From Onegin to Pechorin: the early imitations of Pushkin’s novel

https://doi.org/10.20339/PhS.2-19.045

Boyarkina Polina V.,

PhD student of the Pushkin Studies Department

Institute of Russian Literature of Russian Academy of Sciences

e-mail: polina.boyarkina@gmail.com

Dostoevsky, placing the Pushkin’s hero on the “ancestral place”, wrote that he was followed by “Pechorins, Chichikovs, Rudins and Lavretsky, Bolkonskie <...>”. But before Pechorin was created, the development of the character went through an earlier stage. Even before the publication of the full edition of Pushkin’s novel, and even before the publication of its last chapters, about two dozen works written on the model of “Eugene Onegin” appeared.The type of the main character turned out to be almost the most difficult for perception (it is no accident that the critics found him “vague”). The imitations of the 1820–1830s show different versons of its embodiment. For example, the distinctive feature of the character — disappointment — was transmitted to the hero typologically related not to Onegin, but to Lensky, whose name, biography or poetic talent are taken over. Lermontov hardly directly focused on one or another of this texts when creating the “Hero of Our Time”. And yet in these texts the Pushkin’s type of hero went through a certain stage of comprehension, which could not but influenced the formation of the Pechorin’s type.

Keywords: Pushkin, Eugene Onegin, type of hero, Lermontov, Pechorin.

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