Evolution of the main characters of the novel Eugene Onegin. Spiritual evolution of eugene onegin

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The novel "Eugene Onegin" - Pushkin's favorite brainchild - was written over almost eight years - from the spring of 1823 to the fall of 1830. In addition, he returned to the novel in the fall of 1833. In this work "one of the most significant ideas of the poet found its fullest embodiment - to give the image of a" hero of the time ", a typical portrait of his contemporary - a man of the new, XIX century." (1) The author put a lot into this book: mind and heart, youth and wise maturity, moments of joy and sorrow, longing and longing of the soul, hours of sleepless thoughts - a person's entire life in all its manifestations. And it is important to note that "descriptions and reflections on behalf of the author are given in" Eugene Onegin "an immeasurably greater place than the direct development of the plot action." (2) The author himself, in a letter to his brother, evaluates Onegin as his best work: “Maybe I will send him (Delvig - A. Sh.) Excerpts from Onegin; this is my best work. Do not trust N. Raevsky, who scolds him - he expected romanticism from me, found satire and cynicism, and did not swell up a lot. " (3)
First of all, it is important to note the historicism of the novel. For example, Belinsky says that Eugene Onegin is a historical poem in the full sense of the word, although there is not a single historical person among its heroes. " (4) F.M. Dostoevsky calls the poem "palpably real, in which real Russian life is embodied with such creative power and such completeness, which never happened before Pushkin, and perhaps even after him." (5) It is impossible to snatch the novel, when critically examined, from its historical context. In this work, an attempt is made to look at the evolution of the image of Onegin from an Orthodox historical perspective.

And although, according to S. Bondi, the plot of "Eugene Onegin" is very simple (6), it is difficult to disagree with Belinsky, who calls Pushkin's novel "an encyclopedia of Russian life and an extremely popular manifestation." a lot, and comprehensively about the life of Russia at the beginning of the XIX century. But the main thing in the novel is not a general description of the "Russian state", but a full of contradictions image of the protagonist, reflected in his fate.

Contradictions in Onegin, a combination of some positive features with sharply negative ones, are found throughout the novel. D. D. Blagoy notes on this matter: "The main method, with the help of which Onegin's character is especially prominent, is the method of contrast." (8) Moreover, the contrast is observed not so much in relation to the characters of the various heroes of the novel, but rather in relation to the internal contradictions of the personality of the protagonist. It would seem that these contrasting contradictions should give rise to a change in Onegin's character. After all, the characters of the main characters in literary works “are not something given once and for all, stopped, frozen; on the contrary, as in life itself, they are in a state of constant movement, development. " (9) It is assumed that, changing, Onegin internally, as it were, evolves into a different, albeit far from the moral ideal, person. Traditionally, in Russian literary criticism, which has repeatedly turned to the novel, there are several points of view on the evolution of the image of the protagonist. The purpose of this work is to consider the following problem: is there a process of evolution of the image of the protagonist and, if there is, its result. Indeed, if the evolution of the image is positively resolved in the novel, then “it is extremely important to delve into each stage of this evolution, without omitting a single link”. (10) According to the "Dictionary of the Russian language" S.I. Ozhegov's image, in a work of art, is a type, a character. The evolution of the hero's image is one of the methods used by Pushkin to consider the main problem of the novel and determine the main idea. The main problem is the problem of the meaning and purpose of life. “Apparently, the condition - whether Onegin will acquire a high goal or it will be inaccessible to him - will become decisive at the final stage of the hero's spiritual evolution. And yet, whether Onegin finds a purpose, this time will forever remain open. An affirmative answer is not ruled out, but it is not guaranteed either. " (eleven)

Who is the main character of the novel "Eugene Onegin"? The answer to this question is quite clear: of course, the one by whose name Pushkin named his work, of course, Eugene! "The choice of the title and name of the protagonist was not accidental." (12) The name in the novel plays a special role, adds something to the image of Onegin. It was this name, which had a rather common sense, was worn by the hero of one of the novels popular at that time. The author, giving a name to the hero, put a definite and well-known meaning in Pushkin's contemporary literature. "Eugene (- noble) is a name denoting a negative, satirically depicted character of a young nobleman who enjoys the privileges of his ancestors, but does not have their merits." (13)

Likewise, the patronymic, or generic name, in Russia has always had a special meaning. "The title of the novel seems to contain the name of the protagonist, but the reader still does not know his patronymic." (14) It was customary to call even minor representatives of the noble family by their full names. The absence of a patronymic in Pushkin's work has a separate meaning: "there is no patronymic, not because the hero has lost the fullness of his individuality, but because he has not acquired his own name in its entirety." (15)

Describing the hero's childhood and youth, the poet finds the most accurate, most convincing words to tell how unhappily Yevgeny was brought up: he does not know how to feel, suffer, rejoice. But he knows how to "hypocrite, seem, appear." But, like many secular people, he knows how to get bored, languish…. "The agonizing, inescapable" boredom "- dissatisfaction with others - a property inherent in a number of his progressive contemporaries well known to Pushkin." (16). Onegin's life is variegated and at the same time monotonous. It seems to have everything in it: both the prosperity not to work, and balls every evening and other entertainment, and education, and love. But everything, as it were, jokingly: education only in the form of historical anecdotes, and education from a wretched Frenchman, and love in the form of vulgar flirting. Onegin is an egoistic man, which is not surprising in principle: his father paid almost no attention to him, completely and completely surrendering to his affairs, entrusting him to foreign governors - "Monsieur and Madame", obviously one of those charlatans who flooded Russia after the French Revolution. Those, in turn, cared little about the upbringing of the child: they only "scolded a little for pranks", "did not bother with strict morality." The boy grew into a person who thinks only about himself, about his desires and pleasures, who does not know how, and does not want to pay attention to the feelings, interests, suffering of others, who can easily offend a person, offend, humiliate - hurt a person without even thinking above this. “The good inclinations of his soul, thanks to his upbringing, remained hidden in a life situation, did not receive development.” (17)

And here we have the hero of the novel - a contradictory and ambiguous personality. This is an empty slacker who is "sick of hard work", leading an inactive, meaningless, chaotic life. And at the same time, he is a sincere and seeker person. He did not receive a systematic education, but he can in no way be called a complete ignoramus, tk. his teachers were books, albeit not always of a high content, but which laid in him observation and unrealized desire for any activity. By nature, he is a subtle and intelligent person. But willpower, the desire for creation, creativity are not brought up in him, and he is not able to find a worthy application for his abilities and vitality. He is not interested in how the people around him live, because he sees only the same as himself, moral monsters. But he cannot find an application for his forces, and he does not know why. But not only a depraved society formed him, but he did not resist this depravity. The result is the hero's complete loneliness. But Onegin is lonely not only because he was disappointed in the light, but also because he did not find the opportunity to see real friendship, love, closeness of human souls. One cannot agree with V.G. Belinsky who asserted that "Onegin is a suffering egoist ... he can be called an unwilling egoist." (eighteen). Except for one thing: Onegin really suffers, because an egoist cannot but suffer, because selfishness is a disease, a disease of the soul. Moreover, "psychologically Onegin is disabled." (19) He is definitely a spiritual invalid. And, like any other, the disease of egoism also brings pain and suffering. But to be "selfish against his will" is the choice of the hero himself. Choosing such a way of life, Eugene rejects another image that the Creator has put into a person - the image of God, and becomes a symbol and a sign, becoming like the neighbors despised by him. And his life, like those of his kind, is filled not with actions, but with gestures. “The habit of symbolic relationships dooms Onegin to make mostly gestures, one of which becomes the reason for the death of his young friend. There is a regularity in the fact that a sign inevitably requires from a person not an act, but a gesture - a rejection of the image. ”(20)
This is how the author portrays the manifestation of Onegin's image, for example, in the theater: he is not interested in the stage, but only in himself, so he is bored: "he enters, walks between the chairs on his legs, a double lorgnette, squinting, leads unfamiliar ladies to the boxes ..." , barely glancing at the stage "in great distraction," already "turned away - and yawned." In each of his actions, there is simultaneously self-admiration and contempt for those around him, the same as himself, people.
Barely in his early adolescence, having entered the world, Eugene indulged in secular entertainment, trying to nourish the emptiness of his soul with them:
He in his first youth
Was a victim of violent delusions
And unbridled passions.

The years spent in the world of falsehood and corruption were not in vain. "The eternal murmur of the soul" was replaced by indifference because passions cannot nourish the soul of a person. The more a person tries to satisfy his passionate desires, the more the fire of passions flares up. It burns the soul of a person to the ground, devastates it more and more:
He did not fall in love with beauties,
And he dragged himself somehow;
Refuse - instantly consoled;
They will change - I was glad to have a rest.

Hobbies turned out to be empty. And life is a senseless play of passions. Dreams are useless and unrealizable. From meaninglessness came indifference to life:
So surely an indifferent guest
Comes to the evening whist,
Sits down; game over:
He leaves the yard
He falls asleep quietly at home
And he himself does not know in the morning
Where will he go in the evening.

Both in the novel and in subsequent, especially Soviet, literary criticism, the word "passion" is used very often and in some positive sense. For example, Abram Lvovich Stein argues that being subject to the passions of both the author and the heroes of Onegin's novel gives them “a great advantage, since "Passions enrich a person spiritually, give him that intense attention, which becomes the source of his mental superiority." (21) In the dictionary of the Church Slavonic language, "passion" is explained as "unbridled attraction, suffering, illness." (22) And in the “Symphony on the works of St. Tikhon of Zadonsky ”by Schema-Archimandrite John (Maslov) there is a more detailed interpretation of this concept:“ Passions are internal idols in the heart of a person. Vile, for passion instead of God is worshiped as an idol. Those who work passions, such as: fornicators, drunkards, evil-doers, robbers and others like them, who are obvious our enemy - the devil, captives, and under his heavy yoke and dark power are in disaster. Passion and custom blind the eye of the soul - the mind - so that a person does not see his calamity and harm ”. (23)

A disorderly life full of service to passions leads to the fact that even the very structure of life is violated. Truth and falsehood, light and darkness, good and evil, and even day and night are changing places.
What is my Onegin? Half asleep
He goes to bed from the ball:
And Petersburg is restless
Already awakened by the drum.

The residents of St. Petersburg, who are sometimes called the inhabitants, have already begun their difficult working day. And the hero of the novel is alien to labor, therefore
... tired of the noise of the ball
And turning the morning into midnight,
Sleeps quietly in the shade of the blissful
Having fun and luxury child.

Dunaev M.M. notes on this occasion, “that Onegin possesses the fullness, as far as possible in his condition, of treasures on earth. Usually a person of eudemonic culture thinks everything that Pushkin's hero has as the basis of earthly happiness: youth, health, wealth. Onegin does not even mention the latter: for him, of course, of course, and does not constitute a concern. The hero of Western European literature usually recognizes everything listed here as the goal of his everyday activity, and if he achieves that, he calms down in contentment with himself and with life. But here is the “mysterious Russian nature”: everything is given in hand, I don’t want to live, but he just doesn’t want to, mope and languishes with life ... and origin, and upbringing, and education - doomed a person to that spirit of idleness, which turns into an inevitable blues ” ... (24)

The senseless, "one-sounding noise of life" drains Onegin's soul. The author directly calls Eugene's state of mind a disease, an ailment.
The disease, which is the cause
It would be high time to find
Like an English spleen
In short: Russian blues ...
The blues were waiting for him on guard,
And she ran after him,
Like a shadow or a faithful wife.

The inability to acquire the meaning of life gives rise to a blues in his soul, a painful yearning of the soul, which Pushkin himself defines as "the spirit of dull idleness." And “despondency is neglect for spiritual salvation ... despondency closes the heart and does not allow it to accept the word of God”. (25) And indeed in the novel there are no indications, or even hints, of the spiritual life of the protagonist, as well as of other characters. And the main question of the evolution of the protagonist of the novel is a sublime, spiritual question, it is a question of a deeply religious nature - a question of the meaning of life. And Onegin's passive search for his soul is a search for meaning where there is none, and simply cannot be. It is the closeness of the heart, the neglect of one's own salvation that gives rise to the inescapable longing of the heart, indifferent satiety with passions and, at the same time, a painful dependence on them. Therefore, Onegin's throwing is only a slavish tribute to sin, which he served from his youth. There is no One in his life who could and would like to deliver him from this slavery to sin and passions. Eugene himself refused His hand, he does not see the helping hand extended to him. He is a stranger in the land of the God-bearer people.

This is how Onegin lived his best young years: from sixteen to twenty-four years old.
This is how he killed eight years,
Losing life is the best color.
Killed! This is not a random word, Pushkin has no random words in his novel. Because, killing eight years of life, Onegin himself did not notice how he killed the high in himself and left only the low. Himself, but "not against one's will." Because he does not see the meaning in his life.
So, at the beginning of the novel, the readers are faced with the image of a person whose life is saturated with meaninglessness. Only in the acquisition of the meaning of life and the evolution of the image of the protagonist is possible.

In a completely devastated spiritual state, Yevgeny, suddenly impoverished after the death of his father, leaves for the village to visit his dying uncle. Before him there were two possibilities: when Onegin's father died, it turned out that the inheritance was encumbered with large debts, in this case the heir could accept the inheritance and take on the father's debts with him or abandon it, leaving the creditors to settle accounts among themselves. The first decision was dictated by a sense of honor, a desire not to tarnish the father's good name or preserve the family estate. Onegin followed the second path. “Receiving an inheritance was not the last resort to fix upset affairs. Youth, the time of hopes for an inheritance, was like a legalized period of debts, from which in the second half of life it was necessary to free oneself by becoming the heir to "all one's relatives" or by marrying favorably. " (26)

But Eugene is in time for the funeral of his uncle and to receive a considerable inheritance:
Here is our Onegin - a villager,
Factories, waters, forests, lands
The owner is complete ...

“… The village is an extremely important stage in Onegin's life. Here is Pushkin's hero in full growth: both in the brilliance of a skeptical mind, and with spiritual callousness. " (27)
It is very difficult for Onegin in the village - because it is difficult because he is surrounded by the same types as in the capital. Tired of communicating with secular Petersburg, Onegin is all the more burdensome with this "provincial light". He avoids meeting the local nobility in every way possible. In order to more vividly show the social environment of the noble province, Pushkin depicts not people, but rather signs, symbols. For this, the author endows the neighbors - nobles with symbolic surnames: Pustyakovs, Gvozdins, Skotinins, Buyanovs, Petushkovs, Flyanovs and even Monsieur Triquet. One of those was his late uncle:
... the village watchman
For forty years he scolded with the housekeeper,
I looked out the window and crushed the flies.

Onegin refuses to abide by the rules of conduct and "norms of decency" that are accepted in the provincial secular circle. And these people are hateful to Eugene, and he is hostile to them, so they slander about him:
Our neighbor is ignorant, madcap;
He's a freemason; he drinks one
A glass of red wine;
He does not fit ladies to the handle;
All yes, no; won't say yes
Or no, sir. That was the general voice.

