42. Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin

Onegin is to Onega as Pechorin is to Pechora. The link is rivers. Pushkin named his hero after the freezing northern-Russian River Onega; in homage to Pushkin, Lermontov, in A Hero of our Time, named his main character after the even more freezing and even more northerly River Pechora. Both rivers yielded rather odd-sounding surnames, and it is likely that Pushkin was deliberately trying to foster the impression of an outsider, a man who did not really fit in: it is not a coincidence that Onegin was the progenitor of the ‘superfluous man’, a mainstay of the Russian nineteenth-century novel later developed in the work of Lermontov (Pechorin) and Turgenev (Rudin in the book of the same name). Educated and cosmopolitan, the superfluous man at the same time lacked purpose, identity, even Russianness, since he spoke French and modelled himself on Byron. As Pushkin wrote of his hero:

What is he? Just an apparition
A shadow, null and meaningless,
A Muscovite in Harold’s dress,
A modish second-hand edition…

Consulted:
Pushkin, Alexander and Bayley, John, ed.: Eugene Onegin (1979)
Jones, MV, and Miller, RF: The Cambridge Companion to the Classic Russian Novel (1998)

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