julia? And should he have forgotten her so soon? (II, 208)26

The narrator claims to 'hate inconstancy', butJulia has been forgotten byJuan, and after this last reference to her existence, by the narrator as well.

Although the nightmare of Byron's Haidee in Canto ii (which Pushkin had read very early on) may well have been the jumping off point for Tat'iana's dream (Don Juan, Canto ii, stanzas 3 I-35; Onegin, Chapter 5, stanzas xi-xxi), Pushkin again made significant alterations to his source. Byron explores the subconscious of the incoherent and pregnant Haidee only briefly, then she is killed off so that Juan can move on to the next female. Haidee dreams of seeing Juan's corpse, then is awoken as her father discovers the pair in flagrante delicto - an obvious repetition of the farcical scene in which Juan and Julia are found in bed by her husband - albeit in much darker tones. Byron relates Haidee's subsequent death and the loss of her unborn child in a

25 William Hazlitt, 'Lord Byron' in English Romantic Writers, ed. David Perkins, New York, I967, p. 698. 26 Pichot: 'Mais Juan a-t-il donc oublieJulia? Aurait-il dui l'oublier si vite?'




sentimental style worthy of Dickens. Tat'iana's nightmare, however, is fully integrated into the plot of Onegin, foreshadowing Onegin's killing of Lenskii. It is also justified psychologically by what we already know of her personality and helps further to enrich her character.

Pushkin must have been startled that Byron had laid out so rich an exposition with the Julia-Alfonso-Juan triangle, only to drop it. In leavingJulia and following Juan on his travels, Byron was restricting the scope of his poem. However much geography DonJuan covers, his interior landscape remains the same, and so does Byron's discursive style. The result is that no matter how many womenJuan seduces, or is seduced by, their images all blur and their voices soon fade as the narrator's voice dominates.

What remains, of course, is Byron's dazzling, witty, and irreverent narrative persona, a creation that continues to fascinate us to this day. It also attracted Pushkin, who creates his own unique type of narrator in Onegin. Undoubtedly, Pushkin enjoyed the Byronic persona in Don Juan, but we should remember that Pushkin had already demonstrated his delight (shared by Byron) in the sprezzatura of Pulci and Ariosto, who provided models for the ironical, intruding narrator of Ruslan and Liudmila. And, while it is true that Pushkin continued to indulge in the conceit of aimless composition and to delay the action with lyrical digressions and reminiscences from his narrator-participant, Leon Stilman is surely right to caution:

In fact, the 'digressions', the various intrusions of the authorial 'I', and the switches from objective to subjective narration in many instances serve to develop the plot of Evgenii Onegin and are part and parcel of the work's narrative system.27

Byron's rambling monologue and episodic narration failed to meet Pushkin's needs as his work took final shape. His literary persona is as much a unique creation as Byron's, but he does not permit the persona to swallow whole the poem and all its protagonists. What is more, Pushkin's classical sense of measure would not allow him to inject jarring intrusions into the symmetrical structure of Onegin, or to mix conflicting tones in Byron's inimitable manner. Instead Pushkin achieved a unique balance between schematic plot and the elaborate 'narrative system' of the poem.

Pushkin echoes Byron in sending his hero off on international travels, but drops from the final version stanzas for a separate chapter on 'Onegin's Journey'. Here is the most important change made by Pushkin in his adaptation of the Julia-Don Juan episode. Instead of

27 L. N. Shtil'man, 'Problemy literaturnykh zhanrov i traditsii v "Evgenii Onegine" Pushkina' in American Contributions to the Fourth International Congress of Slavists, The Hague, I958, p. 328. This is by far the most thoughtful and suggestive discussion of Onegin's relationship to the Western literary tradition, but Stilman says little about Don Juan.



440 JOHN GARRARD

following Onegin, he stays with Tat'iana, focusing on the woman rather than the man. Tat'iana does not live in the hothouse fictional world of Spain or the sentimental pastorale of Karamzin's 'Poor Liza', a work Pushkin parodied in his story 'The Stationmaster' during the same Boldino Autumn in which he wrote the final chapter of Onegin. Her anxious mother packs her off to the marriage market in Moscow. Tat'iana must, of course, endure her fate in a world in which a young woman's choices are restricted to marriage and spinsterhood. In fact, Tat'iana makes a successful marriage, moving up into the highest circles of St Petersburg society. Her upward mobility thus links her to the many 'vertical heroes' who populate European fiction.