Onegin is burdened by his musty little world, this vicious circle. He proudly despises those of whom he himself is, thinking at the same time: "I am like other people." And this contempt is not forgiven by his entourage. At times, it seems that the author is trying in Onegin to express the contradictions of his soul, his own throwing. He places the hero in his world, between two colliding destructive forces: slow indifferent decay and rapid romantic suicide. But this collision is still unconscious, incomprehensible. At the level of intuition, these two camps feel mutual hostility, but at the same time, an indissoluble unity. Everything has yet to be formulated. Half a century later, the Russian philosopher Vl. Solovyov will summarize the process that only began to take shape in the time of Pushkin: "... The socialists and their visible opponents - representatives of the plutocracy - unconsciously shake hands with each other in the most essential." (28) This process was felt by Pushkin as his genius and, as a great master of realism, reflecting the truth of the surrounding reality, he described, placing the hero between two fires, equally dangerously disfiguring and incinerating the human soul.

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky rightly notes: “In the wilderness, in the heart of his homeland, he is, of course, not at home, he is not at home. He doesn’t know what to do here, and he feels as though at his own place. Subsequently, when he wanders in anguish for his native land and foreign lands, he, as a person undoubtedly intelligent and indisputably sincere, feels even more like a stranger with strangers. True, he also loves his native land, but does not trust it. Of course, I've heard about my own ideals, but he doesn't believe them. He only believes in the complete impossibility of any kind of work in his native field, and looks at those who believe in this possibility - and then, as now, few - with a sad mockery. ”(29)

Nevertheless, the hero is still in some kind of search, he seeks to change something, if not in himself, then at least in his own household: once he “read Adam Smith and was a deep economy”. And when Eugene, alone "among his possessions, just to spend time ... with a yarn ... corvee with an old quitrent with a light one," then
... I pouted in my corner,
Seeing this terrible harm,
His calculating neighbor.

When Lensky appears in the novel, we get to know yet another type of Russian young man of the Pushkin era.
With a soul straight from Göttingen,
Handsome, in full bloom of years,
Kant's admirer and poet.
He's from foggy Germany
Brought fruits of scholarship:
Freedom dreams
The spirit is fiery and rather strange.

Many Russian youths were brought up at the University of Göttingen in Germany, and all of them were known for their "freedom-loving dreams."
So, Onegin and Lensky became friends, although the author diligently opposes one to the other:
... Wave and stone,
Poems and prose, ice and fire
Not so different among themselves.

They became friends not only because everyone else was not at all suitable for friendship, that each was bored in his village, having no serious occupation, no real business, that the life of both, in essence, was not filled with anything, that, being opposites, involuntarily reached out to each other. Their friendship was a mechanical phenomenon: two people found themselves, by the will of fate, in one place at the same time.
They were boring to each other;
Then I liked it ...
So people (I first repent)
Friends have nothing to do.

Arriving in the village and getting to know Lensky takes place in the spring or summer of 1820 - Onegin is already 24 years old, he is not a boy, but an adult man, especially compared to the eighteen-year-old Lensky. Knowing the people of his circle and despising them, nevertheless, Eugene "was very different ... and respected the feeling out of others." It is not surprising, because he treats Lensky a little patronizingly, looks down on his "youthful fever and youthful delirium." Their communication was born of curiosity, a desire to find out that both were unknown in each other. In their disputes, they tried to find, give birth to truth, but it turned out that the dispute does not give rise to truth, but kills one of the participants in the dispute.
Between them, everything gave rise to controversy
And attracted to thought:
Tribes of bygone treaties,
The fruits of science, good and evil,
And age-old prejudices,
And the fatal secrets of the grave,
Fate and life in its own course,
Everything was subject to their judgment.
A poet in the heat of his judgments
I read, forgetting myself, meanwhile
Fragments of northern poems,
And condescending Eugene,
Although I did not understand many of them,
He listened diligently to the young man.
But more often passions occupied
The minds of my hermits.
Gone from their rebellious power,
Onegin spoke of their rebellious power
With an involuntary sigh of regret ...

In Lenskoye, Pushkin portrayed a character completely opposite to Onegin's character. This figure of the second plan is intended to set off the character of the main character of the novel. His character is completely abstract, completely alien to reality. Lensky was a romantic both by nature and by the spirit of the times. But at the same time, "he was an ignoramus, dear at heart," always talking about life, he never knew it. “Reality had no influence on him: he and his sorrows were the creation of his fantasy” (30), Belinsky justly notes. He fell in love with Olga, and adorned her with virtues and perfections, attributed to her feelings and thoughts that she did not have and which she did not care about. “Olga was charming, like all the“ young ladies ”until they became“ ladies ”; and Lensky saw in her a fairy, a selphide, a romantic dream, not in the least suspecting the future lady ”(31), - writes Vissarion Grigorievich. “People like Lensky, with all their indisputable merits, are not good in that they are either reborn into perfect philistines, or, if they retain their original type forever, become these outdated mystics and dreamers. ... In a word, these are now the most intolerable empty and vulgar people ". (32)

Vyazemsky notes that while reading the novel: “at the verse
My friends, you feel sorry for the poet ...
One of his friends said: "It's not at all a pity" - "How so?" - asked Pushkin. - “And because, - answered the friend, - that you yourself brought Lensky more funny than attractive. In his portrait, drawn by you, there are shades of caricature. " Pushkin laughed good-naturedly, and his laugh was, apparently, an expression of consent to the remark made. " (33) The history of friendship between Onegin and Lensky leads us to the conclusion that these two people really were only "from nothing to do friends."

“We regard everyone as zeros and ourselves as units,” the author emphasizes. Onegin's friendship is based on the same egoism, and therefore the hero so easily allows himself to poke fun at the feelings of Lensky, and then, having received a cartel from a friend, he is only "dissatisfied with himself."

Lensky introduces Onegin to the Larin family, small landowners. The sisters, Tatiana and Olga, appear in the novel as opposition to each other. They are too different. Vladimir introduces Eugene to his fiancee Olga, but another sister, Tatiana, attracts the sophisticated attention of him. At the first acquaintance with the Larin sisters, he remarks: "I would have chosen another." Tatiana also immediately pays attention to Eugene, but for a different reason. She, who has spent all her life in the wilderness, still longs to see and feel what Onegin left in St. Petersburg. Her heart, unlike the hero, was not satiated with the deception of passions. Her romantic upbringing was made up of books.
She liked novels early;
They replaced everything for her;
She fell in love with deceptions
And Richardson and Russo.

Tatiana's soul is ripe for love. Even before meeting Onegin, she was already in love, she herself created love. All that was needed was the object of this love. And she falls in love with Onegin as soon as he appears on the doorstep of their house. L.S. Vygotsky emphasizes: "Onegin was only someone who was waiting for Tatyana's imagination, and further development of her love proceeds exclusively in the imagination ..." (34) In the imagination awakened by novels. Her soul thirsting for love does not care who to love:
The time has come, she fell in love.
So the grain has fallen into the ground
Spring is revived by fire.
Her imagination has long been
Burning with bliss and melancholy,
Alkalo of fatal food;
Long sincere longing
Her young breasts were pressed against her;
The soul was waiting ... for someone
And Onegin, as a person experienced in matters of love flirting, perfectly sees and understands the state of the girl's soul. He understands that this is not true love, but only the passion of falling in love, grown in a romantic girl's heart, and soundly nourished by love stories. From a young age he was accustomed to the deception and hypocrisy common in his circle. The art of love play - flirting - Eugene is fluent in:
But what was he true genius,
What he knew harder than all the sciences,
What was izmlad for him
And labor, and torment, and joy,
What took a whole day
His yearning laziness, -
There was a science of tender passion ...

Onegin himself does not believe in love, does not believe in happiness, does not believe in anything like that. The years he lived in a false world were not in vain for him. After so many years of living in a lie, Eugene cannot truly love. His soul is satiated with passions. This explains his understanding of Tatiana. But, having received a letter from Tatiana, he shows nobility, because "... was vividly touched" by the inexperience and sincere feeling of her love: "Your sincerity is dear to me." His rebuke to Tatyana is dictated by his concern for a young girl:
But he did not want to deceive
The credulity of an innocent soul.

In his soul there are still remnants of conscience not burnt by the fire of passions, surprisingly combined with egoism. Therefore, he says to Tatyana:
Whenever life is at home
I wanted to limit
That is true except for you alone
I was not looking for another bride ...
Once, in his early youth, Onegin believed, probably, in the possibility of high love for life. But his whole subsequent life, filled with passions, killed this faith - and even the hope of its return:
There is no return to dreams and years:
I will not renew my soul ...
Here it is - Onegin's main tragedy: "I will not renew my soul"! Of course, from his point of view, he is right, he acts nobly: not believing in the possibility of love, refuses it, so as not to deceive the girl, not to subject her to shame.

I, no matter how much I love you,
Having got used to it, I will stop loving you immediately;
Start to cry: your tears
Will not touch my heart
And they will only enrage him ...
Why is Onegin so sure that there can be no other "family happiness"? Because he saw too many similar examples in the light:
What could be worse in the world
Families where the poor wife
Sad for an unworthy husband
And in the afternoon and evenings alone;
Where is the boring husband, knowing her value
(Fate, however, cursing),
Always frowning, silent,
Angry and coldly jealous!

It is this meeting with Tatyana that for the first time reveals to us another Onegin, previously hidden by the veil of egoism. For the first time, Onegin does not make a gesture, but an act, although he did it for two reasons. On the one hand, he understood the sincerity of a deluded girl's heart, and on the other, he was tired and satiated with the deceptions of prodigal passion. In his noble deed, we see, if not the very evolution of the hero's image, then its possibility. A sprout of hope appears that not everything is lost for him, through the nobility of the deed, the revival of the soul is possible. But this is just a mirage, flashed and melted, which is shown by the further development of events.
The turning point of the novel is January 12 - Tatyana Larina's name day. It is here that the outset of subsequent events takes place. Onegin himself starts a conversation about the Larins' sisters, asking Lensky, and he, driven by a sincere feeling for the one he considers his friend, and, wishing him, according to his ideas, good, invites Eugene to the name day. Onegin, who does not like the "provincial light", does not want to appear there. Vladimir promises him that it will be a family holiday, out of good intentions deceiving a friend.
“But a bunch of people will be there
And any such rabble ... "
- And, no one, I'm sure!
Who will be there? own family.
Let's go do a favor!

A great disappointment seizes the hero when he sees, instead of a modest family celebration, a crowded feast that turns into a ball. Irritation seeps into his soul. But most of all, he is annoyed by the reception that is given to him on name days. He is perceived as Tatyana's fiancé, seated opposite her at the table, while Vladimir is seated opposite Olga. And the very sight of embarrassed Tatyana, who understands everything, but does not have the strength to cope with herself, infuriates him. He sees the ugliness of the events taking place. “But in the novel the name days are only designated, the poet brilliantly showed how to replace the name day with their vulgar imitation ... far from the image of St. Tatiana, who should have been remembered on this day at the name day. The culmination of the ugliness occurs in the novel on pseudo-names, when instead of the verb about St.

Between the old songs of the almanac
This verse was printed;
Triquet, the quick-witted poet,
Brought him into the world from the dust,
And boldly instead of belle Nina
Put belle Tatiana.

The ugly character of the name day is further enhanced by the fact that the guests at the holiday have neither names nor surnames. “The meaninglessness of the name day lies in the fact that they pass without names. Therefore, their ugly result is natural and so - the death of Lensky. " (36)
All this disgrace causes anger in Onegin's soul. He is unable to forgive his friend for the deception that, in the hero's opinion, put his pride in a humiliatingly awkward position. In his position, he accuses Lensky and, holding a grudge,
He pouted and, indignant,
He swore to enrage Lensky
And take revenge in order.
Now, triumphant beforehand,
He began to draw in his soul
Caricatures of all guests.
For this, Onegin does not need to make an effort, since the guests themselves are just a sign, a caricature, a parody of people.

Onegin's revenge is terrible: he provokes Lensky with his courtship of his bride to a duel and kills him. From indifferent contempt for others to a mean act, one step and Eugene, without hesitation, takes it. Also easily, without hesitation, he will do the next - to the murder. And these steps can in no way be called links in the "evolutionary" chain of the image of the hero of the novel.

An accidental quarrel is only a pretext for a duel, and the reason for it, the reason for Lensky's death is much deeper. A force enters the quarrel between Onegin and Lensky, which can no longer be reversed — the force of "public opinion." The bearer of this power is hated by Pushkin more than Pidyakov, Gvozdin, Flyanov and others put together - those are only nonentities, bribe-takers, jesters, libertines, and now before us is a murderer, an executioner:
Zaretsky, once a brawler,
Ataman of the card gang,
The head of the rake, the tavern tribune,
Now kind and simple
The father of the family is single,
Reliable friend, peaceful landowner
And even an honest man
This is how our century is being corrected!

On such people as Zaretsky, there is the world of the Petushkovs and the Flyanovs; he is the support and legislator of this world, the guardian of its laws and the executor of judgments. In every word of Pushkin about Zaretsky, hatred rings, and we cannot but share it. But Onegin! He knows life, he understands everything perfectly. He tells himself that he
Had to lend myself
not a ball of prejudice
Not an ardent boy, a fighter,
But a husband with honor and intelligence.

Pushkin selects verbs that depict Onegin's state very fully: "blamed himself," "should have," "he could," "he should have disarmed the young heart." But why are all these verbs in the past tense? After all, you can still go to Lensky, explain yourself, forget the enmity - it's not too late. No, late? Here are Onegin's thoughts:
... in this case
The old duelist intervened;
He is angry, he is a gossip, he is talkative ...
Surely there must be contempt
At the cost of his funny words.
But the whisper, the laughter of fools ...

Onegin thinks so. And Pushkin painfully sums up:
And here is the public opinion!
Spring of honor, our idol!
And that's what the world turns on!

The author does not often use heaps of exclamation marks. But here he crowns three lines in a row with them: all his torment, all his indignation - in these three exclamation marks in a row. This is what guides people: the whisper, the laughter of fools - the life of a person depends on it! It is terrible to live in a world that revolves on evil chatter! "Alone with his soul" Onegin understood everything. But the trouble is that the ability to remain alone with your conscience, “calling yourself to a secret judgment,” and to act as your conscience tells you, is a rare skill. Here you need courage, which Eugene does not have. The judges are the Skotinins, Pustyakovs and Buyanovs with their vulgar morality, against which Onegin does not dare to oppose. Onegin is amazing in this scene. Yesterday he did not have the courage to give up the duel. His conscience tormented him - after all, he obeyed the very "strict rules of art" that Zaretsky loves so much, today he is rebelling against the "classic and pedant", but how pathetic is this rebellion? Onegin breaks all the rules of decency by taking a footman as a second. "Zaretsky bit his lip" after hearing Onegin's "performance" - and Yevgeny is quite satisfied with this. For such a small violation of the "laws" of the world, he has enough courage.

