Alexander Pushkin’s Verse Novel Eugene Onegin: A Form-True Dialogic Verse Translation with Lyrical Replies and Supplements Including a Dialogic Introduction with Caryl Emerson (the present essay by the Author, Martin Bidney) A lexander Pushkin (1799-1837) is Russia’s most beloved poet. Eugene Onegin, called by Pushkin a “novel in verse,” is Russia’s favorite narrative poem and her most influential novel. The narrative – about what was widely called a “superfluous man” – sets a context for works by Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov that were to follow. From Lord Byron, Pushkin borrowed a clever device: the use of a casual narrator who becomes a fascinating character in the story. Composer Tchaikovsky made Onegin into a great tragic opera, but the had to leave out the entertaining character of the narrator – plus all the delightful mood changes in the storyteller’s personality. As Pushkin’s form-faithful translator, I’ve created a new genre of literature, the verse interview book. For every 14-line poem (sonnet) of Pushkin’s, I offer a Pushkin-style “reply” poem. So the book becomes a total dialogue, really two verse novels in conversation. Utterly unprecedented. The translator as collocutor. Professor Caryl Emerson is the foremost authority on the “dialogic” approach to literature explored by Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin. So my“Introduction” takes the form of a dialogue with her! At the start she writes, “I just read the first two stanzas… you’re awfully good. And of course an in-form dialogic response is completely in keeping with the digressive, invasive, in-your-face nature of Pushkin’s indulgent Narrator.” That sets the tone for all of her remarks. Pushkin’s novel features one of the best-loved characters in Russian prose or verse, the young woman Tatyana Larina. Her thoughtful strength of spirit and convention-defying boldness will remind many readers of Charlotte Brontë’s admirable Jane Eyre. In one of my podcasts dealing with the present volume I tried to show what an honor it was to be the commentator responding to this heroine in interpretive poetry (see martinbidney.org). In another podcast I responded to the more satirically treated Eugene. I’ve been thinking about this Pushkinian verse novel since at age 19 I first encountered it as a Russian major at Indiana University in a course taught by Prof. Walter Vickery. It still carries, for me, such a wealth of memories (literary and biographical) that I have included in this book a fair number of related poems by other, mainly Russian, poets – many of them contemporaries of Pushkin. Additional light may be cast on this ultimate masterwork of Russian narrative verse by a perusal of Pushkin’s glorious happy-and-solemn Gabri-iliad, which I have also translated in – of course – my favorite “con-vers-ational” book format.
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