![]() ![]() Tolstoy called this the major influence for Anna Karenina, and you can see it. The version I have includes some fragments after VIII - stuff that survived the flames for whatever reason - but it's really not enough to be more than a curiosity. The story ends abruptly at Chapter VIII Pushkin had to do some last-minute rearranging, by which I mean burning most of a chapter that was critical of the government, which really throws the pace off there. ![]() He's no Mos Def, but he's pretty good with the rhymes. My boy Stanley Mitchell has done what feels like an admirable job I'm sure if I knew Russian I'd say he brutalized the thing, but one takes what one can get and this version felt readable and elegant. ![]() It also makes a tough challenge for a translator, and for a long time Onegin was considered untranslatable. But in a good way! Tetrameter has a dangerous tendency to sound sing-songy to me, and this helps counterbalance that somehow. The scheme is abab, ccdd, effe, gg, so he's switching it up in each quatrain, which leaves me constantly off-balance. It's organized in stanzas that are almost sonnets, but far enough off to kindof fuck with your head, or mine anyway. It's a "novel in verse," which means epic poem, wtf, in iambic tetrameter. And it's only around 200 pages, so it's not as much of a commitment as, y'know, those other Russian assholes who can't stop writing. ![]()
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