Eugene Onegin Themes

Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin is a novel about youthful passions that have consequences and continue to haunt the characters even as months and years pass. At the heart of it is a duel between Lensky and Eugene, which arises from a conflict that began as a harmless prank. Before the duel, Eugene is a jaded man in his 20s who has stopped seeing pleasure in the world. Lensky, meanwhile, is an enthusiastic teenager who enjoys…

Eugene Onegin is a novel about the attempted courtships of Lensky and Olga, and Eugene and Tatyana. Although the narrator claims that love and romance are some of the most important parts of life, his portrayal of courtship rituals and marriage is often humorous and cynical. In the case of the sisters Olga and Tatyana, for example, the narrator notes how each fails to live up to the heroines who appear in romantic…

The novel Eugene Onegin explores what it meant to be Russian in the 19th century. As the narrator points out, one of the main contradictions of Russian life at the time was that Russian identity was often directly influenced by other countries, particularly in Europe. The epitome of this is Eugene Onegin himself, who is in some ways the quintessential cosmopolitan Russian of the era, going out to all the social functions, at least until…