Addressing fundamental themes such as the conflicts between art, reality, and social convention, Eugene Onegin was the founding text of modern Russian literature
When the Romantic and world-weary dandy Eugene Onegin moves from St. Petersburg to take up residence in the country estate he has inherited, he strikes up an unlikely friendship with his mild-mannered neighbor, the poet Vladimir Lensky. Coldly rejecting the amorous advances of Tatyana and cynically courting her sister Olga—Lensky's fiancée—Onegin finds himself dragged into a tragedy of his own doing. Marking a clean break from the high-flown classical style of its predecessors, this ground breaking novel introduced the quintessentially Russian hero and heroine that would remain the archetypes for subsequent novelists throughout the nineteenth century.
