Pushkin’s Tatiana

One of the most discussed and elusive female characters in the Russian literary tradition, Alexandr Pushkin’s Tatiana Larina is the progenitor of an impressive list of heroines, ranging from Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina to Pasternak’s Lara Guishar in
Doctor Zhivago . In this new study the author offers an exegesis of Pushkin’s novel-in-verse,
Eugene Onegin , that focuses systematically on Tatiana. A major revisionist reading of one of the central texts of the Russian canon, this approach to
Eugene Onegin
should revitalize our understanding of both Pushkin’s heroine and the novel in which she appears. The author shows how Tatiana is able to realize her imaginative potential in a context full of risk and constraint. Tatiana emerges as a new literary, psychological and cultural model who enacts precisely those creative tensions and possibilties on which Pushkin himself drew.
Pushkin’s Tatiana
recovers the erotic energy, self-control and expressivity of Pushkin’s most beloved heroine, freeing her from the cliched image of self-sacrificial woman. It concludes with an exploration of Tatiana’s subsequent role in the self-presentations of the Russian poets Karolina Pavlova and Marina Tsvetaeva.