498
PARTISAN REVIEW
move. Byron gave it a new thrill; Rene, Adolphe, and their co–
sufferers received a transfusion of demon blood.
E'tJgeniy Onegin
is a Russian novel in verse. Pushkin worked at
it from May 1823 to October 1831. The first complete edition ap–
peared in the spring of 1833 in St." Petersburg; there is a well–
preserved specimen of this edition at the Houghton Library, Harvard
University.
Onegin
has eight chapters and consists of 5,551 lines,
all of which, except a song of eighteen unrhymed lines (in trochaic
trimeter ), are in iambic tetrameter, rhymed. The main body of the
work contains, apart from two freely rhymed epistles, 366 stanzas,
each of fourteen lines, with a fixed rhyme pattern: ababeecciddiff
(the vowels indicate the feminine rhymes, the consonants the mascu–
line ones). Its resemblance to the sonnet is obvious. Its octet consists
of an elegiac quatrain and of two couplets, its sestet of a closed
quatrain and a couplet. This hyperborean freak is far removed from
the Petrarchan pattern, but is distinctly related to Malherbe's and
Surrey's variations.
The tetrametric, or "anacreontic," sonnet was introduced in
France by Scevole de Sainte-Marthe in 1579; and it was once tried
by Shakespeare (Sonnet CXLV: "Those lips that Love's own hand
did make," with a rhyme scheme "make-hate-sake: state-come-sweet–
doom-greet: end-day-fiend-away. Threw-you"). The
Onegin
stanza
would be technically an English anacreontic sonnet had not the sec–
ond quatrain consisted of two couplets instead of being closed or
alternate. The novelty. of Pushkin's freak sonnet is that its first twelve
lines include the greatest variation in rhyme sequence possible within
a three-quatrain frame: alternate, paired, and closed. However, it
is really from the French, not from the English, that Pushkin derived
the idea for this new kind of stanza. He knew his Malherbe weIl–
and Malherbe had composed several sonnets (see for example,
((A
Rabel, peintre, sur un livre de Ileurs,"
1630) in tetrameter, with four
rhymes in the octet and assymetrical quatrains (the first alternately
rhymed, the second closed), but of course Malherbe's sestet was the
classical one, never clinched with a couplet in the English fashion.
We have to look elsewhere for Pushkin's third quatrain and for his
epigrammatic couplet-namely in French light verse of the seven–
teenth and eighteenth century. In one of Gresset's
«Epltres" ((Au
I