And then the duel begins. Pushkin terribly plays on the words-antonyms "enemy" and "friend". Indeed, what are they now, Onegin and Lensky? Already enemies or still friends? They themselves do not know it.
Enemies stand with downcast eyes.
Enemies! How long have we been apart
Has their lust for blood taken away?
How long have they been hours of leisure,
Meal, thoughts and deeds
Did you share it amicably? Now it is wicked
Hereditary enemies are like,
As in a terrible, incomprehensible dream,
They are to each other in silence
They are preparing death in cold blood ...
Do they not laugh until
Their hand was not stained,
Do not disperse amicably? ..
But wildly secular enmity
Afraid of false shame.
... Cloaks are thrown by two enemies.
Zaretsky thirty-two steps
Measured with excellent precision,
He spread friends, but an extreme trail,
And everyone took their pistol.
The idea to which Pushkin led us throughout the course of events is now formulated briefly and accurately:
But wildly secular enmity
Afraid of false shame.
The duel of Onegin and Lensky is the most tragic and most mysterious episode of the novel, which reveals a lot in the moral image and character of the hero. Onegin is at best a "scholar, but a pedant," but not a cold-blooded killer and brute. There is no indication of this in the novel. Vladimir Lensky is a naive poet and dreamer; he also does not give the impression of an inveterate shooter. But the tragic ending of the ridiculous event, experienced by the hero of the novel as a personal drama and, perhaps, the author's sincere regret about the death of the "young poet" compel us to take a closer look at the sixth chapter of the novel. In this regard, two questions arise: firstly, what is the reason for such a strange and sometimes inexplicable behavior of Eugene Onegin before and during a duel and, secondly, why the hero of the novel, an independent and even daring personality, recognizes the behavior imposed on him by Zaretsky , loses will and becomes a doll in the hands of a faceless duel ritual?

A duel is a duel, a pair fight that takes place according to certain rules and has the goal of "removing" a shameful spot, insults and "restoring" honor. The strict observance of the rules was achieved by appealing to experts and arbitrators in matters of honor. This role in the novel is played by Zaretsky, "in duels - a classic and a pedant," and, as can be seen from the novel, deals with great omissions. More precisely, he deliberately ignored everything that could eliminate the bloody outcome. On the first visit to Onegin to transfer the challenge, he did not even think to discuss the possibility of reconciliation. And this was the direct responsibility of the second. Further, immediately before the fight, he again does nothing, although it is clear to everyone except the eighteen-year-old Lensky that there is no blood grievance. Instead, he "got up without explanation ... having a lot to do at home." Then there were at least two more reasons for stopping or even ending the duel. “Firstly, Onegin is more than an hour late. In this case, according to the dueling code, the opponent is declared not to appear. Secondly, as a second, Onegin brings his lackey, the Frenchman Guillot, arguing that he is at least an "honest fellow", and this was already a clear and unequivocal insult to Zaretsky. " (37) After all, the seconds had to be equal, that is, both must have a title of nobility.

So, Zaretsky separated the opponents by 32 steps, placing barriers at a "noble distance", apparently ten steps, or even less, and did not stipulate in the conditions of a duel that the opponents should be stopped after the first shot. Thus, our connoisseur of dueling ethics behaves not so much as a supporter of strict rules of the art of dueling, but as a person extremely interested in a scandalous, noisy, and, in relation to a duel, fatal outcome. The duel rules are violated by both Zaretsky and Onegin. The first is because he sees in her an opportunity to gain scandalous notoriety, the second is to demonstrate contempt for the story in which he fell against his own will and in the seriousness of which he does not believe. All of Onegin's behavior in the fight testifies to the fact that the author wanted to make him a reluctant killer. Both for Pushkin and for his contemporaries, who were familiar with the duel firsthand, it was obvious that those who wish the enemy death do not shoot on the move, at the barrel of someone else's pistol from a long distance. However, why did Onegin shoot at Lensky, and not past? Yu. M. Lotman believes that a demonstrative shot in the air or to the side could hardly have contributed to reconciliation. Rather, it would be regarded as an insult. And then it is known that in the case of no effective duel, she was fired upon before receiving the first wound or the death of one of the duelists. The duel in the Onegin era had a strict ritual. They did not act of their own free will, obeying the established rules. (38) The society, which Onegin despised, nevertheless turned out to have power over his actions and soul. Onegin is afraid to seem ridiculous, to become the topic of provincial gossip. He does not find courage in his empty soul, an empty soul is empty. This does not mean that there are no feelings there - there are no positive, but only negative ones, and here the hero shows one of them - cowardice.

An exhaustive moral assessment, as if summing up the culmination of the novel, is given by F.M. Dostoevsky: “Thus, his behavior is determined by fluctuations between the natural movements of his soul, his human feelings for Lensky and the fear of being branded as a jester and a coward, violating the conventional norms of behavior at the barrier. He killed Lensky simply from the blues, who knows, maybe from the blues according to the world ideal - this is too much in our opinion, this is probably. ”(39)

Lensky is killed. Pushkin sadly ironic over this in verse, exaggerating elegiac cliches to the limit:
Young singer
Found an untimely end!
The storm has died, the color is beautiful
Faded in the morning dawn
The fire on the altar is extinguished! ..
The murder of Lensky was for Onegin that moment, that turning point, beyond which there was no choice left for him, there was no way to go back. He burned all the bridges behind him. His "involuntary" egoism was the cause of death, in general, of a harmless person, an absurd dreamer, whom Onegin himself considered for some time his friend. And, seeing the hopelessness of his life, he runs. He runs from people, runs from himself, but he has nowhere to run. And, as you know, you can't run away from yourself. He leaves in a hurry, without saying goodbye to anyone, since there is no one to be with. Despair and longing chase him away.
Killing a friend in a duel,
Having lived without a goal, without work
Until twenty six
Languishing in idle leisure
No service, no wife, no deeds,
I didn't know how to do anything.
Anxiety seized him
Wanderlust

And provincial life goes on in its own measured order. Lensky is buried. Gossiping, the neighbors calmed down. The bride quickly consoled herself and soon married a passing uhlan. The tragic winter is over. Driven by the yearning of her soul, Tatiana timidly sets off to Onegin's empty estate. Wanting to recognize the one whom, without knowing, she loved so passionately and so hopelessly, the girl turns her gaze to the books left in the house. "Tell me what you read and I'll tell you who you are." What did she see?
Singer Giaur and Juan
Yes, there are two or three more novels with him,
In which the century was reflected
And modern man
Depicted fairly true
With his wicked soul
Self-loving and dry
A betrayed dream immeasurably,
With his embittered mind
Boiling in action, empty.

Tatyana trusts books too much, it is from them that she draws knowledge of life, considering them a true reflection of reality, and not the result of the creative imagination of the authors. It seems to Tatyana that the works of Byron and “two or three more novels” that she found in Onegin's office completely exhaust and explain the thoughts, actions and state of mind of the owner of these books. A new Onegin opens up to her, which she did not know.
What is he? Is it an imitation
An insignificant ghost or else
Muscovite in Harold's cloak,
Interpretation of other people's quirks,

Isn't he a parody?

Onegin's journey lasts about three years. But this period does not bring healing to the hero. Tormented by his conscience for the committed sin of murder, "he left his village", "where a bloody shadow appeared to him every day." But in his petrified heart there is no remorse, because it is not the desire to change his own thoughts that seizes him, but only anxiety and "the desire to change places." The author emphasizes that Eugene "began wandering without a goal." Also, without a goal, he completed his travels when they "got tired of everything in the world." “The seeker of world harmony, having read her [Tatiana] a sermon and nevertheless acted very honestly, set off with his world longing and with blood shed in his silly anger in his hands to wander around his homeland, not noticing it, and, boiling with health and strength, exclaim with curses:
I'm young, life is strong in me,
What should I wait, longing, longing! " (40)

Wanderings do not bring Onegin any reassessment of moral values, all the same melancholy, all the same selfishness. His selfish reticence raises personal suffering to the level of a worldwide problem, and at the same time, he remains completely indifferent to the suffering of others.

Yuri Mikhailovich Nikishov sums up the aimless wanderings of the hero: “The journey did not revive Onegin to a new life and did not even prepare him for it. On the contrary, he returns from the journey extremely devastated and exhausted. His position is desperate and hopeless. ”(41) The mood, expressed in the sad“ longing, longing, ”runs like a red thread throughout Onegin's journey. His spiritual state and psychological makeup did not change during this period of his life. An attempt to unwind at the expense of travel does not reach the goal, since “Onegin is little dependent on external impressions ... But, perhaps, to make an allowance for“ evolution ”, maybe we have a“ new ”Onegin? ... Maybe this“ concern ”brings significant adjustments to the very nature of the perception of the environment? All these assumptions must be answered in the negative. That is why the role of travel in the evolution of Onegin cannot be exaggerated. " (42)

The eighth chapter causes the most controversy and various interpretations. This is natural: such is the peculiarity of Pushkin's novel. He informs the reader of the facts, events, actions of the heroes and almost does not give a psychological justification for these events, actions, facts. Has Tatiana changed only externally or internally too? What kind of man is her husband? Why Onegin, who did not love Tatiana in the village, is now seized with such an all-consuming passion? Pushkin does not give an unambiguous, final answer to all these questions, giving the reader the right to think for himself ...

A new meeting between Eugene and Tatiana opens up something new to us in the main character. This meeting strikes him deeply and strongly. He sees a new Tatiana and is speechless. He saw "and he remained motionless." Now all his thoughts and all movements of his heart are directed towards Tatiana. Pushkin does not embellish his hero in the least. He admits that Eugene was thinking about the princess, and not about the "timid girl." And yet Tatiana attracted him not only with her current magnificent position, but also with the spiritual strength that Onegin saw and felt in her, the one whom the author calls "the unapproachable goddess of the magnificent, regal Neva."

But then the crowd hesitated
A whisper ran through the hall ...
The lady was approaching the mistress,
An important general is behind her.
She was leisurely
Not cold, not talkative,
Without an insolent gaze for all,
No claim to success
Without these little antics
Without imitative undertakings ...
Everything is quiet, it was just in her ...
The ladies moved closer to her;
The old ladies smiled at her;
The men bowed below
They caught the gaze of her eyes;
The girls passed quieter ...
“… Not everyone is capable of joining this refined environment to the same extent as Tatyana, and even more so to win the championship in it. This is a kind of feat of Tatiana. " (43) But it is worth remembering that the very people who are hated, despised and afraid of by Onegin are honored by her. Many literary critics, mainly adhering to the traditions and ideas of revolutionary socialist, such as Herzen, Belinsky and many Soviet researchers of the novel, consider it axiomatic that the assertion that “Onegin has an advanced consciousness, wandering from article to article, is axiomatic. Equally, no doubt, is his critical attitude to his surroundings. Evidence of this is already his departure from the "light". (44) In other words, a person who in some way opposes himself to society, only due to this opposition is recorded in the "advanced". But if you follow the logic of this statement, you will have to admit that any antisocial person, be it a terrorist or an "authority" of the criminal world, will become one of the "advanced" people next to Onegin. After all, they also “critically” relate to the environment and also “left” the “light”.
Moreover, in the novel we see not only Onegin's departure from the “light”, but also his return to the “light”. Somewhat earlier, before the duel with Lensky, the hero is driven by fear of the opinions of the "light". After all, it is precisely out of the desire not to become a laughingstock in the eyes of the society he despises that he participates in a duel, the result of which is the absurd death of a person.
And now, having returned to secular society, he sees the "new" Tatiana. Which became, according to the author's definition, the "goddess" of this society. He sees what he himself, for various reasons, could not become. And passion for Tatiana suddenly strikes his heart, in the heat of which he writes a letter.
I foresee everything: will offend you
A sad secret explanation.
But so be it: I'm on my own
You can't resist anymore;
It's all decided: I'm at your will
And surrender to my destiny.
Tatiana does not believe Onegin. What does she know about him? How does he represent it? The one I saw in the "empty study" three years ago, on the pages of his books; in the garden, when the girls sang and her heart fluttered, and Onegin was cold and wordy. Now she reads his letters and does not believe them. After all, Onegin wrote more than one letter to Tatiana:
No answer. He has a message again.
There is no answer to the second, third letter.

Why, when we read Onegin's letter, we see genuine torment in it, but Tatiana does not see or does not want to see? But no! She sees and understands better than we do what exactly moves the heart and hand of the hero of the novel. “After all, she sees who he is: the eternal wanderer suddenly saw a woman whom he had previously neglected in a new brilliant, unattainable setting — but in fact, in this setting, perhaps, the whole essence of the matter is. After all, this girl, whom he almost despised, is now worshiped by the light - the light, this terrible authority for Onegin, despite all his world aspirations - that's why he rushes to her blinded! This is my ideal, he exclaims, this is my salvation, this is the outcome of my anguish, I overlooked it, and "happiness was so possible, so close!" (45) After all, as we remember, she was brought up for the most part on the romantic literature of the late 18th - early 19th centuries, so she knows, and perhaps not only from books, that love is self-sacrifice. Love does not seek its own, believes everything, always hopes. Love constitutes human happiness, gives life and gives birth to joy. The feeling of Onegin is not love, but a passionate desire to saturate your tortured heart with only a semblance of a high feeling. His desire is not to be love, but to have love. The desire of an adult capricious child to enjoy love. Therefore, for Eugene, his feeling is illness, death, suffering. And here again the meeting of the two heroes.
Goes, looking like a dead man.
Well, Tatiana? She does not accept his feelings, not because she does not want to, but because she cannot. She would like this love: Tatiana has remained the same romantic nature, it seems to her that “happiness was so possible, so close” is not true. They could not be and did not become together. After all, he has nothing to offer but new pain, suffering and shame. He wants not to give her love, but to receive himself what he missed in his time.
I thought: freedom and peace
A replacement for happiness. My God!
How wrong I was, how I was punished.

In this final chapter of the novel, the contrast of the characters is again manifested. Indeed, against the background of Tatiana's responsibility and self-sacrifice, Onegin's egoistic passionate feeling looks criminal and insignificant. “By the way, who said that the secular, court life perniciously touched her soul and that it was the dignity of a secular lady and new secular concepts that were partly the reason for her refusal to Onegin? No, it wasn't like that. No, this is the same Tanya, the same old village Tanya! She is not spoiled; on the contrary, she is depressed by this magnificent Petersburg life, she is broken and suffers; she hates her rank as a secular lady, and whoever judges her differently does not at all understand what Pushkin wanted to say. " (46) And here she firmly says to Onegin:
But I'm given to another
And I will be faithful to him forever.
“Yes, she is loyal to this general, her husband, an honest man who loves her, respects her and is proud of her. Let her "begged her mother," but she, and no one else, agreed, she, after all, she herself swore to him to be his honest wife. She may have married him out of despair, but now he is her husband, and her betrayal will cover him with shame, shame and kill him. And how can a person base his happiness on the unhappiness of another?

Happiness is not only in the pleasures of love, but also in the highest harmony of the spirit. How to calm the spirit if there is a dishonest, ruthless, inhuman deed back and forth? " (47)
Has the main character changed? What is he like now? Outwardly, Onegin returns to the lifestyle that he led at the beginning of the novel, when we first met him:
And in a silent office
He remembered the time
When the cruel blues
I was chasing him in the noisy light.
At such a "moment, evil for him," Pushkin leaves his hero.

