When the Romantic and world-weary dandy Eugene Onegin moves from St Petersburg to take up residence in the country estate he has inherited, he strikes up an unlikely friendship with his mild-mannered neighbour, the poet Vladimir Lensky. Coldly rejecting the amorous advances of Tatyana and cynically courting her sister Olga – Lensky’s fiancée – Onegin finds himself dragged into a tragedy of his own doing.

Addressing fundamental themes such as the conflicts between art, reality and social convention, Eugene Onegin was the founding text of modern Russian literature, marking a clean break from the high-flown classical style of its predecessors and introducing the quintessentially Russian hero and heroine, which would remain the archetypes for subsequent novelists throughout the nineteenth century.

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'Pushkin’s novel in verse, Eugene Onegin, is the book that has most influenced my life. Vikram Seth

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Read an excerpt from Eugene Onegin

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