Alexander Pushkin and his True Ideal

Abstract

Both before and since Dostoevsky uttered these ringing, rhetorical words, the character of Tatyana has taken on quasi-mythical proportions as the exemplar of true Russian womanhood, a symbol, indeed, of the positive feminine. It is equally held as a commonplace in Russian literary criticism that she became the model for later generations of strong Russian women, especially the creations of Ivan Turgenev, to be endlessly contrasted with the weaker masculine types.² Pushkin has even been recently acclaimed as the ‘first Russian feminist’.³ The present chapter will mainly concern itself with a re-evaluation of the images of the feminine and masculine in Pushkin’s most influential work, Yevgeny Onegin (1830), although I will commence with a brief analysis of these issues as they emerge in two earlier works of male/female interaction, namely The Fountain of Bakhchisaray (1821–3) and The Gipsies (1824).⁴

Pushkin would have done even better had he given his poem the name Tatyana, and not Onegin, as she is unquestionably the main heroine of the poem. She is a positive type, not negative; she is the type of positive beauty, she is the apotheosis of the Russian woman.¹