Pushkin's decision to stay with Tat'iana had momentous consequences not only for Onegin, but for the later Russian novel. Unlike Onegin and Juan, Byron's female characters or indeed other female characters in Onegin, Tat'iana evolves emotionally and ethically. She becomes much more than merely the object of the male's sexual desires or sentimental ideals, and quite different from the stereotypical female characters who had peopled Russian literature in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century.28 She thus provides the axis for the structured narrative that is one of the characteristics of Onegin, in contrast to Don Juan, a work Byron simply broke off in mid-canto.

Byron as a rule saw women not as creatures in their own right, but as the object of the male's desires, like Boucher portraits of the 'small, full manageable body, which has always appealed to the average sen- sualist'.29 Views of women that would later be regarded as offensive were widely held in the nineteenth century, and need not be attributed to any ambivalence on the part of the bisexual Byron. It is of some interest that Byron does have Julia state one of his most celebrated critical bon mots (although he was in this case paraphrasing a woman, Mme de Stael in her De l'inftuence des passions):

'Man's love is of his life a thing apart, 'Tis woman's whole existence . . .' (i, I94)30

28 Mikhail Chulkov's 'comely cook' is a rare exception, a tough-minded war widow who reflects some features of characters in the novels of Marivaux and Defoe. For further details, see J. Garrard, 'The Portrayal of Reality in the Prose Fiction of Mikhail Chulkov', Slavonic and East European Review, 48, I 970, I, pp. I 6-26. 29 Sir Kenneth Clark, The Nude. A Study of Ideal Art, London, I 956, p. I 39. 30 Pichot: 'L'amour n'est qu'un episode dans la vie de l'homme; il est toute l'existence de la

femme.' On Byron's attitude towards women as displayed throughJulia, McGann (Byron, p. 68o)

notes that her letter is 'an eloquent statement of a deeply traditional set of ideas ....' McGann also points out: 'In Byron's own day the position is memorably stated by Anne Elliot injane Austen's Persuasion (vol. 2, ch. I 3), a book which Murray published, and which he may very well have sent to Byron, not long before this passage was written.' Murray was Byron's publisher.



CORRESPONDING HEROINES 44I

Pushkin might appear to echo this melancholy assessment in the draft of an I825 letter written in French to Nikolai Raevskii, when he declares that 'women have no character, only passions in their youth; and that is why it is easy to portray them' (Pis'ma, p. I 62). However, we must allow for Pushkin's desire to appear witty and 'Byronic' whenever he writes to the Raevskii brothers, and particularly when writing in French. Furthermore, this remark is set within a severe critique of Byron's habit in his closet dramas of parcelling out various aspects of his personality to his characters: '. . . and thus from one integrated, gloomy and energetic personality he has created several trivial characters; this is not tragedy' (ibid.). Pushkin suggests that Byron was able to portray young women in love, but not as mature human beings, nor as 'rounded' characters - a fault that the Russian poet detected also in the male characters of Byron's dramas.

Instead of abandoning Tat'iana after her letter, Pushkin launches her from being a part of a satirical, episodic narrative into a prototype of the 'strong' female in the Russian novel of psychological realism. Tat'iana is, of course, not to be compared in psychological richness to later female characters of Dostoevskii and Tolstoi, or even Turgenev, but she is certainly no longer the 'sentimental' heroine of the eighteenth century. Tat'iana differs too from her younger sister Ol'ga, who is much more akin to a two-dimensional Byronic female. Significantly, Pushkin declines to describe the younger woman since her portrait can be found in any novel (2, XXIII) - Onegin himself later likens Ol'ga's pretty round face to '. . . a dumb moon/On a dumb horizon' (3, v).31

Of all the characters in Onegin Tat'iana is treated by Pushkin with the gentlest irony, and never with satire - and that is, of course, precisely true of Byron's unique treatment ofJulia. The other characters in Onegin could fairly be said to belong to a Byronic or eighteenth- century sentimental landscape. Onegin becomes more identified ironi- cally with Childe Harold - and by Tat'iana herself, not merely by Pushkin's narrator. For the character of Tat'iana's mother Pushkin borrows something from Juan's mother, but softens the harsher tones in Byron's description of the society lady's hypocrisy and sexual depravity. To the young poet Lenskii he allocates some of the characteristics of the naive Juan, although Lenskii's very immaturity is integral to the plot, since it leads to the duel and to Onegin's rapid departure.

