Champagne for the Brain: Reading and Writing Onegin Stanzas with American Undergraduates (1) (2004)

Eugene Onegin--like champagne Its effervescence stirs my brain. (Vikram Seth, A Golden Gate, 1986) Poetry as we know it is dying. Thus David Bethea opens his 1998 book on Alexander Pushkin (3); similar laments on undergraduates' bewilderment when asked to read poems (Lanser, 81) can be found throughout English-language scholarship on both poetry and pedagogy. Apparently, anglophone students today do not particularly enjoy poetry, unless in the updated context of rap or poetry slams. On the other hand, in a 1999 interview, award-winning and best-selling novelist Vikram Seth named Pushkin as the writer who has influenced him most: I suppose I have been most inspired by someone whom I haven't read a single word of in the original--Pushkin ... He wrote so wonderfully that even in translation, or at least in certain translations, his vision comes across. I really admire him. And I suppose he gives me the courage to experiment with form ... Pushkin is very close to my heart because I like his mixture of levity and deep seriousness. He refused to be pompous ... (Seth Variations) Seth's own 1986 novel The Golden Gate, inspired by Pushkin and set in Pushkin's unique verse form, Onegin stanzas, at least partly explains Pushkin's appeal to Seth. By writing like Pushkin, Seth actively engaged Pushkin's verse forms, so that his reading was as a fellow writer in a living tradition, rather than as a student trying to understand one that is, for her, dead. Can students of Russian literature benefit from Seth's example? Why is it important that Onegin is set in verse? Can translations come close to conveying the original? Addressing these questions through writing assignments may offer American undergraduates little versed in poetic tradition a taste of Onegin's champagne-like effervescence. John Bean, in his 2001 Engaging Ideas, argues that [t]he most intensive and demanding tool for eliciting sustained critical thought is a well-designed writing (xii-xiii); Bean recommends a mix of formal and informal writing assignments, including creative (41). In fact, Bean has found creative assignments to yield more lively, provocative and interesting pieces in much less time than analytical assignments. Jason Merrill has recently argued for applying Bean's ideas to the nineteenth-century canon by assigning reader-response journals that echo Tolstoy's own diaries. Here I will suggest taking the creative writing assignment a step further: writing Onegin stanzas while reading Onegin in English. Pushkin's Onegin opened my fall, 2003 course on the Russian Novel at Franklin & Marshall College. Only a few students in my course had heard of Pushkin; in contrast, most of them had read some Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, and several were especially keen to read Gogol. To set Pushkin in context, on the first day of class we read excerpts from twentieth-century testimonials to Pushkin, including Seth's Golden Gate. This elegantly fashioned pulp fiction, set in 1980s San Francisco, provides an updated modeling of Pushkin's multivoicedness--parenthetical asides, metaliterary discourse on how this is being written, a mix of lexical registers: How do I justify this stanza? These feminine rhymes? My wrinkled muse? This whole passe extravaganza? How can I (careless of time) use The dusty bread molds of Onegin In the brave bakery of Reagan? ... (Seth, 101) Students were assigned to read the first two and a half cantos of Onegin (in Falen's translation) for the second class, when the Onegin stanza writing task was presented. They were thus acquainted with Pushkin's humor and polyphony, as well as (passively) with the Onegin stanza form, when they began their own stanzas. The Unbearable Lightness of Modeling Pushkin But reading Pushkin is not necessarily the best preparation for writing like Pushkin, who often leaves readers with the impression that his texts have been produced effortlessly. …