In the criticism devoted to the novel, it is often mentioned that Onegin is a "product" of society, the result and stage of the decay of serf Russia. "Superfluous person"! It is even believed that Pushkin opens a whole gallery of "superfluous" people in Russian literature of the 19th century by Onegin. This is precisely what many literary critics who adhere to the liberal and revolutionary-democratic world outlook are asserting. It is necessary to pay attention to the fact that Pushkin's novel does not require any interpretation. This work must be perceived as it is written. Many literary critics use an unacceptable method: they say, the author wanted to say this and that. The author said what he wanted to say and what he was able to say and read the novel "Eugene Onegin" should be the way it was written, and not invent something and not put into the author's mouth those words that he did not utter.

Man is something more than the "Laplace" mathematical addition of molecules. And the personality is made up not only of the influence of society and living conditions. Such a simplified view can be “forgiven” for the revolutionary democrats of the 19th century (and even then only “for years ago”), when a mechanistic, flat view of nature, society and personality reigned in everything. When it seemed that the world lay in full view, that everything is known and all the laws of the world are open, and if something is unknown, then it is only a matter of time, and not far. But even in those days, in Russia, her best sons understood life differently than the revolutionaries - socialists - communists who overthrew social foundations. They saw in a person a free personality, and not just the result of education and the influence of society. They argued that a person can and must always choose between good and evil, and if he refuses this choice, then, as Pushkin showed in his novel, he still chooses evil. He who is not for good is against him, because the gap between good and evil fills in indifference, and indifference in itself is already evil.

Has Onegin's inner world changed? We can confidently answer in the affirmative. The circle of his reading says a lot and definitely: Gibbon, Rousseau, Herder, Madame de Stael, Belle, Fontenelle and others - philosophers - educators, atheists, scientists - materialists. This is no longer the indifferent pessimism of Lord Byron and not the "two or three novels in which the century is reflected", loved by Onegin before. This is the reading circle of the Decembrists, people of the so-called. "Free-thinkers" ... In the beginning. In the 19th century, due to the penetration from abroad of various educational literature generated by the era of the French Enlightenment, many noble youth were carried away by fashion trends. The French language and French culture have become closer to high society than their native Russian. The destructive and cruel epoch of the Great French Revolution became the new ideal of young nobles who grew up on an alien to the Russian people, the entire Russian state, foreign culture: language, history, faith, ideology, etc. Secret societies and Masonic lodges of various kinds were active everywhere. The revolutionaries fascinatingly, ardently and skillfully explained to young and inexperienced people that the reason for their misfortunes was not in themselves, not in their isolation from the people's life of their own Russian people, but in the structure of the social system. And although the majority of the "educated" nobility did not really understand the reasons and secret currents of social life, everyone was fascinated by the demagogy of the destroyers of the "old world" and sympathized with it. This is no longer the jaded indifference, leading a chaotic and worthless life, secular dandies and dandies. The sin of despondency, which Pushkin displays in a novel called the blues, is replaced by anger. Selfishness, from personal, becomes public, because claims are made against society: "Why am I so worthless?" The reason for the ugliness of their soul is sought not in itself, but in other people, in the whole society. At the heart of such a character trait as selfishness is pride, pride. And egoism gives rise to envy, and it also becomes the original cause of revolutions and other "class" upheavals. But we never found out, due to the end of the novel, whether the hero had “grown up” from his “private” egoism to the egoism of the “public,” revolutionary.

Thus, having “lived” with the hero his life in the novel, we can regretfully summarize that the evolution of the image as a process of qualitative change, we have not seen. Again, we have before us the main tragedy of Onegin, formulated by the great Russian poet: "I will not renew my soul." The hero is not updated. Onegin always has a choice, and his attempts to change, if not himself, then at least the world around him, are also visible. It would seem that everything is there for the evolution of the hero, but it does not happen. Since the hero does not acquire the meaning of life. And as before, there is no goal in front of him, all the same "the heart is empty, the mind is idle." Life remains for him "a vain gift, an accidental gift."

It is difficult to conclude the consideration of the evolution of the image of the protagonist of the novel with words better than those spoken on the day of memory of A.S. Pushkin, dedicated to the 50th anniversary of the death of the great Russian poet, while the great Russian scientist - historian V.O. Klyuchevsky:
“We were not analyzing the novel, but only its hero, and we noticed with surprise that he was not at all a hero of his time and the poet himself did not think to portray him that way. He was a stranger to the society in which he had to move, and everything came out somehow awkwardly, at the wrong time and inappropriate. "Having fun and luxury child" and the son of a squandered father, an 18-year-old philosopher with a chilled mind and extinguished heart, he began to live, that is, burn life when you should have learned; began to learn when others took action; tired before starting work; he was bustling about in the capital, he was lazy about in the country too; out of arrogance he did not know how to fall in love when it was necessary, out of arrogance he hastened to fall in love when it became criminal; in passing, without a goal and even without anger, he killed his friend; traveled across Russia without a purpose; from nothing to do, he returned to the capital to wear out the strength exhausted by various idleness. And here, finally, the poet himself, without finishing the story, abandoned him on one of his everyday follies, wondering what to do next with such a stupid existence. Kind people in the countryside sat quietly in their places, sitting out or just incubating their nests; an idle stranger came from the capital, outraged their peace, threw them off their nests, and then, with disgust and annoyance at himself, turned away from what he had done. In a word, of all the characters in the novel, the most superfluous is its hero. Then we began to think about the question that the poet posed either on his own behalf, or on behalf of Tatyana:
Well he, really imitation,
An insignificant ghost or else
Muscovite in Harold's cloak,
Interpretation of other people's quirks,
Words of fashionable full lexicon ...
Isn't he a parody? " (48)

List of used literature.
1. Belinsky V.G. Article eight. A.S. Pushkin in Russian criticism.
2. Good D.D. "Eugene Onegin". Russian classical literature.
3. Bondi S. “Pushkin A.S. Eugene Onegin".
4. Dostoevsky F.M. Pushkin. Speeches about Pushkin 1880 - 1960s.
5. Dunaev M.M. Orthodoxy and Russian Literature.
6. Ilyin A.A. Russian literature in the context of Russian Orthodox traditions.
7. History of Russian literature.
8. Klyuchevsky V.O. Eugene Onegin and his ancestors. Speeches about Pushkin 1880 - 1960s.
9. Lotman Yu.M. Pushkin. St. Petersburg., "Art-St. Petersburg", 1995.
10. Maslov, schema. John. Symphony on the works of St. Tikhon Zadonsky.
11. Nikishov Yu.M. The concept of the hero in Pushkin's novel "Eugene Onegin".
12. Novikova L.I., Sizemskaya I.N. Russian Philosophy of History: A Course of Lectures.
13. Pletneva A. A., Kravetsky A. G. Church-Slavonic language.
14. Pushkin A.S. Collected Works.
15. Reznikov V. Reflections on the path to faith (On the poetry of AS Pushkin).
16. Stein A.L. On the heights of world literature.

The novel in verses by A.S. Pushkin "Eugene Onegin" is one of his most famous works. It reflected a whole historical era, presented through the history of the hero, reflected the secular society of that time with all its shortcomings. It was a consumer society incapable of high moral experiences. Everything was consumed: from food to spectacles and even feelings. In consumption, every day of a monotonous life, devoid of any meaning, passes.

Such a life is not for Onegin, he is above all this. He is an advanced personality who has overtaken society in development. However, society has never understood and did not accept people unlike the majority, who think more modern and progressive, such people become "superfluous".

Eugene Onegin received a home education typical for aristocratic youth of that time under the guidance of a French governor, not very deep, but sufficient for "the world to decide that he is smart and very nice."

The first chapter shows Onegin in St. Petersburg, where he, like many other young people of noble origin, indulges in entertainment. Onegin is a metropolitan dandy, busy with the "play of passions", and it seems that he is deprived of the ability to love. But Eugene, by his nature, stands out from the general mass of his "involuntary devotion to dreams", "inimitable strangeness and sharp, chilled mind", a sense of honor and nobility of soul. For this reason, Onegin is disappointed in the secular society, and he is overcome by the "Russian blues". Having left secular society, he tried to engage in some useful activity, but "hard work was nauseous to him." Onegin tries to dispel the boredom by reading, but he failed. In the end, having received the news that his uncle is dying, Yevgeny goes to the village "preparing money for the sake of boredom, sighs and deception."

However, Onegin did not find his uncle alive. Having inherited the estate, Eugene settles in the village, hoping to allay boredom. Onegin replaced the "old corvée" with a "light quitrent", which greatly facilitated the life of the peasants and was an advanced step for that time. This was the end of his participation in the life of the peasants. On the third day, the blues overcame him again. Onegin was frankly bored in the village, and friendship with Lensky, the complete opposite of Eugene, was forced, which the author emphasizes with the lines "there is nothing to do friends." Onegin's life experience, a cold skeptical mind lead him to a denial of reality, to a critical attitude towards it. How much Lensky is delighted with life, so much Onegin was disappointed in it; how romantic Lensky is, how pragmatic Onegin is. This dissimilarity brought the heroes closer together, but it also led to the death of Lensky. Onegin treated him like a father and hesitated before the duel, “blamed himself in many ways”, understood that “he was already wrong”, that he had to show himself “not an ardent boy, a fighter, but a husband with honor and intelligence” and apologize to Lensky, explain the reason for his behavior, thereby preventing a duel. But the fear of public opinion, the order and foundations of the very secular society, which Onegin so despised, did not allow him to do this. Lensky was killed. A pang of conscience forces Onegin to leave the village and travel.

In the end, Eugene, never finding his place in life, returns to St. Petersburg. There he meets Tatiana, and for the first time a real, deep feeling envelops Onegin. But Tatiana has already married a general, a friend of Eugene, and cannot be with Onegin. Eugene is left alone.

Onegin's image evolves throughout the novel. Onegin “leaves” the novel in a completely different way from what Pushkin portrays him in the first chapters. If at the beginning of the novel Onegin is given as a strong, proud man who knows his own worth, then at the end we see him devoid of any prospects in life, devoid of strength, energy, despite his youth, position and mind. However, Pushkin left the ending of the novel open, and the further fate of Onegin remains unknown ...

Updated: 2018-06-21

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The novel "Eugene Onegin" - Pushkin's favorite brainchild - was written over almost eight years - from the spring of 1823 to the fall of 1830. In addition, he returned to the novel in the fall of 1833. In this work, one of the most significant ideas of the poet found its fullest embodiment - to give the image of a "hero of the time", a typical portrait of his contemporary - a man of the new, XIX century ". The author has put a lot into this book: mind and heart, youth and wise maturity, moments of joy and sorrow, longing and longing of the soul, hours of sleepless thoughts - a person's entire life in all its manifestations. And it is important to note that "the descriptions and reflections on behalf of the author are given in" Eugene Onegin "an immeasurably greater place than the direct development of the plot action". The author himself, in a letter to his brother, evaluates "Onegin" as his best work: "Maybe I will send him (Delvig. - A.Sh.) excerpts from" Onegin "; this is my best work. Do not trust N. Raevsky, who scolds him - he expected romanticism from me, found satire and cynicism and did not swell up pretty much. " First of all, it is important to note the historicism of the novel. For example, Belinsky says that "Eugene Onegin" is a historical poem in the full sense of the word, although there is not a single historical person among its heroes. "FM Dostoevsky calls the poem" palpably real, which embodies real Russian life with such creative power and with such completeness, which did not happen before Pushkin, and even after him, perhaps. "It is impossible to pull the novel, with its critical study, from the historical context. In this work, an attempt is made to look at the evolution of the image of Onegin from the Orthodox historical position And although, according to S. Bondi, the plot of "Eugene Onegin" is very simple, it is difficult to disagree with Belinsky, who calls Pushkin's novel "an encyclopedia of Russian life and an extremely popular manifestation." life of Russia at the beginning of the XIX century. dbe.

Contradictions in Onegin, a combination of some positive features with sharply negative ones, are found throughout the novel. D.D. Blagoy notes in this regard: "The main method, with the help of which Onegin's character is especially prominent, is the method of contrast." Moreover, the contrast is observed not so much in relation to the characters of the various heroes of the novel, but rather in relation to the internal contradictions of the personality of the protagonist. It would seem that these contrasting contradictions should give rise to a change in Onegin's character. After all, the characters of the main characters in literary works "are not something given once and for all, stopped, frozen; on the contrary, as in life itself, they are in a state of constant movement and development."

It is assumed that, changing, Onegin internally, as it were, evolves into a different, albeit far from the moral ideal, person. Traditionally, in Russian literary criticism, which has repeatedly turned to the novel, there are several points of view on the evolution of the image of the protagonist. The purpose of this work is to consider the following problem: is there a process of evolution of the image of the protagonist and, if there is, its result. Indeed, if the evolution of the image is positively resolved in a novel, then "it is extremely important to delve into each stage of this evolution, without omitting a single link." According to the "Dictionary of the Russian language" S.I. Ozhegov's image, in a work of art, is a type, a character. The evolution of the hero's image is one of the methods used by Pushkin to consider the main problem of the novel and determine the main idea. The main problem is the problem of the meaning and purpose of life. “Apparently, the condition - whether Onegin will acquire a high goal or it will be inaccessible to him - will become decisive at the final stage of the hero's spiritual evolution. And yet, whether Onegin gains a goal, this time will forever remain open. An affirmative answer is not ruled out, but and not guaranteed. "

The name plays a special role in the novel, adds something to the image of Onegin. It was this name, which had a rather common sense, was worn by the hero of one of the novels popular at that time. The author, giving a name to the hero, put a definite and well-known meaning in Pushkin's contemporary literature. "Eugene (noble) is a name denoting a negative, satirically depicted character of a young nobleman who enjoys the privileges of his ancestors, but does not have their merits."

Likewise, the patronymic, or generic name, in Russia has always had a special meaning. "The title of the novel seems to contain the name of the protagonist, but the reader still does not know his patronymic." It was customary to call even minor representatives of the noble family by their full names. The absence of a patronymic in Pushkin's work has a separate meaning: "there is no patronymic, not because the hero has lost the fullness of his individuality, but because he has not acquired his own name in its entirety."

Describing the hero's childhood and youth, the poet finds the most accurate, most convincing words to tell how unhappily Yevgeny was brought up: he does not know how to feel, suffer, rejoice. But he knows how to "hypocrite, seem, appear." But, like many secular people, he knows how to get bored, languish…. "The agonizing, inescapable" boredom "- dissatisfaction with others - a property inherent in a number of his progressive contemporaries well known to Pushkin." Onegin's life is variegated and at the same time monotonous. It seems to have everything in it: both the prosperity not to work, and balls every evening and other entertainment, and education, and love. But everything, as it were, jokingly: education only in the form of historical anecdotes, and education from a wretched Frenchman, and love in the form of vulgar flirting. Onegin is an egoistic man, which is not surprising in principle: his father almost did not pay attention to him, completely and completely surrendering to his affairs, entrusting him to foreign governors - "Monsieur and Madame", obviously one of those charlatans who flooded Russia after the French Revolution. Those, in turn, cared little about the upbringing of the child: they only "scolded a little for pranks", "did not bother with strict morality." The boy grew into a person who thinks only about himself, about his desires and pleasures, who does not know how, and does not want to pay attention to the feelings, interests, suffering of others, who can easily offend a person, offend, humiliate - hurt a person without even thinking above this. "The good inclinations of his soul, thanks to his upbringing, remained hidden in the living environment, did not receive development."

