Eugene Onegin
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.
Guests
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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
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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)