Village Pushkin

I came to the Pushkin mountains with Evgeny Onegin. I prefer to consume lunch and books where they grew up, and rarely go on a road without the escort of local authors. In the south, I read Faulkner, in the north - Nansen, in the west - the strap of Gart, in the east - Kavabata, in Vermont - Solzhenitsyn, in the village - "Evgeny Onegin", for I will decide that Pushkin opened this page of Russian history, becoming the first village man in it.

If Dostoevsky’s tie is formed abroad, and the denouement is in Russia, then Pushkin Petersburg serves as a prologue, Moscow - an epilogue, and the action takes place in the village. In the "Onegin" two real time: now and always - as in the opera, where the recitative moves the action, and Aria sings about the eternal. The difference is the same as between prose and verses. The village slows down the novel, making it possible and replacing it with a poem. In this book, the city is a frame, a picture is a rural landscape: a melancholy area with estates that once formed a network of cultural substations (Fichte, embroidery, clavichords).

Onegin moved to the village inadvertently. Then a life was waiting for him, reminiscent of a ride in a Russian train: endless, monotonous, with random neighbors - and absolutely idle. Especially after "he replaced the corvee with an old frill in the old firmware," not wanting to serve as a collective farm foreman. Squeezing linen, measured as weights, rustic life introduces Onegin into a trance. Having rejected “Thoughts of Dead Capital”, he thoughtlessly dissolves in the surrounding and indifferently (and means poetically) reflects him in the descriptions that convey the “holy” boredom of the rural idyll:

Walks, reading, deep sleep,

Forest shadow, murmur of jets.

Although Onegin is a source of all troubles in the novel, Pushkin forgives him everything, because Onegin does not fit into the novel. He has no place in the plot or in the universe, for Onegin is an unfinished character, which means (hello to Sartre) is free. Like all spontaneous existentialists, Onegin realizes his freedom in a whim. Having lost the hope of becoming a slave in peace, he is doomed to stand on the threshold of someone else's happiness - and grief. Pushkin hid his hero according to his favorite model: a feast during the plague. Actually, Onegin is both a feast and a plague: like a feast - a drunk, like a plague - unable to stop. Without knowing how to let the roots into any soil, Onegin leads a light - ethereal - life. Therefore, his image is doubled. First, he is a guardian angel, then a fallen angel, and only at the end Onegin again becomes himself: a failed man is superfluous.

In a dense literary context of the novel, everyone imitates their beloved author. Lensky lives according to Schiller, Onegin - according to Byron, Tatyana - like Richardson, but in fact - according to Pushkin.

She is the voice of the village, land, landscape, the guardian of the Holy Mountains. The light and the city nevertheless made it a calm English woman, that is, the fat general achieved what Onegin could not cope with, but only because the author put a hand, which turned Tatyana into the ice ideal of each cholera, primarily the author. In the final, Tatyana is like a grown Pushkin, Pushkin after the village. Therefore, the Moscow described at the end of the book is Petersburg for disappointed. Moscow Tatyana is an exhausted champagne of Onegin Petersburg.

From the village, the author tells, there is no way back.