Except for one thing: Onegin really suffers, because an egoist cannot but suffer, because selfishness is a disease, a disease of the soul. Moreover, "Onegin is psychologically disabled." He is definitely a spiritual invalid. And, like any other, the disease of egoism also brings pain and suffering. But to be "selfish against his will" is the choice of the hero himself. Choosing such a way of life, Eugene rejects another image that the Creator has put into a person - the image of God, and becomes a symbol and a sign, becoming like the neighbors despised by him. And his life, like those of his kind, is filled not with actions, but with gestures. "The habit of symbolic relationships dooms Onegin to make mostly gestures, one of which becomes the cause of the death of his young friend. There is a pattern in the fact that a sign inevitably requires from a person not an act, but a gesture - a rejection of the image."

This is how the author portrays the manifestation of Onegin's image, for example, in the theater: he is not interested in the stage, but only in himself, so he is bored: "he enters, walks between the chairs on his legs, a double lorgnette, squinting, leads unfamiliar ladies to the boxes ..." , barely glancing at the stage "in great distraction," already "turned away - and yawned." In each of his actions, there is simultaneously self-admiration and contempt for those around him, the same as himself, people.

Barely in his early adolescence, having entered the world, Eugene indulged in secular entertainment, trying to nourish the emptiness of his soul with them:

He in his first youth

Was a victim of violent delusions

And unbridled passions.

The years spent in the world of falsehood and corruption were not in vain. The "eternal murmur of the soul" was replaced by indifference because passions cannot nourish a person's soul. The more a person tries to satisfy his passionate desires, the more the fire of passions flares up. It burns the soul of a person to the ground, devastates it more and more:

He did not fall in love with beauties,

And he dragged himself somehow;

Refuse - instantly consoled;

They will change - I was glad to have a rest.

Hobbies turned out to be empty. And life is a senseless play of passions. Dreams are useless and unrealizable. From meaninglessness came indifference to life:

So surely an indifferent guest

Comes to the evening whist,

Sits down; game over:

He leaves the yard

He falls asleep quietly at home

And he himself does not know in the morning

Where will he go in the evening.

And in the "Symphony on the works of St. Tikhon of Zadonsk" by Schema-Archimandrite John (Maslov) there is a more detailed interpretation of this concept: "Passions are internal idols in a man's heart. Disgusting, because passion instead of God is worshiped like an idol. Those who work with passions somehow : fornicators, drunkards, evil-doers, robbers and others like them, obvious of our enemy - the devil, captives, and under his heavy yoke and dark power they are miserable.Passion and custom blind the eye of the soul - reason - so that a person does not sees ".

What is my Onegin? Half asleep

He goes to bed from the ball:

And Petersburg is restless

Already awakened by the drum.

The residents of St. Petersburg, who are sometimes called the inhabitants, have already begun their difficult working day. And the hero of the novel is alien to labor, therefore

... tired of the noise of the ball

And turning the morning into midnight,

Sleeps quietly in the shade of the blissful

Having fun and luxury child.

Dunaev M.M. notes on this occasion, “that Onegin possesses the fullness, as far as possible in his condition, of treasures on earth. Usually a person of eudemonic culture thinks everything that Pushkin’s hero has as the basis of earthly happiness: youth, health, wealth. mentions: this for him, of course, and does not constitute a concern. The hero of Western European literature usually recognizes everything listed here as the goal of his everyday activity, and if he achieves that, he calms down in contentment with himself and life. But here is the "mysterious Russian nature": everything it’s given in hand, I don’t want to live, but he doesn’t want to, he is moping and languishing with life ... and origin, and upbringing, and education - doomed a person to that spirit of idleness, which turns into an inevitable blues ".

The senseless, "one-sounding noise of life" drains Onegin's soul. The author directly calls Eugene's state of mind a disease, an ailment.

The disease, which is the cause

It would be high time to find

Like an English spleen

In short: Russian blues ...

The blues were waiting for him on guard,

And she ran after him,

Like a shadow or a faithful wife.

The inability to acquire the meaning of life gives rise to a blues in his soul, a painful yearning of the soul, which Pushkin himself defines as "the spirit of dull idleness." And "despondency is neglect of spiritual salvation ... despondency closes the heart and does not allow it to accept the word of God." Indeed, in the novel there are no indications, or even hints, of the spiritual life of the protagonist, as well as of other characters. And the main question of the evolution of the protagonist of the novel is a sublime, spiritual question, it is a question of a deeply religious nature - a question of the meaning of life. And Onegin's passive search for his soul is a search for meaning where there is none, and simply cannot be. It is the closeness of the heart, the neglect of one's own salvation that gives rise to the inescapable longing of the heart, indifferent satiety with passions and, at the same time, a painful dependence on them. Therefore, Onegin's throwing is only a slavish tribute to sin, which he served from his youth. There is no One in his life who could and would like to deliver him from this slavery to sin and passions. Eugene himself refused His hand, he does not see the helping hand extended to him. He is a stranger in the land of the God-bearer people. This is how Onegin lived his best young years: from sixteen to twenty-four years old.

This is how he killed eight years,

Losing life is the best color.

Killed! This is not a random word, Pushkin has no random words in his novel. Because, killing eight years of life, Onegin himself did not notice how he killed the high in himself and left only the low. Himself, but "not inevitably." Because he does not see the meaning in his life. So, at the beginning of the novel, the readers are faced with the image of a person whose life is saturated with meaninglessness. Only in the acquisition of the meaning of life and the evolution of the image of the protagonist is possible. In a completely devastated spiritual state, Yevgeny, suddenly impoverished after the death of his father, leaves for the village to visit his dying uncle. Before him there were two possibilities: when Onegin's father died, it turned out that the inheritance was encumbered with large debts, in this case the heir could accept the inheritance and take on the father's debts with him or abandon it, leaving the creditors to settle accounts among themselves. The first decision was dictated by a sense of honor, a desire not to tarnish the father's good name or preserve the family estate. Onegin followed the second path. "Receiving an inheritance was not the last way to fix upset affairs. Youth, the time of hope for an inheritance, was like a legalized period of debts, from which in the second half of life one should get rid of it by becoming the heir to" all one's relatives "or by marrying favorably."

But Eugene is in time for the funeral of his uncle and to receive a considerable inheritance: Here is our Onegin - a villager, Plants, waters, forests, lands The owner is full ... "... The village is an extremely important stage in Onegin's life. Here is a Pushkin hero in full growth : and in the brilliance of a skeptical mind, and with spiritual callousness. " It is very difficult for Onegin in the village - because it is difficult because he is surrounded by the same types as in the capital. Tired of communicating with secular Petersburg, Onegin is all the more burdened by this "provincial light". He avoids meeting the local nobility in every way possible. In order to more vividly show the social environment of the noble province, Pushkin depicts not people, but rather signs, symbols. For this, the author endows the neighbors - nobles with symbolic surnames: Pustyakovs, Gvozdins, Skotinins, Buyanovs, Petushkovs, Flyanovs and even Monsieur Triquet. One of those was his late uncle:

Village watchman

For forty years he scolded with the housekeeper,

I looked out the window and crushed the flies.

Onegin refuses to comply with the rules of conduct and "standards of decency" that are accepted in the provincial secular circle. And these people are hateful to Eugene, and he is hostile to them, so they slander about him:

Our neighbor is ignorant, madcap;

He's a freemason; he drinks one

A glass of red wine;

He does not fit ladies to the handle;

All yes, no; won't say yes

Or no, sir. That was the general voice.

Onegin is burdened by his musty little world, this vicious circle. He proudly despises those of whom he himself is, thinking at the same time: "I am like other people." And this contempt is not forgiven by his entourage. At times, it seems that the author is trying in Onegin to express the contradictions of his soul, his own throwing. He places the hero in his world, between two colliding destructive forces: slow indifferent decay and rapid romantic suicide. But this collision is still unconscious, incomprehensible. At the level of intuition, these two camps feel mutual hostility, but at the same time, an indissoluble unity. Everything has yet to be formulated. Half a century later, the Russian philosopher V. Solovyov will summarize the process that had just begun to take shape in the time of Pushkin: "... Socialists and their visible opponents - representatives of the plutocracy - unconsciously shake hands with each other in the most essential." This process was felt by Pushkin as his genius and, as a great master of realism, reflecting the truth of the surrounding reality, he described, placing the hero between two fires, equally dangerously disfiguring and incinerating the human soul.

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky rightly remarks: “In the wilderness, in the heart of his homeland, he is, of course, not at home, he is not at home. he wanders in longing for his native land and for foreign lands, he, as a person undoubtedly clever and indisputably sincere, feels even more like a stranger with strangers. True, he loves his native land, but does not trust it. about his own ideals, but he does not believe them. He only believes in the complete impossibility of any kind of work in his native field, and he looks at those who believe in this possibility - even then, as now, few - with sad mockery. "

Nevertheless, the hero is still in some kind of search, he seeks to change something, if not in himself, then at least in his own household: once he "read Adam Smith and was a deep economist." And when Eugene alone "among his possessions, just to spend time ... with a yarn ... corvee with an old rent with a light one", then ... In his corner pouted, Seeing this terrible harm, His prudent neighbor.

When Lensky appears in the novel, we get to know yet another type of Russian young man of the Pushkin era.

With a soul straight from Göttingen,

Handsome, in full bloom of years,

Kant's admirer and poet.

He's from foggy Germany

Brought fruits of scholarship:

Freedom dreams

The spirit is fiery and rather strange.

Many Russian youths were brought up at the University of Göttingen in Germany, and all of them were known for their "freedom-loving dreams." So, Onegin and Lensky became friends, although the author diligently opposes one to the other:

Wave and stone

Poems and prose, ice and fire

Not so different among themselves.

They were boring to each other;

Then I liked it ...

So people (I first repent)

Friends have nothing to do.

By and large, their friendly relationship cannot be called friendship. Onegin saw in Lenskoye the ardor of youth that he did not know himself. Lensky revealed something new that Eugene had not yet met. He listened to Lensky with a smile. The poet's passionate conversation, And the mind, still in its judgments, is unsteady, And the eternally inspired gaze, - Everything was new to Onegin ... Arrival in the village and acquaintance with Lensky occurs in the spring or summer of 1820 - Onegin is already 24 years old, he is not a boy, but an adult man , especially compared to the eighteen-year-old Lensky. Knowing the people of his circle and despising them, nevertheless, Eugene "was very different ... and respected the feeling of others." It is not surprising, because he treats Lensky a little patronizingly, looks down on his "youthful fever and youthful delirium." Their communication was born of curiosity, a desire to find out that both were unknown in each other. In their disputes, they tried to find, give birth to truth, but it turned out that the dispute does not give rise to truth, but kills one of the participants in the dispute.

Between them, everything gave rise to controversy

And attracted to thought:

Tribes of bygone treaties,

The fruits of science, good and evil,

And age-old prejudices,

And the fatal secrets of the grave,

Fate and life in its own course,

Everything was subject to their judgment.

A poet in the heat of his judgments

I read, forgetting myself, meanwhile

Fragments of northern poems,

And condescending Eugene,

Although I did not understand many of them,

He listened diligently to the young man.

But more often passions occupied

The minds of my hermits.

Gone from their rebellious power,

Onegin spoke of their rebellious power

With an involuntary sigh of regret ...

In Lenskoye, Pushkin portrayed a character completely opposite to Onegin's character. This figure of the second plan is intended to set off the character of the main character of the novel. His character is completely abstract, completely alien to reality. Lensky was a romantic both by nature and by the spirit of the times. But at the same time, "he was an ignoramus with his dear heart," always talking about life, he never knew it. “Reality had no influence on him: he and his sorrows were the creation of his fantasy,” Belinsky rightly notes. He fell in love with Olga, and adorned her with virtues and perfections, attributed to her feelings and thoughts that she did not have and which she did not care about. "Olga was charming, like all the" young ladies "until they became" ladies "; and Lensky saw in her a fairy, a selphide, a romantic dream, not in the least suspecting a future lady," writes Vissarion Grigorievich. "People like Lensky, with all their indisputable merits, are not good in that they are either reborn into perfect philistines, or, if they retain their original type forever, they become these outdated mystics and dreamers. ... In a word, these are now the most intolerable empty and vulgar people. ".

Vyazemsky notices that while reading the novel: "with the verse My friends, you feel sorry for the poet ... One of his friends said:" It's not at all a pity "-" How so? " that you yourself made Lensky more funny than attractive. In his portrait, drawn by you, there are shades of caricature. "Pushkin laughed good-naturedly, and his laugh was, apparently, an expression of consent to the remark made." The history of friendship between Onegin and Lensky leads us to the conclusion that these two people really were only "from nothing to do friends." "We regard everyone as zeros and ourselves as ones," the author emphasizes. Onegin's friendship is based on the same egoism, and therefore the hero so easily allows himself to poke fun at Lensky's feelings, and then, having received a cartel from a friend, he is only "dissatisfied with himself."

She liked novels early;

They replaced everything for her;

She fell in love with deceptions

And Richardson and Russo.

The time has come, she fell in love.

So the grain has fallen into the ground

Spring is revived by fire.

Her imagination has long been

Burning with bliss and melancholy,

Alkalo of fatal food;

Long sincere longing

Her young breasts were pressed against her;

The soul was waiting ... for someone

And Onegin, as a person experienced in matters of love flirting, perfectly sees and understands the state of the girl's soul. He understands that this is not true love, but only the passion of falling in love, grown in a romantic girl's heart, and soundly nourished by love stories. From a young age he was accustomed to the deception and hypocrisy common in his circle. The art of love play - flirting - Eugene is fluent in:

But what was he true genius,

What he knew harder than all the sciences,

What was izmlad for him

And labor, and torment, and joy,

What took a whole day

His yearning laziness, -

There was a science of tender passion ...

Onegin himself does not believe in love, does not believe in happiness, does not believe in anything like that. The years he lived in a false world were not in vain for him. After so many years of living in a lie, Eugene cannot truly love. His soul is satiated with passions. This explains his understanding of Tatiana. But, having received a letter from Tatiana, he shows nobility, because "... he was vividly touched" by the inexperience and sincere feeling of her love: "Your sincerity is dear to me." His rebuke to Tatiana is dictated by his concern for the young girl: But he did not want to deceive The credulity of an innocent soul.

In his soul there are still remnants of conscience not burnt by the fire of passions, surprisingly combined with egoism. Therefore, he says to Tatyana:

Whenever life is at home

I wanted to limit

That is true except for you alone

I was not looking for another bride ...

Once, in his early youth, Onegin believed, probably, in the possibility of high love for life. But his whole subsequent life, filled with passions, killed this faith - and even the hope of its return:

There is no return to dreams and years:

I will not renew my soul ...

