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Tatiana
- Northwestern University Press
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Tatiana Caryl Emerson [TatianaJ, as is well known, besides being Onegin's illstarred partner and the coldblooded wife ofthe general, was Pushkin's personal Muse.... I even think that's the reason she didn't start anything up with Onegin and remained true to her unloved husband, so she'd have more free time to read and reread Pushkin and to languish over him. -Abram Tertz [Andrei SinyavskyJ, Strolls with Pushkin "Prostite mne: ia tak liubliu Tat'ianu miluiu moiu." (Forgive me: I so love my precious Tatiana.) -The narrator, Eugene Onegin, chap. 4, XXIV THE HEROINE OF Pushkin's Evgenii Onegin (Eugene Onegin) bears the most famous, deceptively complex female name in Russian literature. Paradoxes abound in her image, which is in varying degrees derivative, abject, impulsive, renunciatory, passive, majestically diSciplined and inexplicably faithful. Starting with the narrator who tells her story and ending with many generations of critics, almost everyone who touches this image falls in love with it-or with its unrealized potential. It could be argued that Tatiana and her exquisitely "withheld" personal fate functioned as the single, most richly inspirational source for Russian literary heroines well into the present century. This essay grew out ofmy bewilderment over the Tatiana cult. What has made this sentimental collage of female attributes-naive, stubborn, largely silent-so resilient and irresistible? Tatiana's energies and virtues have been enormously inflated, by detractors as well as devotees. In one of the earliest portraits, Belinsky, smitten by Tatiana but resisting the fate that Pushkin provided for her, lamented that she could not break free into her own autonomous life; Dostoevsky, pursuing the other extreme in his Pushkin Speech of 1880, elevated that fate to the level of hagiography by crediting Tatiana with every possible civic and metaphysical virtue, eventually investing her marital fidelity with the cosmic dimensions ofIvan Karamazov's challenge to an unjust universe.1 And then there is the troublesome denigration 6 Tatiana of Evgeny that usually attends the exaltation of Tatiana. He is made "superfluous " not only to his own life and times but also to the novel that bears his name; his honest and honorable actions vis-a-vis the rural maiden who thrust herself inopportunely upon him are read as mental cruelty, frivolity, even depravity.2 (Here, Tchaikovsky's wonderfully nuanced 1879 reworking ofthe novel into opera-"lyrical scenes" that probably should have been titled Tatiana-must figure as a crucial stage in the maturation of the cult.) To be sure, there are eminent Pushkin scholars (Gukovsky, Bondi, Slonimsky, and Makogonenko in the Soviet period) who have attempted a rehabilitation of Evgeny. This move is too often linked, however, with an extratextual, politically motivated fantasy cobbled together from the fragmentary chapter 10: Evgeny was "becoming a Decembrist," and thus he deserved Tatiana's (and the reader's) sympathy.3 Perhaps more serious than these facts of reception and transposition is the disjointed and confounding image ofTatiana within the text itself. There are the obvious incompatibilities: for example, that Tatiana is assembled from imported sentimentalist scraps and yet, on the strength ofone folkloreladen nightmare and a love of winter, represents the "Russian soul"; or that the moments of Tatiana's most profound transformation are concealed from us by the garrulous and possessive narrator. But there are also more radical discontinuities. Foremost among them is the hectOring, sententious and holier -than-thou tone that Tatiana adopts in her final rebuke to Evgeny in chapter 8: a lecture, as I shall argue below, that Tatiana in all likelihood could never have delivered to Onegin in the form Pushkin transcribes it.4 In this essay I suggest an alternative reading of Tatiana's role in the novel, one that acknowledges her extraordinary vigor and potency but makes it more aesthetic than moral, and-here's the blasphemous, countercultic rub-that sees this potency as largely Evgeny's achievement. FALLING IN LOVE WITH TATIANA: FOUR HYPOTHESES All three creators in the novel (Pushkin, the narrator, and Evgeny in his capacity as title role) sooner or later come to love Tatiana, each for his own reasons. Although the courtships of these respective suitors are carried out on different planes and often overlap, the follOwing motivations for eros can be distinguished. First there is the "forbidden fruit" argument, largely associated , I would argue, with Evgeny's sphere. The narrator does not doubt its power, over the hero and over people in general, as he tells us in the famous lines from chapter 8...