ABSTRACT
The Russian novel begins in poetry, with Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. He worked on it from 1823 until 1831, during a decade when Russian verse still held the supremacy over prose. There are many aspects of Eugene Onegin , which was to initiate so much in Russian literature. The first and most important must be the quality of its language Pushkin’s attitude to Russian society, even though Evgeny stands not far from the Childe Harold of Byron, the Adolphe of Benjamin Constant, and the Chatsky of Griboyedov in his comedy Woe from Wit , improves on satire, because the poet responds to a quality in Tatyana that eludes Onegin, her imaginative sense of Russia. Pushkin’s handling of aristocratic life, of scenes in drawing-rooms and in officers’ billets, taught Lermontov, Turgenev and the young Tolstoy a notation which they used more fully but could scarcely improve.