Unlike Onegin, Tat'iana learns from her experiences. While Onegin proceeds on his Childe-like pilgrimage, Tat'iana escapes the restric- tions of vicarious living through literature. Earlier she had compared her situation to that of 'Clarissa, Julie, and Delphine' (3, x). Pushkin

31 '... glupaia luna/ Na etom glupom nebosklone.'



442 JOHN GARRARD

may have drawn upon these earlier models for the denouement of Onegin, where Tat'iana - like all three sentimental heroines -

declines a life with the hero for moral reasons. However, Pushkin was a great deal less impressed with the epistolary novels of Richardson, Rousseau and Mmie de Stae than was Tat'iana. His true feelings are expressed in his letters, which suggest that he thought of Tat'iana on a loftier aesthetic plane than the trio of suffering demoiselles. For example, in a November 1824 letter Pushkin expresses total exaspera- tion with Clarissa: 'She drives me up the wall - what a boring idiot!' (Pis'ma, p. I io).32

Tat'iana's famous letter to Onegin may indeed contain verbal echoes of letters in French novels; her reading is dominated by epistolary romances. Pushkin's decision, however, to have her write the letter in the first place may more likely derive from his reading of Don Juan. In seeking for sources of Tat'iana's letter, say in Rousseau's La Nouvelle H6loise (or of Onegin's letter in Constant's Adolphe),33 we must distin- guish between Pushkin's reading tastes and those of his characters. Pushkin (or his narrator) implies that both his major protagonists (and Tat'iana's mother and Lenskii) relied on the works they read when pressed to express their innermost thoughts. In fact, a major theme in Onegin is the Wildean danger of life copying art. Onegin himself succumbs to this danger, and so does Tat'iana at first, but she escapes

a sign of her growing maturity. That is why Tat'iana's visit to Onegin's abandoned house is so

crucial to the denouement; indeed, the ending of the work cannot be properly understood without taking this carefully placed scene into account. She finds his study graced by a portrait of Lord Byron and the obligatory bust of Napoleon - the two cultural demigods of the age throughout Europe. As Tat'iana scans the volumes in Onegin's study, noting the thumbnail marks, the tell-tale marginalia and question marks, she comes to understand that Onegin is an imitation, 'A Muscovite in Childe Harold's cloak'. Tat'iana has now caught up with her creator by reading Byron. Her question, 'Can it be that he is a parody?' (7, XXIV) marks a critical stage in her own recognition of the sterility of life imitating art, and provides psychological weight for her later rejection of Onegin. If Tat'iana does not mature, if she does not 'see through' Onegin, then she will be much less likely to resist his entreaties.

32' '. mochi net kakaia skuchnaia dura!' Those who wish to compare Tat'iana to such eighteenth-century heroines might well wonder why Pushkin would want to have 'his' Tat'iana linked to them, rather than to Byron's Julia, whose portrayal he so evidently admired. 33 See the wide-ranging and stimulating article by Anna Akhmatova, "'Adol'f"

Benzhamena Konstana v tvorchestve Pushkina', Vremennik Pushkinskoi komissii, I, I936, i, Moscow and Leningrad, pp. 91-I 14.




As several scholars including Slonimskii have noted,34 in the final two chapters the reader is shown events through the eyes of Tat'iana, rather than Onegin. This switch in focus necessitates an important change in tone. Tat'iana's views parallel those of Pushkin himself in Chapter 8. Nabokov suggested that she becomes the poet's Muse, and his view has been followed, indeed much expanded, by a large number of later critics, most recently Andrei Siniavskii.35 Muse or not, the central point is that Tat'iana has now read Byron, as has Pushkin himself, and so their views of Onegin coalesce, whereas previously they had been separate. Perhaps Tat'iana even scanned the first two cantos of Don Juan (naturally, in Pichot's French, because she herself thought and wrote in that language) and recalled Julia's unhappy fate at her final confrontation with Onegin in Chapter 8.

Tat'iana's visit to Onegin's library sets the scene for the new maturity she displays when the reader and Onegin meet her again in the final chapter after two years have elapsed. Now Tat'iana is married and a great hostess in St Petersburg society. She may despise the pretentious veneer of that society, but she has acquired an authentic existence and the ability to surprise the reader - an ability possessed by 'rounded' characters. Just so she surprises Onegin, who (still a Byronic hero with little to show for his extensive travels) cannot understand why and how she could resist his entreaties.