Here it is - Onegin's main tragedy: "I will not renew my soul"! Of course, from his point of view, he is right, he acts nobly: not believing in the possibility of love, refuses it, so as not to deceive the girl, not to subject her to shame.

I, no matter how much I love you,

Having got used to it, I will stop loving you immediately;

Start to cry: your tears

Will not touch my heart

And they will only enrage him ...

Why is Onegin so sure that there can be no other "family happiness"? Because he saw too many similar examples in the light:

What could be worse in the world

Families where the poor wife

Sad for an unworthy husband

And in the afternoon and evenings alone;

Where is the boring husband, knowing her value

(Fate, however, cursing),

Always frowning, silent,

Angry and coldly jealous!

It is this meeting with Tatyana that for the first time reveals to us another Onegin, previously hidden by the veil of egoism. For the first time, Onegin does not make a gesture, but an act, although he did it for two reasons. On the one hand, he understood the sincerity of a deluded girl's heart, and on the other, he was tired and satiated with the deceptions of prodigal passion. In his noble deed, we see, if not the very evolution of the hero's image, then its possibility. A sprout of hope appears that not everything is lost for him, through the nobility of the deed, the revival of the soul is possible. But this is just a mirage, flashed and melted, which is shown by the further development of events. The turning point of the novel is January 12 - Tatyana Larina's name day. It is here that the outset of subsequent events takes place. Onegin himself starts a conversation about the Larins' sisters, asking Lensky, and he, driven by a sincere feeling for the one he considers his friend, and, wishing him, according to his ideas, good, invites Eugene to the name day. Onegin, who does not like "provincial light", does not want to appear there. Vladimir promises him that it will be a family holiday, out of good intentions deceiving a friend. "But a bunch of people will be there And all such rabble ..." - And, no one, I'm sure! Who will be there? own family. Let's go do a favor!

A great disappointment seizes the hero when he sees, instead of a modest family celebration, a crowded feast that turns into a ball. Irritation seeps into his soul. But most of all, he is annoyed by the reception that is given to him on name days. He is perceived as Tatyana's fiancé, seated opposite her at the table, while Vladimir is seated opposite Olga. And the very sight of embarrassed Tatyana, who understands everything, but does not have the strength to cope with herself, infuriates him. He sees the ugliness of the events taking place. "But in the novel the name days are only designated, the poet brilliantly showed how you can replace the name day with their vulgar imitation ... far from the image of St. Tatiana, which should have been remembered on that day at the name day. to Saint Tatiana, a verse is sung by the "quick-witted poet".

Between the old songs of the almanac

This verse was printed;

Triquet, the quick-witted poet,

Brought him into the world from the dust,

And boldly instead of belle Nina

Put belle Tatiana.

The ugly character of the name day is further enhanced by the fact that the guests at the holiday have neither names nor surnames. "The meaninglessness of the name day lies in the fact that they pass without names. Therefore, their ugly result is natural - the death of Lensky."

All this disgrace causes anger in Onegin's soul. He is unable to forgive his friend for the deception that, in the hero's opinion, put his pride in a humiliatingly awkward position. In his position, he accuses Lensky and, holding a grudge,

He pouted and, indignant,

He swore to enrage Lensky

And take revenge in order.

Now, triumphant beforehand,

He began to draw in his soul

Caricatures of all guests.

For this, Onegin does not need to make an effort, since the guests themselves are just a sign, a caricature, a parody of people. Onegin's revenge is terrible: he provokes Lensky with his courtship of his bride to a duel and kills him. From indifferent contempt for others to a mean act, one step and Eugene, without hesitation, takes it. Also easily, without hesitation, he will do the next - to the murder. And these steps can in no way be called links in the "evolutionary" chain of the image of the hero of the novel. An accidental quarrel is only a pretext for a duel, and the reason for it, the reason for Lensky's death is much deeper. A force enters the quarrel between Onegin and Lensky, which can no longer be reversed - the force of "public opinion." The bearer of this power is hated by Pushkin more than Pidyakov, Gvozdin, Flyanov and others put together - those are only nonentities, bribe-takers, jesters, libertines, and now before us is a murderer, an executioner:

Zaretsky, once a brawler,

Ataman of the card gang,

The head of the rake, the tavern tribune,

Now kind and simple

The father of the family is single,

Reliable friend, peaceful landowner

And even an honest man

This is how our century is being corrected!

Had to lend myself

not a ball of prejudice

Not an ardent boy, a fighter,

But a husband with honor and intelligence.

Into this case

The old duelist intervened;

He is angry, he is a gossip, he is talkative ...

Surely there must be contempt

At the cost of his funny words.

But the whisper, the laughter of fools ...

Onegin thinks so. And Pushkin painfully sums up:

And here is the public opinion!

Spring of honor, our idol!

And that's what the world turns on!

The author does not often use heaps of exclamation marks. But here he crowns three lines in a row with them: all his torment, all his indignation - in these three exclamation marks in a row. This is what guides people: the whisper, the laughter of fools - the life of a person depends on it! It is terrible to live in a world that revolves on evil chatter! "Alone with his soul" Onegin understood everything. But the trouble is that the ability to remain alone with your conscience, "calling yourself to a secret judgment," and to act as your conscience tells you, is a rare skill. Here you need courage, which Eugene does not have. The judges are the Skotinins, Pustyakovs and Buyanovs with their vulgar morality, against which Onegin does not dare to oppose. Onegin is amazing in this scene. Yesterday he did not have the courage to give up the duel. His conscience tormented him - after all, he obeyed the very "strict rules of art" that Zaretsky loves so much, today he is rebelling against the "classic and pedant", but how pathetic is this rebellion? Onegin breaks all the rules of decency by taking a footman as a second. "Zaretsky bit his lip" after hearing Onegin's "performance" - and Yevgeny is quite satisfied with this. For such a small violation of the "laws" of the world, he has enough courage. And then the duel begins. Pushkin terribly plays on words-antonyms "enemy" and "friend". Indeed, what are they now, Onegin and Lensky? Already enemies or still friends? They themselves do not know it. Enemies stand with downcast eyes.

Enemies! How long have we been apart

Has their lust for blood taken away?

How long have they been hours of leisure,

Meal, thoughts and deeds

Did you share it amicably? Now it is wicked

Hereditary enemies are like,

As in a terrible, incomprehensible dream,

They are to each other in silence

They are preparing death in cold blood ...

Do they not laugh until

Their hand was not stained,

Do not disperse amicably? ..

But wildly secular enmity

Afraid of false shame.

Cloaks are dropped by two enemies.

Zaretsky thirty-two steps

Measured with excellent precision,

He spread friends, but an extreme trail,

And everyone took their pistol.

The thought to which Pushkin led us throughout the course of events is now formulated briefly and precisely: But wildly secular enmity Is afraid of false shame. The duel of Onegin and Lensky is the most tragic and most mysterious episode of the novel, which reveals a lot in the moral image and character of the hero. Onegin is at best a "scholar, but a pedant," but not a cold-blooded killer and brute. There is no indication of this in the novel. Vladimir Lensky is a naive poet and dreamer; he also does not give the impression of an inveterate shooter. But the tragic ending of the ridiculous event, experienced by the hero of the novel as a personal drama and, perhaps, the author's sincere regret about the death of the "young poet" compel us to take a closer look at the sixth chapter of the novel. In this regard, two questions arise: firstly, what is the reason for such a strange and sometimes inexplicable behavior of Eugene Onegin before and during a duel and, secondly, why the hero of the novel, an independent and even daring personality, recognizes the behavior imposed on him by Zaretsky , loses will and becomes a doll in the hands of a faceless duel ritual?

A duel is a duel, a pair fight that takes place according to certain rules and has the goal of "removing" a shameful spot, insults and "restoring" honor. The strict observance of the rules was achieved by appealing to experts and arbitrators in matters of honor. This role in the novel is played by Zaretsky, "in duels - a classic and a pedant," and, as can be seen from the novel, he deals with great omissions. More precisely, he deliberately ignored everything that could eliminate the bloody outcome. On the first visit to Onegin to transfer the challenge, he did not even think to discuss the possibility of reconciliation. And this was the direct responsibility of the second. Further, immediately before the fight, he again does nothing, although it is clear to everyone except the eighteen-year-old Lensky that there is no blood grievance. Instead, he "got up without explanation ... having a lot to do at home." Then there were at least two more reasons for stopping or even ending the duel. “Firstly, Onegin is more than an hour late. In this case, according to the dueling code, the enemy is declared not to appear. "honest fellow," and this was already a clear and unequivocal insult to Zaretsky. " After all, the seconds had to be equal, that is, both must have a title of nobility.

So, Zaretsky separated the opponents by 32 steps, placing barriers at a "noble distance", apparently ten steps, or even less, and did not stipulate in the conditions of a duel that the opponents should stop after the first shot. Thus, our connoisseur of dueling ethics behaves not so much as a supporter of strict rules of the art of dueling, but as a person extremely interested in a scandalous, noisy, and, in relation to a duel, fatal outcome. The duel rules are violated by both Zaretsky and Onegin. The first is because he sees in her an opportunity to gain scandalous notoriety, the second is to demonstrate contempt for the story in which he fell against his own will and in the seriousness of which he does not believe. All of Onegin's behavior in the fight testifies to the fact that the author wanted to make him a reluctant killer. Both for Pushkin and for his contemporaries, who were familiar with the duel firsthand, it was obvious that those who wish the enemy death do not shoot on the move, at the barrel of someone else's pistol from a long distance. However, why did Onegin shoot at Lensky, and not past? Yu.M. Lotman believes that he could hardly have contributed to reconciliation by a demonstrative shot in the air or to the side. Rather, it would be regarded as an insult. And then it is known that in the case of no effective duel, she was fired upon before receiving the first wound or the death of one of the duelists. The duel in the Onegin era had a strict ritual. They did not act of their own free will, obeying the established rules. Society, which Onegin despised, nevertheless turned out to have power over his actions and soul. Onegin is afraid to seem ridiculous, to become the topic of provincial gossip. He does not find courage in his empty soul, an empty soul is empty. This does not mean that there are no feelings there - there are no positive, but only negative ones, and here the hero shows one of them - cowardice.

An exhaustive moral assessment, as if summing up the culmination of the novel, is given by F.M. Dostoevsky: “Thus, his behavior is determined by fluctuations between the natural movements of his soul, his human feelings for Lensky and the fear of being branded as a jester and a coward, violating the conventional norms of behavior at the barrier. according to the world ideal - this is too our way, it is likely. "

Lensky is killed. Pushkin sadly ironic over this in verse, exaggerating elegiac cliches to the limit:

Young singer

Found an untimely end!

The storm has died, the color is beautiful

Faded in the morning dawn

The fire on the altar is extinguished! ..

The murder of Lensky was for Onegin that moment, that turning point, beyond which there was no choice left for him, there was no way to go back. He burned all the bridges behind him. His "involuntary" selfishness was the cause of death, in general, of a harmless person, an absurd dreamer, whom Onegin himself considered for some time his friend. And, seeing the hopelessness of his life, he runs. He runs from people, runs from himself, but he has nowhere to run. And, as you know, you can't run away from yourself. He leaves in a hurry, without saying goodbye to anyone, since there is no one to be with. Despair and longing chase him away.

Killing a friend in a duel,

Having lived without a goal, without work

Until twenty six

Languishing in idle leisure

I didn't know how to do anything.

Anxiety seized him

Wanderlust

Singer Giaur and Juan

Yes, there are two or three more novels with him,

In which the century was reflected

And modern man

Depicted fairly true

With his wicked soul

Self-loving and dry

A betrayed dream immeasurably,

With his embittered mind

Boiling in action, empty.

Tatyana trusts books too much, it is from them that she draws knowledge of life, considering them a true reflection of reality, and not the result of the creative imagination of the authors. It seems to Tatyana that the works of Byron and "two or three more novels" she found in Onegin's office completely exhaust and explain the thoughts, actions and state of mind of the owner of these books. A new Onegin opens up to her, which she did not know.

What is he? Is it an imitation

An insignificant ghost or still a Moskvich in a Harold cloak,

Interpretation of other people's quirks,

Words of fashionable full lexicon ...

Isn't he a parody?

Onegin's journey lasts about three years. But this period does not bring healing to the hero. Tormented by his conscience for the committed sin of murder, "he left his village," "where a bloody shadow appeared to him every day." But in his petrified heart there is no remorse, because it is not the desire to change his own thoughts that seizes him, but only anxiety and "the desire to change places." The author emphasizes that Eugene "began wandering without a goal." Also, without a goal, he completed his travels when they "got tired of everything in the world." "The seeker of world harmony, having read her [Tatiana] a sermon and nevertheless acted very honestly, set off with his world longing and with blood shed in his silly anger in his hands to wander around his homeland, not noticing it, and, boiling with health and strength, exclaim with curses: I am young, life in me is strong, What can I expect, longing, longing! "

Yuri Mikhailovich Nikishov sums up the aimless wanderings of the hero: "The journey did not revive Onegin for a new life and did not even prepare him for it. On the contrary, he returns from the journey extremely devastated and exhausted. His position is desperate and hopeless." The mood, expressed in the sad "longing, longing", runs like a red thread throughout Onegin's journey. His spiritual state and psychological makeup did not change during this period of his life. An attempt to unwind at the expense of travel does not reach the goal, since "Onegin depends little on external impressions ... But, perhaps, to make an allowance for" evolution ", maybe we have a" new "Onegin? ... Maybe this" concern "brings significant adjustments in the very nature of the perception of the environment? All these assumptions must be answered in the negative. That is why the role of travel in the evolution of Onegin cannot be exaggerated. "

Has Tatiana changed? Undoubtedly. However, she did not tear herself away, but rose above that secular society in which Onegin so longs and so despises. He sees how those whom he despises and whose judgment he is so afraid of bow down before her. She became a part of this society, and at what really is the best part of it. Tatiana's success in society does not speak at all about the ideal assimilation of the culture of "light", but about her spiritual victory over secular society. She is not hostile to the "light", but is "above" him, she is his "ideal". And the proof of this is the universal admiration that surrounds her. But then the crowd hesitated, A whisper ran through the hall ... A lady was approaching the hostess, Behind her was an important general. She was unhurried, Not cold, not talkative, Without an insolent gaze for everyone, Without claims to success, Without these little antics, Without imitative undertakings ... Everything was quiet, it was just in her ... The ladies moved closer to her; The old ladies smiled at her; The men bowed below, Catching the gaze of her eyes; The girls walked quieter ... "... Not everyone is capable of joining this refined environment to the same extent as Tatiana, and even more so to win the championship in it. This is a kind of feat of Tatiana." But it is worth remembering that the very people who are hated, despised and afraid of by Onegin are honored by her. Many literary critics, mainly adhering to the traditions and ideas of revolutionary socialist, such as Herzen, Belinsky and many Soviet researchers of the novel, consider it axiomatic that the assertion that Onegin has an advanced consciousness wandering from article to article. Evidence of this is already his departure from the “light.” In other words, a person who in some way opposes himself to society, only due to this opposition is recorded in the “advanced.” But if you follow the logic of this statement, you will have to admit that any an antisocial personality, be it a terrorist or an “authority” of the criminal world, will become one of the “advanced” people next to Onegin, because they are also “critical” of their surroundings and have also “left” the “light.” Moreover, in the novel we see not only Onegin's departure from the “light”, but also his return to the “light.” Somewhat earlier, before the duel with Lensky, the hero is driven by fear of opinions that ". After all, it is precisely out of the desire not to become a laughingstock in the eyes of the society he despises that he participates in a duel, the result of which is the absurd death of a person.

