Of all great writers Pushkin left the greatest number of incomplete or fragmentary works. Even when something is finished it still has an air of potential, of development that might have been carried on had not the author felt that his art had done its mysterious job and that it was not for him to press it further. Don Juan comes to an end because Byron cannot keep up the pressure and think up further adventures to which his imagination can really respond, and so he loses interest. Evgeny Onegin does not end in this sense at all. In it Pushkin tells us that when he began what he calls his 'free novel' he did not know how it would end. His story breaks off, but his hero and heroine seem to live on. Their destiny is fulfilled in the form of the narrative, but we continue to ask questions about their future. Would Evgeny have continued to pursue Tatiana? Would she (as Nabokov opined) in time have relented? Russian readers, and writers too, have always speculated about them.

LRB 3 November 1983 | PDF Download