Onegin's puzzlement has been shared by generations of Russians, who desired a sentimental 'happy ending' rather than the discomfiture of the hero. The responses of even major authors reveal how advanced Pushkin was in his treatment of a female character. As though dis- satisfied with Pushkin's ending, Tolstoi examined the consequences in Anna Karenina of a married woman in Tat'iana's situation yielding to Onegin. Yet the irony is that his portrait of Anna is Byronic rather than Pushkinian. Tolstoi shows her as a woman to whom love is indeed her 'whole existence'. In other words, Tolstoi agreed with Byron's Julia, and not Pushkin's Tat'iana.

Dostoevskii, in his famous i88o speech at the unveiling of the Pushkin monument in Moscow, yearned to change the past and have Onegin accept rather than reject the declaration of love by Tat'iana.36 Extravagant as this sounds, it was Dostoevskii who, in this same i 88o speech, first recognized Tat'iana's central importance and suggested that Pushkin might well have given her name to his work, rather than

34 A. Slonimskii, Masterstvo Pushkina, 2nd revised edn, Moscow, I 963, p. 3 I 8. 35 In his Progulki s Pushkinym, Paris, I 975, Siniavskii insists that Tat'iana rejects Onegin and

stays faithful to her husband just so she can have more free time to read Pushkin's works and pine after him (p. 28), and even that Pushkin turns her into a nun, hiding her for his own delectation (p. 29).

36 See F. M. Dostoevskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh, 30 vols, Leningrad, I 972-90, vol. XXVI, I 984, p. I 40.



444 JOHN GARRARD

Onegin's. Furthermore, Dostoevskii accepted Pushkin's denouement and displayed his familiar psychological insight into Tat'iana's motives in rejecting Onegin's entreaties: '. . . she sees what Onegin is really like. Here is an eternal wanderer, who suddenly sees again a woman he had previously rejected in a new light, dazzling and unobtainable'.37 If we correct his earlier assumption that Tat'iana's husband is old (as a friend of Onegin's, he could easily have been promoted in the field during the Napoleonic wars and still be under forty less than a decade later), and substitute the more appropriate term 'Byronic hero' for skitalets (eternal wanderer), then Dostoevskii has surely got it right. He has understood a fellow writer's insights and the psychological nature of Onegin, even if he is a little hard on him. After all, why should we expect a man like Onegin to change his personality overnight and respond to a young provincial girl's declaration of love?

Dostoevskii, however, then parts company with Pushkin. He wants to believe that Onegin's new-found love for Tat'iana has redeemed him and will change his personality. Pushkin had his doubts, and thus so did Tat'iana. Nevertheless, her bitter understanding of Onegin's personality did not prevent her from looking back nostalgically and regretting the lost opportunities:

A cnacTbe 6bIAO TaK B03MO>KHO,

TaK 6A43K0 ... (8, XLVII) 38

Slonimskii suggests that Tat'iana's statement encapsulates the 'leit- motif of the novel' (p. 380).

Tat'iana possesses what Julia did not - an existence outside of passion. Tat'iana's melancholy words in Chapter 8 look back not only to Onegin's speech in the garden in Chapter 4, but partly to the prediction in her letter that, had Onegin not visited them, she would have married another and settled down to be a faithful wife and mother. In this sense, Tat'iana had necessarily to be rooted in her time, and her time was a very restrictive one for women. She could not vote, study medicine or law, or pursue any profession. Legally she was more property than person, and one of her very few protections in society was her unblemished reputation.

The last time we see Tat'iana, she is about twenty-three - the same age as wasJulia at the turning point in her life. Tat'iana says to Onegin before abruptly leaving the room:

38Ibid., p. i 42. 38 'And yet happiness was possible,! So close. ..'




'51 BaC Aio6AIo (K 'eMy AyKaBHTb?),

Ho X ApyroMy OTAaHa: 51 6yAy BeK eMy BepHa.' (8, XLVII)39

This abrupt dismissal of Onegin may be a reminiscence (in direct discourse and with a change in tense) of Pichot's 'Julia avait de l'honneur, de la vertu; elle aimait don Alfonso et lui etait fidele ...'