And now, having returned to secular society, he sees the "new" Tatiana. Which became, according to the author's definition, the "goddess" of this society. He sees what he himself, for various reasons, could not become. And passion for Tatiana suddenly strikes his heart, in the heat of which he writes a letter.

I foresee everything: will offend you

A sad secret explanation.

But so be it: I'm on my own

You can't resist anymore;

It's all decided: I'm at your will

And surrender to my destiny.

Tatiana does not believe Onegin. What does she know about him? How does he represent it? The one I saw in the "empty study" three years ago, on the pages of his books; in the garden, when the girls sang and her heart fluttered, and Onegin was cold and wordy. Now she reads his letters and does not believe them. After all, Onegin wrote more than one letter to Tatiana: There is no answer. He has a message again. There is no answer to the second, third letter.

Why, when we read Onegin's letter, we see genuine torment in it, but Tatiana does not see or does not want to see? But no! She sees and understands better than we do what exactly moves the heart and hand of the hero of the novel. "After all, she sees who he is: the eternal wanderer suddenly saw a woman whom he had previously neglected in a new brilliant unattainable setting - but in this situation, perhaps, the whole point of the matter is. despised, now worships light - light, this terrible authority for Onegin, despite all his world aspirations - that's why he rushes to her blinded! This is my ideal, he exclaims, here is my salvation, here is the outcome of my anguish, I overlooked it, and “happiness was so possible, so close!” After all, as we remember, she was brought up for the most part on the romantic literature of the late 18th - early 19th centuries, so she knows, and perhaps not only from books, that love is Self-sacrifice. Love does not seek its own, believes everything, always hopes. Love constitutes human happiness, gives life and gives birth to joy. But Onegin's feeling is not love, but a passionate desire to saturate his tortured heart with only a semblance of a high feeling. His desire is not to be love, but have love. The desire of an adult capricious child to enjoy love. Therefore, for Eugene, his feeling is illness, death, suffering. And here again the meeting of the two heroes. Goes, looking like a dead man. Well, Tatiana? She does not accept his feelings, not because she does not want to, but because she cannot. She would like this love: Tatiana has remained the same romantic nature, it seems to her that "happiness was so possible, so close" - this is not true. They could not be and did not become together. After all, he has nothing to offer but new pain, suffering and shame. He wants not to give her love, but to receive himself what he missed in his time. I thought: freedom and peace A substitute for happiness. My God! How wrong I was, how I was punished. In this final chapter of the novel, the contrast of the characters is again manifested. Indeed, against the background of Tatiana's responsibility and self-sacrifice, Onegin's egoistic passionate feeling looks criminal and insignificant. "By the way, who said that secular, court life perniciously touched her soul and that it was the dignity of a secular lady and new secular concepts that were partly the reason for her refusal to Onegin? No, it was not so. No, this is the same Tanya, the same old village Tanya! She is not spoiled, she, on the contrary, is depressed by this magnificent Petersburg life, is broken and suffers; she hates her dignity as a secular lady, and whoever judges her otherwise does not at all understand what Pushkin wanted to say. " And so she firmly says to Onegin:

But I'm given to another

And I will be faithful to him forever.

"Yes, she is loyal to this general, her husband, an honest man, who loves her, respects her and takes pride in her. Let her mother begged her, but she, and no one else, gave her consent, she, she herself, swore to him to be honest his wife. Let her marry him out of despair, but now he is her husband, and her betrayal will cover him with shame, shame and kill him. But can a man base his happiness on the misfortune of another? Happiness is not only in the pleasures of love, but also in the highest harmony of the spirit. How to calm the spirit if there is a dishonest, ruthless, inhuman act standing back? " Has the main character changed? What is he like now? Outwardly, Onegin returns to the lifestyle that he led at the beginning of the novel, when we first met him:

And in a silent office

He remembered the time

When the cruel blues

I was chasing him in the noisy light.

At such a "moment, evil for him," Pushkin leaves his hero.

In the criticism devoted to the novel, it is often mentioned that Onegin is a "product" of society, the result and stage of decay of serf Russia. "Superfluous person"! It is even believed that Pushkin opens a whole gallery of "superfluous" people in Russian literature of the 19th century by Onegin. This is precisely what many literary critics who adhere to the liberal and revolutionary-democratic world outlook are asserting. It is necessary to pay attention to the fact that Pushkin's novel does not require any interpretation. This work must be perceived as it is written. Many literary critics use an unacceptable method: they say, the author wanted to say this and that. The author said what he wanted to say and what he was able to say and read the novel "Eugene Onegin" should be the way it was written, and not invent something and not put into the author's mouth those words that he did not utter.

Man is something more than the "Laplace" mathematical addition of molecules. And the personality is made up not only of the influence of society and living conditions. Such a simplified view can be “forgiven” the revolutionary democrats of the 19th century (and even then only “because of the old age”), when a mechanistic, flat view of nature, society and personality reigned in everything. When it seemed that the world lay in full view, that everything is known and all the laws of the world are open, and if something is unknown, then it is only a matter of time, and not far. But even in those days, in Russia, her best sons understood life differently than the revolutionaries - socialists - communists who overthrew social foundations. They saw in a person a free personality, and not just the result of education and the influence of society. They argued that a person can and must always choose between good and evil, and if he refuses this choice, then, as Pushkin showed in his novel, he still chooses evil. He who is not for good is against him, because the gap between good and evil fills in indifference, and indifference in itself is already evil.

In the beginning. In the 19th century, due to the penetration from abroad of various educational literature generated by the era of the French Enlightenment, many noble youth were carried away by fashion trends. The French language and French culture have become closer to high society than their native Russian. The destructive and cruel epoch of the Great French Revolution became the new ideal of young nobles who grew up on an alien to the Russian people, the entire Russian state, foreign culture: language, history, faith, ideology, etc. Secret societies and Masonic lodges of various kinds were active everywhere. The revolutionaries fascinatingly, ardently and skillfully explained to young and inexperienced people that the reason for their misfortunes was not in themselves, not in their isolation from the people's life of their own Russian people, but in the structure of the social system. And although the majority of the "educated" nobility did not really understand the reasons and secret currents of social life, they were all fascinated by the demagogy of the destroyers of the "old world" and sympathized with it. This is no longer the jaded indifference, leading a chaotic and worthless life, secular dandies and dandies. The sin of despondency, which Pushkin displays in a novel called the blues, is replaced by anger. Selfishness, from personal, becomes public, since claims are made against society: "Why am I so worthless?" The reason for the ugliness of their soul is sought not in itself, but in other people, in the whole society. At the heart of such a character trait as selfishness is pride, pride. And egoism generates envy, and it also becomes the original cause of revolutions and other "class" upheavals. But we never found out, due to the end of the novel, whether the hero had "grown" from his "private" egoism to the egoism of the "public," revolutionary.

Thus, having “lived” with the hero his life in the novel, we can regretfully summarize that we did not see the evolution of the image as a process of qualitative change. Again we have before us the main tragedy of Onegin, formulated by the great Russian poet: "I will not renew my soul." The hero is not updated. Onegin always has a choice, and his attempts to change, if not himself, then at least the world around him, are also visible. It would seem that everything is there for the evolution of the hero, but it does not happen. Since the hero does not acquire the meaning of life. And as before, there is no goal in front of him, all the same "the heart is empty, the mind is idle." Life remains for him "a vain gift, an accidental gift."

It is difficult to conclude the consideration of the evolution of the image of the protagonist of the novel with words better than those spoken on the day of memory of A.S. Pushkin, dedicated to the 50th anniversary of the death of the great Russian poet, while the great Russian scientist - historian V.O. Klyuchevsky: “We were not analyzing the novel, but only its hero and was surprised to notice that this was not at all a hero of his time and the poet himself did not think to portray him that way. somehow awkward, at the wrong time and inopportune. "Having fun and luxury child" and the son of a squandered father, an 18-year-old philosopher with a chilled mind and a faded heart, he began to live, that is, to burn life when it was necessary to study; when others began to act; tired before he set to work; bustling about lounging in the capital, idly messing around in the country; out of arrogance he did not know how to fall in love when it was necessary, out of arrogance he hastened to fall in love when it became criminal; in passing, without a purpose and even without anger he killed his friend; traveled across Russia without purpose; from nothing to do he returned to the capital to wear off his strength exhausted by various idleness. oh, what to do next with such a stupid existence. Kind people in the countryside sat quietly in their places, sitting out or just incubating their nests; an idle stranger came from the capital, outraged their peace, threw them off their nests, and then, with disgust and annoyance at himself, turned away from what he had done. In a word, of all the characters in the novel, the most superfluous is its hero. Then we began to think about the question that the poet posed either on his own or on behalf of Tatyana: Well, is he really an imitation, An insignificant ghost or even a Moskvich in a Harold cloak, Interpretation of other people's quirks, The words of fashionable full lexicon ... Is he a parody? "

The theme of the "superfluous person" in Russian literature is associated with the image of Eugene Onegin. Pushkin was the first to draw the attention of his contemporaries to this problem. What is the reason that the smart, educated Onegin does not find a place for himself in life, experiences boredom, fatigue in the prime of his life? You can answer this question by tracing the evolution of the image in the novel.

The first chapter reveals to us the character and lifestyle of the protagonist. We find him in the carriage. The author calls Onegin a "young rake" who cynically thinks about the death of his uncle. The first stanza shows the moral character of the hero and gives his calling card. "Without prefaces, this very hour" Pushkin introduces us to Onegin's biography. Like many nobles of that time, the hero was brought up by the French governors. They cared little about the spiritual development of their pupil, taught him "jokingly everything," in isolation from the national culture and traditions. The result of this education:

He is in French perfectly

I could express myself and write;

Easily danced the mazurka

And bowed at ease;

What is more to you? The light decided

That he is smart and very nice.

Then the author shows us the secular life of a young man who is most successful in "the science of growing together tender." Onegin easily wins the hearts of beauties, skillfully using his charm and hypocrisy. The hero of Pushkin is a real dandy, dressed in the latest fashion, accustomed to standing for hours in front of the mirror. The life of the hero is described by the author as a continuous feast. The day is in full swing, and Onegin is being brought to bed with notes with an invitation to evening balls. Then lunch, walks, theater, where he loved to shine. And so it was repeated every day.

Onegin is used to getting only pleasure from life. Even love became entertainment for him. Thus, Pushkin shows us the deadness, emptiness, the existence of the hero. The symbol of his life is consumption. Art, ballet, even human relations are consumed. It is no coincidence that almost the main place in the first chapter is occupied by the description of the table: first it is the dining table, then the dressing table, and, ultimately, the table on which the deceased uncle lies.

In many ways, Onegin lives mechanically. This is evidenced by such a detail as the Breguet, announcing the theater, dinner. It is sad to think that sometimes a soulless mechanism runs a person's life. The question arises: what is the meaning of the hero's life? Is it really just to eat, drink, get pleasure from something that does not require spiritual efforts? Is this really Onegin. After all, there was an idea about him as an intelligent, thinking person.

No, early feelings in him cooled down;

He was bored with the noise of the light ...

I think that here we have a mismatch between the hero's lifestyle and his personality. This is the reason for the "spleen", "Russian blues", Onegin's boredom, cooling to everything. The hero is on the verge of spiritual death. Having met Onegin during this period, the author feels sympathy for him. He saw in the hero "involuntary devotion to dreams," "inimitable strangeness and a sharp, chilled mind." This is Onegin in essence. He did not die completely. There is still hope for a rebirth.

Thus, the novel moves into the inner world of the hero. Pushkin tries to understand what are the origins of Onegin's behavior. Here principles, philosophy, which guides the hero in life, play an important role. This is the Western way of thinking. Onegin learned it from childhood. It is no coincidence that there is a figurine of Napoleon in Eugene's office. Associated with this name is the theory of a strong personality, to which everything is allowed and accessible. Onegin learned this theory well. Selfishness guides his actions. He understands that everything in the world is consumed. The cult of money reigns everywhere. The hero realizes that society is badly organized. He disagrees with his laws. Therefore, he cannot find a place for himself in it. But the author will show us that the very outlook of the hero is wrong. Belinsky wrote that "Onegin suffers from a distorted understanding of the life and purpose of man that he has assimilated." But he has a long road ahead to the truth. And Onegin will gain life experience through his own mistakes.

In the village, he is irritated by everyday conversations about haymaking, wine, a kennel, etc. Acquaintance with the enthusiastic poet Lensky temporarily dispels the hero's boredom. And although in character they are completely different from each other, Onegin and Lensky became friends. I think that in the village the hero has a unique chance to start a new life. Tatiana's deep love would help him in this. Her sincere love confession touches Onegin. But the hero is used to living by reason. He is afraid to open up to real feeling, so he tells the girl that he is not worthy of her:

But I am not made for bliss;

My soul is alien to him;

Your perfection is in vain:

I am not at all worthy of them.

And although in a conversation with Tatyana he showed respect, "souls are direct nobility", Onegin nevertheless acted selfishly with her. He compares Tatiana to a tree:

The young maiden will change more than once

Dreams are light dreams;

So the tree has its leaves

Changes every spring.

On Olga's birthday, Onegin commits inglorious deeds. He is annoyed that everyone predicts him to be Tatyana's suitors. Therefore, the hero flirts with Olga and provokes Lensky. A duel ensues. Onegin was able to prevent it, but immeasurable pride and fear of public condemnation prevented him from doing so. I think that Onegin did not understand at that moment the seriousness of his actions. He thought only of himself, did everything automatically, unconsciously. Onegin's "anguish of heart pangs" gripped him too late. Young Lensky was already dead. At that moment, a fracture occurred in Onegin's soul. He is aware of his guilt, but nothing can be corrected. Lensky cannot be returned.

We expect that the tragic death of a close friend will force Onegin to look at life differently, change it. But nothing like that happens.

In the eighth chapter, after long wanderings, we again meet with Onegin at the St. Petersburg ball. What is our hero now? The author says about him:

Killing a friend in a duel,

Having lived without a goal, without work

Until twenty six

Languishing in idle leisure

No service, no wife, no deeds,

I didn't know how to do anything.

It seems that everything has remained in place.

He did not find the meaning of life, happiness, purpose. But still, after wandering around Russia, changes are noticeable in the hero. Onegin is trying to live. Suddenly he was seized by a passionate love for Tatiana. He became able to sympathize, empathize. Human qualities turned out to be close to him. He really fell in love. And to love means to give yourself to another person, to be one with him. I think that this is the manifestation of Onegin's evolution. At one time, selfishness prevented him from responding to Tatyana's sincere feelings. Now all Onegin's thoughts are occupied by her. The feigned coldness of the hero gave way to his true essence. Now he is already writing love confessions to Tatiana. Tatiana herself has changed. She has long ceased to be a naive provincial girl. On the contrary, she became the first beauty of Petersburg, a real goddess. This amazed Onegin. The hero cannot hide his feelings. He turns pale, embarrassed in front of her, experiences a painful state, writes a sincere message to his beloved, entrusts his fate to her.

