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Chapter 4
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Eugene Onegin, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Youth, Regrets, and the Passage of Time
Love, Courtship, and Marriage
Poetry vs. Reality
Russian Identity
Summary
Analysis
Meanwhile, Tatyana finds winter a cheerful time of year when everything glows with silver snow. She particularly loves traditions around Christmas, including the folklore and superstitions. She also believes in the power of dreams and cards to predict the future, and she sees shooting stars as omens. One of the prophecy games that she plays during the Yuletide season foretells a death to come soon.
Tatyana’s belief in superstitions points to her desire for clear, unambiguous answers to the conflicts of her life. In this regard, she has much in common with many of the other characters who turn to literature for insight into love, romance, and the meaning of life in general. The death prophecy she encounters is a dark omen that may foreshadow at a literal death to come, or perhaps a metaphorical death, like the death of Tatyana’s (or another character’s) youthful idealism.
Themes
One dark night, Tatyana tries unsuccessfully to use the moon and a mirror to divine the face of her future husband. That night she dreams about trying to cross a shaky bridge over a chasm. She reaches out for help but instead finds a bear coming after her. She runs, making it across the bridge into the woods until she can’t run anymore. The bear finds her, picks her up, and takes her back to his hut. He speaks and invites her to warm herself inside his place.
Eugene compared Olga to the moon earlier, noting that both are beautiful, but also cold and distant. Although Tatyana thinks her divination wasn’t successful, in some ways the moon’s coldness predicts the eventual coldness of her own marriage in the final chapter. Tatyana’s strange dream of being chased by a bear over a shaky bridge reflects her new reservations about loving so openly and vulnerably. Eugene’s rejection has taught her the dangers of wearing her heart on her sleeve. The bear, which alternates between fearsome and caring, seems to represent Eugene.
Themes
When Tatyana wakes up, she realizes she’s in a hall somewhere outside a feast, and she doesn’t see any bear around. Tatyana peeks inside at the feast and sees all sorts of strange monsters like a dog with horns, a skeleton, and a crab sitting on a spider. She is even more surprised when she notices Eugene sitting among all the monsters, entertaining them and drinking with them. Tatyana opens the door a little wider, and Eugene sees her.
Although Tatyana wakes up in this section, the monsters that she sees make it clear that she is still very much in a dream. The image of Eugene among the monsters suggests that there is something monstrous about him deep inside, despite his ordinary external appearance. This shows how Tatyana is beginning to see through the idealized, romantic version of Eugene that she once worshipped.
Themes
Eugene opens the door wider, and all the monsters seem to stare at Tatyana, who wants to run away but feels too weak. “She’s mine!” says Eugene, and the monsters leave. Eugene takes Tatyana to a corner of the room and rests his head on her shoulder. Just then, Olga and Lensky enter the room. They argue with Eugene, getting more intense, until eventually Eugene strikes down Lensky with a knife. Lensky’s cry sends a shiver down Tatyana’s spine, and with that she wakes up from the dream, in her bedroom again.
Eugene’s attack on Lensky with a knife foreshadows a conflict that will soon arise between the two men. The monsters and Eugene’s knife attack symbolize the violence lurking beneath the “civilized” veneer of westernized society, which presents itself as courtly and elegant but is in fact no less harsh or violent than the Russian culture it has replaced. The dream seems at first to give Tatyana what she wants—for Eugene to love her—before abruptly tearing it away from her. This reflects how so many characters in the novel chase things that they think they want, only to end up disillusioned and disappointed.
Themes
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Tatyana tries to look up the meaning of her dream in a book. She feels like the dream has sent her a message, and it disturbs her not to know what the message is. But the dream interpretation book she reads doesn’t help, and she’s troubled by the dream for many days.
Just as Tatyana tried to understand romance based on romance novels, now she turns to books to understand her dreams. Tatyana’s inability to find a clear answer in the book reflects how, while books can sometimes broaden a person’s perspective of the world, they are not magic decoders that reveal secrets of life. Ultimately, only the experience of living can provide these answers, and they’re often less straightforward and unambiguous than people would like them to be.
Themes
Eventually, the day of Tatyana’s name-day feast arrives. Relatives and neighbors all come to celebrate, even the narrator’s cousin. Everyone is excited, having heard there will be a ball in the evening. Amid the celebrations at dinner, Lensky and Eugene arrive. Tatyana turns “paler than the moon at dawn” when Lensky and Eugene are seated across the table from her. Eugene notices Tatyana trembling, and at this point, he is just annoyed by her and angry at Lensky for forcing him to come, particularly because Lensky downplayed how many people would be at the event. Everyone else is too busy eating to notice how Tatyana feels.
This passage shows how even at a celebration in Tatyana’s honor, people still ignore her feelings and desires—nobody cares (or thinks to care) that Eugene’s presence at the party might make her uncomfortable, for instance. Although Eugene was once moved by Tatyana’s affection for him, it’s now just an annoyance to him. Ironically, while Eugene is tired of the rituals of European upper-class social life, he also gets mad at Tatyana because her straightforward, honest love letter to him broke from the prescribed social norms that govern rituals of (Western) courtship. and showed her ignorance of social customs. And so, Eugene is in a bind, unhappy with the superficiality of social conventions but also unhappy when they’re disrupted, reflecting a paradox of life in Russia at the time. In a broader sense, Eugene’s conflicted attitude toward Tatyana’s frankness reflects his (and perhaps Pushkin’s, as well) feeling torn between the new European culture of St. Petersburg and the old Russian way of life he experiences in the country.
Themes
At the dinner, a man named Triquet stands up and starts to sing something he wrote in Tatyana’s honor. Afterward, when it’s time for everyone to wish Tatyana well on her day, Eugene takes pity on her and speaks sincerely, which reawakens Tatyana’s interest in him. Then everyone pushes back the chairs to make space to dance, and musicians start to play.
Although Triquet is supposedly honoring Tatyana, this passage makes it clear that he is really just trying to earn glory for himself by singing in public. This is similar to how the narrator mentioned that when Lensky recites poetry for Olga, he does so sometimes for the pleasure of hearing his own voice. In both cases, the narration points to the fundamental superficiality of courtship and of social norms in general.
Themes
The narrator says the ball is so glorious that his words can’t do it justice. Feeling mischievous and still annoyed that he had to come to the party, Eugene asks Olga to dance. Lensky can’t believe what he’s seeing. Eugene dances so well that he makes Olga blush. Lensky becomes angry and jealous. When Eugene and Olga keep dancing together, Lensky at last leaves the party and rides off to get pistols for a duel.
Eugene’s casual (if calculated) decision to dance with Olga to make Lensky jealous ends up having massive consequences for the rest of the novel, as it’s implied that Lensky has decided to challenge Eugene to a duel in retaliation. This passage underscores the dangers of getting too carried away with passion. It also points to yet another negative outcome of Europe’s influence on Russia: the duel, a tradition that came to Russia by way of Western Europe in the 17th century.
Themes
