Eugene Onegin (Paperback: 256 pages)

Enhanced Muze Note

There is, indeed, almost every species of good writing--dark and bright, mocking and tender, gay and serious, brilliant and passionate--in this remarkable novel in verse; writing that proclaims Pushkin's knowledge of human nature, his acute observations of the physical world, his thorough familiarity with sophisticated life and the social scene; writing that at the same time, in a rather taxing fourteen-line stanza, can be wonderfully lyrical, immensely poetic, or have the crackle of epigram, the ballroom gloss of 'vers de société.'...No one, more than Pushkin, has so brilliantly described the social scene or so ably appraised it, but it is the measure of the poem's high excellence that it describes and appraises so much else, and can elsewhere be as intense and poetic as here it is glittering and sharp.