(I, Io9).40 Byron had begun with Julia as faithful and then allowed her to succumb. Pushkin shows Tat'iana infatuated, but ends with her as a faithful wife. Some have tried to explain Tat'iana's behaviour by arguing that Pushkin, contemplating marriage himself and already courting the teenage belle Natal'ia Goncharova, was projecting his anxieties and desires onto Tat'iana. If so, then fate played him hard indeed. Yet surely one need not resort to biographism to justify Pushkin's aesthetic choices here. As the tones darken in Onegin, the theme of duty versus love (so common in French literature, and reflected too in Tat'iana's belief in the power of fate - which was Pushkin's own belief too) reaches its inevitable conclusion.

Unlike Julia, when Tat'iana says she will 'ne'er consent', she means it. In refusing to be a Julia, Tat'iana has also refused to make her husband a cuckold. Tat'iana thus avoids the notoriety that Julia and her husband Alfonso endured, casually dismissed by Byron as 'one of the most circulating scandals/That had for centuries been known in Spain' (I, 190).41 In questioning Onegin's motives, Tat'iana shows her sharp awareness that an affair with him would cause just such a 'circulating scandal'. Indeed, her words refract those of Julia, who in her letter alludes to her own shame, but then passively imagines her young lover going on to further triumphs and conquests:

... MOH H030p Teniepb 6b1 BCeMH 6bIA 3aMexleH H4 MOr 6b1 B o6LieCTBe npHHeCTb

BaM co6Aa3HHTeAbHyIo mecb.?42 (8, XLIV)

Here is Pushkin's final answer to Byron's famous couplet about women's limitations. No, love is not 'woman's whole existence'. In this

39 'I love you (why pretend?),/ But I am given to another:/ I shall forever be faithful to him.' 40 Byron's original reads: 'Julia had honour, virtue, truth, and love,/ For Don Alfonso. . .'

Russian scholars, notably in the Soviet period, argue that Pushkin is here borrowing from a popular song published in the eighteenth century by Mikhail Chulkov. See, for example, Slonimskii, Masterstvo Pushkina, p. 343. Whether there exists a verbal echo of Pichot or popular song, the point to remember is that Pushkin was modelling his leading female protagonist on Byron'sJulia, not on a Russian peasant woman. 41 Creatively, but rather ponderously translated by Pichot as 1... l'evenement le plus scandaleux qui, pendant plusieurs siecles, ou du moins depuis l'expulsion des Vandales. . .'. 42 'Would my shame/ Not then be remarked by all/ And would it not bring you in society/

Alluring honour?'



446 JOHN GARRARD

limited sense, Pushkin was able to question the cultural and intellectual assumptions of his own age.

In this whole process of interaction with Don Juan, the role played by Pichot as intermediary was vital. As Nabokov says, Pichot's prose is often a very poor substitute for Byron's energetic verse. It was, however, for a critical period during the creation of Onegin, all that Pushkin had, and he made the most of it. What is more, Pichot not only made Pushkin independent of the Raevskii sons and daughters, but also coloured his appreciation of Don Juan. Pichot's prose contoured Pushkin's appreciation ofJulia by softening Byron's often bitter sarcasm, and thus played a role in focusing the Russian writer's attention on the character ofJulia rather than onJuan himself in the first Canto. Pichot thereby influenced Pushkin's decision to balance Onegin with a rounded portrait of Tat'iana.

A careful comparison between Onegin and Don Juan reveals that Pushkin treated Don Juan as a plastic medium from which he felt free to take whatever suited him, and to reject or adapt the rest. In this process Pushkin's path began to diverge from Byron's, with pregnant consequences not just for Onegin but for the future of Russian literature. Nevertheless, there is no justification for the widely held view that Pushkin was seeking to 'overcome' Byron's influence in order to become a true 'realist'. Such groundless assumptions about the Byron- Pushkin relationship may well have helped prevent generations of scholars from seeing the wisdom of following Pushkin's own advice and exploring the similarities betweenJulia and Tat'iana.

However critical he might have been of certain aspects of Byron's craftsmanship and aesthetic choices, Pushkin retained his admiration for the Englishman. For the epigraph to the final chapter of Onegin Pushkin even used - in English - the opening couplet from Byron's celebrated I8I6 lyric on his departure from England: 'Fare thee well, and if for ever / Still for ever fare thee well'. When he heard of Byron's death in the marshes of Missolonghi, Pushkin amazed the local priest and population at Mikhailovskoe by having a religious service (obednia) performed for the deceased.43 This whole exercise is recounted tongue in cheek, but it bespeaks respect.

