Книга: Eugene Onegin

Eugene Onegin (1833) is a comedy of manners, written in exquisitely crafted verse, about two young members of the Russian gentry, the eponymous hero and the girl Tatyana, who don t quite connect. It is also the greatest masterpiece of Russian literature - the source of the human archetypes and the attitudes that define and govern the towering fictional creations of nineteenth-century Russia - and one of the most celebrated poems of the world. Before Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837) wrote Eugene Onegin, his nation s literature was a parochial one; after he wrote it, due in no small part to its power and influence, the Russian tradition became one of the central traditions of Western civilization.