Tatiana singer
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Ode to Pushkin’s Tatyana, from ‘Eugene Onegin’
If you were given a chance to travel through time, and if you decided upon visiting the countryside Russia of the late 1820s, you might be lucky and, whilst walking through a peaceful forest enjoying the delight which a birdsong can bestow upon one’s ears, you might stumble upon a peculiar young lady who finds tranquillity in the woods and serenity by the lake; a solitary maiden whose friends are books, flowers and birds, and who feels more at home surrounded by tall soulful trees than in the candlelit salons full of people; a lady who is introverted and timid on the outside, but is full of warmth, passions and feelings on the inside; this creature delicate as a fawn is Tatyana Larina – Pushkin’s wonderful literary creation and the love interest of Eugene Onegin, the Byronic Hero of Russian literature.
Lidia Timoshenko (1903-1976), Tatyana and Onegin Years Later
“Eugene Onegin” is Alexander Pushkin’s novel in verse, first published in 1833, although the current version
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Tatiana’s Letter, A Literary Legacy:
From Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin to D. M. Thomas’s White Hotel
Nora Foster Stovel, University of Alberta
Tatiana’s letter is an extraordinary example of a literary legacy. Originating in Alexander Pushkin’s 1833 narrative poem Eugene Onegin,[1] orchestrated by Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky in his 1878 opera, choreographed by John Cranko in his 1965 ballet, and finally returning to literary form in D. M. Thomas’s 1981 novel The White Hotel,[2] Tatiana’s letter is an eloquent example of intertextuality through different historical periods and artistic genres. Tracing the peregrinations of Tatiana’s letter through these several settings can illuminate its various artistic contexts and demonstrate how these versions resonate through Thomas’s quintessentially postmodernist fiction to provide a palimpsest that complicates his portrait of female subjectivity.
Pushkin composed Eugene Onegin, subtitled A Novel in Verse, in 1823-31. Tatiana, the solitary ingenue, is addicted to novels, especially
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Biography
[English] [Russian] [Hungarian]
Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin (1799-1837)Russian 19th century author who often has been considered his country's greatest poet and the founder of modern Russian literature. Pushkin blended Old Slavonic with vernacular Russian into a rich, melodic language. He was the first to use everyday speech in his poetry. Pushkin's Romantic contemporaries were Byron (d. 1824) and Goethe (d. 1832), but his ironic attitude can be connected to the literature of the 18th century, especially to Voltaire. Pushkin wrote some 800 lyrics with a dozen narrative poems.
"Love passed, the muse appeared, the weather
of mind got clarity newfound;
now free, I once more weave together
emotion, thought, and magic sound."
(from Eugene Onegin, 1823)
Aleksandr Pushkin was born in Moscow into a cultured but poor aristocratic family. On his father's side he was descended from an ancient noble family and on his mother's side he was a great-great-grandson of a black Abyssinian, Gannibal, who served under Peter the Great. Pushkin himself had black hair and swarthly
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