Pushkin continued to draw upon Byron and Don Juan through the whole writing of Onegin. He borrowed the Englishman's threat to 'condescend to prose' (Don Juan, I, 204), and there are echoes too of Byron's remark that it is no good accusing him of plots against society's morals because he has 'nothing planned' (Don Juan, IV, 5). Like Byron himself, Pushkin was taking a fresh look at the typical Byronic hero. Byron's reassessment of byronisme took the form of a simple inversion, a

43 See Pis'ma, p. 135.




travesty of the Byronic poem - as useful but limited as Scarron's Virgile travesti. Pushkin too parodies the epic by 'paying his respects to classicism' and offering the obligatory opening, 'Of a young friend I sing. . .', but only at the end of Chapter 7.

As, however, the comparison betweenjulia and Tat'iana has shown, these echoes took place only on a superficial level and did not determine the plot, tone, and characterization of Onegin. It is through Tat'iana that Pushkin channels his most fundamental critique of the Byronic hero, a character who does not develop and whose interior landscape never changes. Pushkin saw something more in the situation of the Byronic lover and the woman he scorns. What if all the components that go to make up the 'Byronic' male in love create a man who is not very interesting after all? What if the woman has more depth, more character, more heart, and more courage? Here was potential indeed, enabling Tat'iana to break out of the chrysalis of love as woman's whole existence. Until that moment in Russian literature, female characters had been like sculpted bas relief- imprisoned by the sources that had inspired them.

As the poem draws to a close, Pushkin moves beyond the question he posed to Bestuzhev in I825. Of course, Tat'iana is 'sweeter and more charming' than Julia - the character who helped inspire her creation; although if she were merely sweet and charming, she would not yet be Tat'iana. By giving Tat'iana his own values, Pushkin intends to raise her in the reader's esteem. For Pushkin, honour binds a woman as much as it does a man. That is Pushkin's chief message and a central part of his response to Byron's poem. It is fascinating to observe the creative interaction between Pushkin and Byron, which demonstrates a special kind of influence mingled with adaptation. Pushkin was initially impressed by Byron's portrait ofJulia, via the medium of Pichot. Then it is as if Pushkin decided to engage in a friendly literary dispute with Byron, as though to say: What if ... ? Why not try this another way? Just as a great chess master can look at a well-known position on the board and see moves that have not been explored before, so Pushkin saw possibilities latent within a literary situation which could open up vistas for his own novel in verse. Pushkin drew upon Don Juan, via the medium of Pichot's French prose, in order to create his own unique masterpiece, which unites what Mirsky described well as 'the fertility of the creative impulse and the steadiness of critical inhibition'.44

As we have seen, Pushkin adopted several aspects of the English poet's narrative style. He replaced satire, however, with irony, episodic narration with structure and plot, and - to borrow the felicitous juxtaposition of Lilian Furst- the 'man of sensibility' with the 'woman

44 D. S. Mirsky, Pushkin, p. I38.



448 JOHN GARRARD

of sense'. Lilian Furst's analysis ofJane Austen's use of irony reminds us of Pushkin. The differences between the two writers are many, and yet it would be hard to find a more judicious assessment of Pushkin's achievement in Onegin: 'Within the precisely structured social and artistic organisation of Pride and Prejudice the equivocations of irony yield to the certainties of affirmation.'45 In the words of Maurice Baring, who was careful to avoid anachronism, Onegin is 'a realistic novel [. . .] realistic in the sense that Miss Austen is realistic'. Baring continues: 'Pushkin in his Onegin succeeded in doing what Shelley urged Byron to do - to create something new and in accordance with the spirit of the age, which should at the same time be beautiful.'46

45 Lilian R. Furst, Fictions ofRomantic Irony, Cambridge, Massachusets, 1984, p. 67. See also the same author's 'The Man of Sensibility and the Woman of Sense', Jahrbuch fir Internationale Germanistik, I4, I983, I, pp. 13-26. 46 Maurice Baring, An Outline of Russian Literature, pp. 74, 78.



corresponding heroines in "don juan" and "evgenii onegin"

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