Dear yuri,
I enjoyed seeing the film of Eugene Onegin with you during your brief stay in London. I know that the film had a hostile reception in your country. Many Russians considered it impertinent of a British director to film their national poem. Critics leapt with glee upon the movie's most conspicuous blunder-a Soviet song in a 19th-century drawing room. But I saw nothing offensive to Russia in this modest and intelligent attempt to render Pushkin to film. The idea that a nation's culture is inaccessible to foreigners would have puzzled Pushkin, who wrote French as fluently as Russian and borrowed freely from Byron. Pushkin is credited with giving Russia a voice of its own, but he could only do that because he had assimilated everything that was best in European culture. Now that he himself has become part of European culture, it is only fair to grant Britsh artists the same licence with him.
Onegin is very much an Anglicised version of Pushkin's poem. Martha Fiennes wisely decided not to try to replicate the Russian tone of the original. Awkward silence has replaced easy chatter, and the whole thing is pervaded by a typically English atmosphere of brooding introspection. The characters are what the Russian originals might have been had they been English. Lensky is an amicable but hapless public school boy; Onegin himself resembles one of those taciturn heroes of Victorian romance-a Rochester or a Heathcliff. Superbly acted by Ralph Fiennes, he is a more substantial figure than the "superfluous man" of Pushkin's poem.
These differences reflect not only the translation of Russian into English, but also the translation of poetry into film. Film is a more stolid medium than verse. It is tethered, by the very nature of mechanical production, to the real world; it is best suited to the realism of a Tolstoy or a Dickens. How could one possibly reproduce in film the endless digressions and asides, the parodies and self-parodies, the irony and nonsense of Eugene Onegin? In Pushkin's hands, the sad story of Eugene and Tatiana all but disappears under a sumptuous display of virtuosity. Pushkin is often writing for the sheer pleasure of writing itself. Martha Fiennes does not try to imitate Pushkin's stylistic exuberance. Instead she limits herself to the bare action of the poem-a sombre narrative of thwarted love.
The combined effect of these two transformations, cultural and aesthetic, is to turn Eugene Onegin into a conventional romantic tragedy. Pushkin's poem is something more elusive than this. It is pervaded by a wonderfully delicate irony, the effect of which is to dissolve the individual misfortunes of Lensky, Tatiana and Onegin into a more general sense of the futility of life. Lensky is killed in a senseless duel, but perhaps that is best for him; he would never have become anything more than a mediocre poet. Onegin loses Tatiana, but he will not die of grief. He will continue to go to balls and to indulge in loveless romances. He is, moreover, a character of no particular significance-a mere Petersburg fop. From the standpoint of eternity, none of this really matters. Generations "rise, ripen and must fall; others come in their wake..." Happiness is beyond the reach of humankind-only fools believe that they are happy. Alexander Herzen famously described the "three strings on the Russian lyre" as sadness, scepticism and irony; no work better exemplifies these qualities than Eugene Onegin.
But what distinguishes Pushkin's work from similar reflections by other Russian writers is its lack of bitterness. The futility of life in no way diminishes its charm or interest for Pushkin. If anything, it adds to it. Pushkin's heart goes out to all that is ephemeral and trifling; grandeur leaves him cold. Pushkin describes in minute detail the album of a country girl, the ritual of a Petersburg dandy, the daily life of the rural gentry. He rescues these trifles from the oblivion to which they would otherwise be condemned, by setting them in the amber of his verse. They are redeemed through aesthetic love. The affair of Tatiana and Onegin is no more than another such trifle, immortalised through art.
It is perhaps revealing that Russians look upon this inconsequential story as the foundation of their national literature. Compare it to Goethe's Faust, which occupies a similar status in German literature. Goethe wrote Faust with the clear intention of creating a national epic, of raising German letters to the height of Shakespeare and Racine. But why did Pushkin write Eugene Onegin? I don't know, but it seems quite possible that he wrote it to while away some empty moments. What does this reveal about the Russian character? You will be able to talk with more authority on this subject than I can.
Best wishes,
Edward
dear edward,
My philosopher friend Merab Mamardashvili used to say that there are many cultures and languages, but only one civilisation. It was his view that cultures are incompatible. As soon as they come into contact they produce sparks; direct contact between them is almost impossible. But spiritual and intellectual contacts between people from different cultures are possible. We call these contacts civilisation.
You write that the English Onegin met with a hostile reception in Russia. That is not quite so. Rather it was received with a mixture of pride and self-mockery. Here is a not untypical review from the newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets, with a circulation of more than 2m: "Paradoxically, it took the English to present us with a truly Russian film. No foreigners' myths about Russia... It is an impeccable reading of a classic. Noble life, noble people. Only, one of them, a fool, doesn't realise initially what life is all about. Leaving aside the top hats and the Russian names, this is a story of universal appeal.
"Ralph Fiennes and Liv Tyler play an Onegin we didn't know before. We can forget for a moment that it is a screening of a literary work, and look at it as an ordinary love story. It is the story of an innocent country girl who falls for a Petersburg dandy with a thing about freedom ('marriage is not for me'). He then sees her later at a ball, a dazzling noblewoman, and falls to his knees ('how wrong I was'). But it is too late."
I, too, think that Martha Fiennes and her colleagues have done justice to the Pushkin original. But for me the "it is too late" metaphor takes on a larger meaning in the context of subsequent Russian history. Onegin is much more than a disenchanted romantic hero, a Russian Childe Harold. Pushkin's poem has affinities with Sophocles's Oedipus, with Dante's Divine Comedy, or, more recently, with Kubrick's film, Eyes Wide Shut. It is about a person who looks but does not see, who already knows the oracle's prophecy but still murders his father and marries his mother.
What I am saying is that we-individuals and Russia itself-should be born anew, so as to become aware of our stupidity and to overcome mistrust and disappointment. Love and friendship are the most important things in human life. But what is true friendship or love? It's when people accept each other as they are. With a friend, you may know his shortcomings but you accept him. Friendship and love are infrequent in real life. And they are always a source of wonder.
Pushkin did not tell the world anything new about the Russian character. But for his novel in verse he invented the "Onegin stanza" (creating a cosy intonation of friendly chat) and, relying solely on that instrument, he showed-convincingly, in my view-that Russian man does not differ much from his European neighbours.
The concepts of courage and cowardice, sincerity and insincerity, responsibility and irresponsibility, do not apply to situations in which "it is too late." If something has already happened, it is too late to lament or be furious, let alone accuse anyone. But it is never too late to start thinking about how to avoid the same situation in the future. This is the message of Pushkin's poem and it is a relevant one to Russia today.
All success,
Yuri
Translated from the Russian by Evgenie Filipov