And Tatiana behaves indifferently to him. Duty to her husband does not allow her to answer Onegin, give him a hint of reciprocity. Onegin understands the complexity of the situation. But he is unable to drown out a real, deep feeling in himself.

Finally, a decisive conversation takes place between the characters. Tatiana makes the final choice. She remains faithful to her husband, duty, despite her love for Onegin.

Onegin did not expect this. He was like "thunderstruck". The hero was seized by a storm of sensations. With her refusal, Tatyana showed Onegin that there are eternal values in life: loyalty to duty and Christian traditions. Confusion sets in in his soul. How can this affect the future life of the hero? The author leaves the ending of the novel open, invites the reader to answer this question himself.

I think that, most likely, Onegin will be reborn spiritually. Maybe he will even join the Decembrist movement. By the end of the novel, our hero has noticeably grown in moral terms, went through a spiritual evolution. This circumstance gives hope that Onegin will find his place in life.

The protagonist of the novel "Eugene Onegin" opens a significant chapter in poetry and throughout Russian culture. Onegin was followed by a whole line of heroes who were later called "superfluous people": Lermontov's Pechorin, Turgenev's Rudin and many other, less significant characters who embody a whole layer, an era in the social and spiritual development of Russian society. Pushkin traced the origins of this phenomenon: in a superficial upbringing, in a disorderly and imitatively perceived European culture, in the absence of spiritual and social interests, in a noble lifestyle filled with conventions and prejudices, in the habit of idleness and inability to systematic work. These are outstanding, rising above the average level of personality, critically perceiving reality, painfully looking for the meaning of life and their purpose in it, disappointed and mentally devastated, people who do not find use for their remarkable abilities, inevitably experiencing personal drama.

Eugene Onegin received a home education and upbringing, typical for aristocratic youth of his time, under the guidance of a French tutor, who “taught him everything in jest, did not bother him with strict morality, scolded him a little for pranks and took him for a walk to the Summer Garden. “And yet Onegin knew Latin well enough“ to disassemble the epigraphs, talk about Juvenal ”, ancient literature, modern political economy, history:

Onegin was in the opinion of many

(Judges decisive and strict)

Small scientist, but a pedant ...

Despite the irony of the author's assessment of the hero's shallow level of education, as well as the perceptions of the world about this level: “What is more to you? The world decided that he was smart and very nice, ”- Pushkin pays tribute to his rather high intellectual level, the range of his interests. Onegin's lifestyle is typical for the young aristocracy of the capital: balls, restaurants, theaters, walks along the Nevsky, love adventures - a full set of pleasures that make up the philistine idea of a happy, carefree life.

Eugene was self-critical enough, demanding of himself, so as not to realize the artificiality, pretense of his behavior (“How early could he be hypocritical, conceal hope, jealous, disbelieve, make one believe, seem gloomy, languish ...”), a stupefying way of life (“ He will wake up at noon, and again until morning his life is ready, monotonous and variegated ”).

No; early feelings in him cooled down;

He was bored with the noise of the light;

The beauties were not long

The subject of his usual thoughts;

Managed to tire treason;

Friends and friendship are tired ...

Here there is a satiety with monotonous impressions, and a sincere, natural desire of a thinking person to break out of the circle of secular conventions, vulgarity, monotony into the vastness of a living, full-blooded life.

What prompted the hero to protest, albeit passive, against a spiritless, albeit comfortable existence, which doomed him to loneliness, alienation, cooling to life?

The author emphasizes the virtues that distinguish Onegin over the philistine masses: "... Unwitting devotion to dreams, inimitable strangeness and a sharp, chilled mind", "pride and direct honor", "souls are direct nobility." Despite the beautiful views, “golden meadows and fields,” Onegin in his country estate, the castle filled with the air of history, was bored, because he “yawned equally among the fashionable and ancient halls”, shunned the limited neighbors-landowners, preferring to all this the loneliness of a confused but proud spirit ... He made an exception only for a young poet, an admirer of romanticism, inspired by Vladimir Lensky. Both of them looked like "black sheep" in the eyes of their landlord neighbors, both were alienated from the local society with endless talks "about haymaking and wine, about a kennel, about their relatives", although they were so different. Lensky loved passionately, selflessly. Onegin, faced with the sincere, deep love of an extraordinary girl, did not find enough spiritual strength in himself to respond to this high feeling.

Why does Onegin reject Tatyana's love? He sincerely pays tribute to her:

When would a family picture

I was captivated even for a single moment,

That is true b, except for you alone

I was not looking for another bride.

Onegin convinces Tatiana that he was not created for a measured and monotonous family life filled with quiet joys:

But I am not made for bliss;

My soul is alien to him;

Your perfection is in vain:

I am not at all worthy of them.

Believe (conscience is a guarantee),

There is no return to dreams and years;

I will not renew my soul ...

I love you with my brother's love

And maybe even more tender.

Onegin is indulgent and generous, straightforward and honest and at the same time indecisive and even cruel. He nobly does not accept "the science of tender passion, which Nazon glorified ... in which he was a true genius," but fearfully refuses true love, which requires tremendous exertion of mental strength.

The murder of Lensky in a duel, provoked by Onegin's selfish desire to annoy his friend, revealed another weakness of Eugene - the vitality in him of secular conventions, false ideas about noble honor, conventions so deeply despised by him, from which he fled from Petersburg. Onegin refused love, which could decorate his life, but now he has lost his only friend, sincere, trusting. The two closest, dear to him people were rejected by him because of the invincible mental coldness, the inability to step in the name of the high over the insignificant, secondary.

Tatiana, having visited Onegin's estate, re-reads books from his library and with fear notices that her chosen one prefers novels, “v. which the century was reflected and the modern man is depicted quite rightly with his immoral soul, selfish and dry, with an immensely betrayed dream, with his embittered mind, seething in empty action. " And Tatiana, no matter how careful she is in relation to her beloved, no matter how jealous she is of everything that surrounds him, she still doubted his human solvency:

Well he, really imitation,

An insignificant ghost or else

Muscovite in Harold's cloak,

Interpretation of other people's quirks,

Words of fashionable full lexicon ...

Isn't he a parody?

No, Onegin is far from a parody, but a living person, and his fate, conditioned by the entire development of the noble culture, is as sad as the fate of Tatiana. Having experienced a real feeling of love for the first time in his life, Onegin reveals his soul in a letter to Tatiana. He became spiritually richer, deeper, more human, more sensitive. How different he is at the end of the novel to a clever cold aristocrat, explaining in detail to Tatyana the reasons for refusing her love. Now he is in the position of a lover, sincere, defenseless, not afraid of ridicule.

Now he evokes compassion in the reader with his life drama, his whole broken, warped life:

If you only knew how awful

To languish with a thirst for love

To blaze - and the mind is all the hour

To subdue the excitement in the blood;

Wanting to hug your knees

And, weeping, at your feet

Pour out pleas, confessions, penalties,

Everything, everything that I could express ...

WAY

Onegin's theme in the novel is the theme of spiritual awakening, growing up, spiritual evolution.

Onegin's world of the first chapter is secular Petersburg, brilliant, festive, but still somewhat artificial, far from true Russianness. It is no coincidence that Pushkin describes in such detail the everyday culture of the noble Petersburg: Onegin's office, his clothes, lifestyle, then he will describe Onegin's office in his estate in the same detail - a portrait of Lord Byron, a statuette of Napoleon. The first chapter of Onegin reflects a "Byronic hero" quite typical of the first half of the 19th century, endowed, however, with individual features, even in his very skepticism reflecting the eternal Russian longing for a more meaningful, spiritualized life.

Onegin of the beginning of the novel is a person who does not know the whole complexity of life, simplifying it. There is neither true love nor true friendship in Onegin's world. Emphasizing the typicality of his hero, Pushkin recreates in detail one day of his life: the morning began with reading notes with an invitation to the ball, then a walk along the boulevard, lunch in a fashionable restaurant, in the evening - a theater, a ball, and only at dawn Onegin returns home. It is no coincidence that the author uses the verbs of movement - impetuous, but meaningless: "gallop", "rushed", "flew", "galloped headlong", "took off like an arrow." Onegin is not able to belong to something deeply, his life rushes, but rushes aimlessly, its diversity and fullness are replaced by variegation, flickering:

Wakes up in the afternoon. And again

Until the morning his life is ready,

Monotonous and variegated.

And tomorrow is the same as yesterday.

For all the richness of Onegin's outer life, his inner life was empty, it is no coincidence that Pushkin emphasizes: "languishing in spiritual emptiness." It is this “spiritual emptiness”, the lack of awakening of spiritual life that is the reason for Onegin’s indifference to poetry, reading books (“he wanted to write, but he was sick of hard work; nothing came out of his pen,” “I read, read, but everything was useless”) ...

One of the central themes in the first chapter of the novel is the mask motif: the author compares his hero either with Chaadaev, or with windy Venus, but Onegin's main mask is disappointment, which Pushkin calls "spleen" in English, but the next Russian translation immediately reveals the author's irony : "The Russian blues took possession of him little by little." On the one hand, "spleen" is a mask that Onegin wears not even without some pleasure, on the other, a true, deep disappointment in the life that was prepared for him.

Onegin would be of little interest to Pushkin if this aimless life satisfied the hero. In Onegin coexist, on the one hand, dependence on the opinion of the world, subordination to the general style of life, on the other - “inimitable strangeness, involuntary dreams a ness and a sharp, chilled mind. " Onegin is not satisfied with what satisfied many, he is indifferent to the pleasures of social life, he knows the value of momentary heartfelt affections. Onegin, “free, in the prime of his best years, among brilliant victories, among everyday pleasures,” was still not happy. The reason is that he could not consider the meaning of life "brilliant victory" and "daily pleasures", his soul was waiting for something more.

The first impetus to Onegin's spiritual awakening was a meeting with Lensky: the young poet's sincerity and inspiration reminded Onegin of his true feelings. Onegin, with a slight smile, treated Lensky's enthusiasm and some naivety, who “was an ignorant dear at heart,” but Onegin's nobility was reflected in the fact that he “tried to keep the cool word in his mouth”, did not destroy Lensky's dreams with the cold of his skepticism.

However, Onegin was more struck by the completely unusual spiritual world and the appearance of Tatyana Larina. Tatyana's letter surprised Onegin with the depth of thought and feeling, sincerity, openness and at the same time simple-heartedness, naivety: "But, having received Tanya's message, Onegin was vividly touched", "perhaps an ancient ardor took possession of him for a minute." Pushkin emphasizes that in relation to Tatyana Onegin acted nobly, he did not allow himself to play with sincere feelings: "But he did not want to deceive the credulity of an innocent soul."

At first glance, having distinguished Tatyana from Olga, Onegin still did not understand until the end of Tatyana's love. Onegin is so accustomed to loneliness and unhappiness that he passed by his real happiness, which was sent to him in the love of Tatiana. “Accept my confession,” Onegin says to Tatyana during their explanation in the garden, but the author will call Onegin’s words more precisely - not a confession, but a sermon (“this is how Eugene preached”). Onegin will reveal the true reason for his "preaching" later, in a letter to Tatiana: "I did not want to exchange my hateful freedom." And with bitterness he will add:

I thought: freedom and peace

A replacement for happiness. My God!

How wrong I was, how punished!

"Liberty", "peace", "hateful freedom" - such an understanding of the meaning of life turned out to be erroneous, and this mistake shattered possible happiness.

The situation that destroyed Onegin's previous worldview was a duel with Lensky. Onegin, not sharing the morality of secular society, still could not oppose it, he turned out to be a slave of public opinion, the only thing that was enough for him - he neglected some rules of the duel (he was late, invited his servant as a second), thereby discovering his attitude towards her. Onegin understood all the absurdity of this duel, but still, unlike the author, he could not rise above this situation, overcome himself. The murder of Lensky in a duel was a shock, after which Onegin perceives the world and himself in a different way. Unable to be where he was with the friend he had killed, Onegin leaves to wander. The chapter on Onegin's journey was not included in the final version of the novel, but it can be assumed that Pushkin's hero looks at the world in a new way, trying to understand his place in it, to discover true human values.

In the last chapter we already have a different person in many respects: Pushkin speaks with special warmth about the new, changed Onegin. Now the hero understands that “freedom” and “peace” will not replace happiness, that you need to live for the sake of love, mutual understanding, you need to appreciate those who love and understand you, which is why the whole meaning of life for Onegin is concentrated in love for Tatiana. Onegin's drama of unattainable happiness makes him suffering, but also more spiritualized. It is impossible to imagine that about his hero in the first chapter, Pushkin said: "gloomy, awkward," "enters with trepidation for the princess." Now "dreams, desires, sorrows were pressed deep into the soul." Onegin would never have given up these "sorrows", because this is a full-blooded life, which has only just now opened up to him.

Now Onegin is no longer attracted by secular pleasures, he is in no hurry to join the motley carousel of the life of the noble Petersburg, which is why he becomes a “stranger” for everyone, an “eccentric”: having met Tatiana at the ball and seeing her coldness, Onegin locks himself in his office for the whole winter. plunges into reading books, discovers a special world of love and suffering, his feelings are already ready to pour out in poetry:

And exactly: by the power of magnetism

Russian mechanism poems

Hardly at that time did not comprehend

My stupid student.

However, Tatiana cannot change her ideas about duty and honor, because even in her letter to Onegin she dreamed of “being a faithful wife and a virtuous mother”. Onegin loves and is loved, but this, it turns out, can no longer change anything in his fate. The last explanation of the heroes ends with Tatiana's words: “I ask you to leave me; I know: in your heart there is both pride and direct honor. " There is honor in Onegin's heart, and she will not allow him to remind Tatyana of himself anymore. This is truly a separation forever. Loving and beloved, Onegin remains a lonely eccentric, strange and alien to everyone. The purpose of life, its meaning, acquired at the cost of hard thinking, mistakes, search, turned out to be unattainable. Duty and honor close the path to happiness, in "a moment that is evil for him", together with the author, we part with Onegin.

The novel was completed in 1831 - after the Decembrist uprising, which became an era for Pushkin's generation that turned life, and the fate of Onegin on the pages of the novel was not brought to the fateful line of the twenty-fifth year - the hero still has to. This is how the story itself separated the author and his hero. It is not so important whether Onegin will come out to Senate Square or not, another thing is significant - the personality has taken place. Pushkin, with his characteristic harmony of worldview, does not confine himself to one side of life: the heroes are given not only losses, but also gains, not only sorrow, but also joy. Tatiana and Onegin are not given happiness, but love is given to them - this is already a lot. Both Tatiana and Onegin remained true to themselves, did not change their idea of duty and honor - this is precisely why the novel's special enlightenment is connected, the fate of the main characters of which is dramatic. This enlightenment is based on faith in a person, in a good beginning in him, on faith in "self-stability", which, according to Pushkin, is "a guarantee of greatness."

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