PROBLEMS OF TRANSLATION
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and city; and a variety of romantic, satirical and bibliographic digres–
sions that lend wonderful depth and color to the thing.
Onegin himself is, of course, a literary phenomenon, not a local
or historical one. Childe Harold, the hero of Byron's "romaunt"
(1812), whose "early youth [had been] misspent in maddest whim,"
who has "moping fits," who is bid to loath his present state by a
"weariness which springs from
all
[he] meets," is really only a relative,
not the direct prototype, of Onegin. The latter is less "a Muscovite
in Harold's cloak" than a descendant of many fantastic Frenchmen
such as Chateaubriand's
Rene,
who was aware of existing only
through a
«profond sentiment d'ennui."
Pushkin speaks of Onegin's
spleen or "chondria" (the English "hypo" and the Russian "chondria"
or
«
handra"
represent
.a
neat division of linguistic labor on the part
of two nations ) as of "a malady the cause of which it seems high
time to find." To this search Russian critics applied themselves with
commendable zeal, accumulating during the last one hundred and
thirty years one of the most somniferous masses of comments known
to civilized man. Even a special term for Onegin's "sickness" has been
invented
(Oneginstvo);
and thousands of pages have been devoted
to him as a "type" of something or other. Modern Soviet critics
standing on a tower of soapboxes provided a hundred years ago by
Belinski, Herzen, and many others, diagnosed Onegin's sickness as
the result of "Tzarist despotism." Thus a character borrowed from
books but brilliantly recomposed by a great poet to whom life and
library were one, placed by that poet within a brilliantly recon–
structed environment, and played with by him in a succession of com–
positional patterns-lyrical impersonations, tomfooleries of genius,
literary parodies, stylized epistles, and so on- is treated by Russian
commentators as a sociological and historical phenomenon typical of
Alexander the First's regime: alas, this tendency to generalize and
vulgarize the unique fancy of an individual genius has also its advo–
cates in this country.
Actually there has never been anything especially local or time–
significant in hypochondria, misanthropy, ennui, the blues,
Welt–
schmerz,
etc. By 1820, ennui was a seasoned literary cliche of charac–
terization which Pushkin could toy with at his leisure. French fiction
of the eighteenth century is
full
of young characters suffering from
the spleen.
It
was a convenient device to keep one's hero on the
