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Reviewed by:
  • A. S. Pushkin, “Evgenii Oniegin,” Igra dlia personal´nago komp´iutera
  • David L. Cooper
Dreamlore Games. A. S. Pushkin, “Evgenii Oniegin,” Igra dlia personal´nago komp´iutera. Moscow: Akella, 2009. <http://www.dreamloregames.com/onegin/>

Dreamlore’s “Evgenii Oniegin” (title in the old orthography) is not so much a computer game as a kind of comic book with sound and limited interactivity. The genre to which it properly belongs is the Japanese or Japanese-inspired visual novel, an “interactive fiction game,” typically narrated in the first person or through dialogue and presented from the visual perspective of the protagonist, who does not appear in the frame.1 In “Evgenii Oniegin” as well, animation of the characters is limited and voice actors read the dialogue, which is also displayed on the screen (see the website for screenshots). At a small number of climactic moments, the player is asked to decide how to continue, so that the narrative can take different directions and come to different conclusions. The game’s lead creator at Dream-works, Aleksandr Shcherbakov, suggested to me in an email that “Onegin” is deliberate kitsch: “Pushkin + anime + Japanese genre + zombies + guest appearances of Chatskii/Bazarov + glam rock. Something like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, but in a form of an anime game.”

So “Oniegin” is both a translation of Pushkin’s novel in verse into a new genre and a kind of mashup, like Seth Grahame-Smith’s bestselling Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (Quirk Books, 2009). One certainly expects an irreverent transformation of the novel and hopes for a lot of good laughs. But while the artwork and background music are very nicely done, there is too little of the original novel in this transformation, and while there is abstract humor in some of the choices made (Aleksandr Chatskii appears as a Secret Police inspector), the actual laughs are too infrequent. Where Seth Grahame-Smith was able to use Jane Austin’s masterful prose, Pushkin’s verse was removed for translation into the visual novel. Gone also is his narrator, though the creators could have had great fun with his spying and eavesdropping had they made him the invisible protagonist. Instead, the protagonist Onegin appears on screen in most scenes and is the primary narrator of events. Some of the limited dialogue from the original does make it into the game, but not always successfully, as when Onegin suggests to Vladimir Lenskii that he would have preferred Tatiana to Ol´ga, with her round face and banal beauty, the problem being that Ol´ga and Tatiana are drawn as identical twins, with oval faces and pointy chins, distinguished only by hair and dress colors (green and purple vs. purple and green). This could have been a laugh line, but insofar as it is [End Page 165] a part of the systematic distortion of or total disregard for Pushkin’s characters and plot, it elicits a sigh rather than a laugh.

Unlike Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, in which the zombie subplot highlights new and interesting facets of Austin’s characters and plot, in Evgenii Oniegin´´ Pushkin’s plot is but a stepping off point, and his characters are present in name only. The novel opens with Onegin traveling to his uncle’s estate and learning of his uncle’s death. After surveying his new domain the following day, Onegin decides to examine an abandoned neighboring estate, in spite of the fearful tales told by locals, and there, in the graveyard at midnight, encounters his first zombie, which he skeptically dismisses as a hallucination. There follows a visit by Lenskii, a guitar playing rocker with long, straight blond hair, during which Lenskii teases and makes fun of Onegin (!). Lenskii invites Onegin to join him that evening for dinner at the Larins. The Larin household, we learn from Onegin’s servant, is still presided over by the paterfamilias, Nikolai, who nearly died a few years ago in an epidemic but was saved by the young doctor Evgenii Bazarov, whose medical experiments Larin now assists and sponsors. Larin has also remarried (with no account given of the death of his first wife) to the young and shapely Polina, stepmother...

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