Eugene Onegin

Eugene Onegin is the title character of Alexander Pushkin's verse novel Eugene Onegin, written and published in installments between 1825 and 1832. A wealthy, fashionable but jaded and emotionally detached young aristocrat in St. Petersburg, Onegin inherits a country estate and moves there, where he befriends the young poet Vladimir Lensky and is introduced to Lensky's fiancee's sister, the shy and bookish Tatyana Larina, who falls deeply in love with him and writes him a letter confessing it. Onegin coldly rejects her, and later, largely out of boredom and spite, flirts with Lensky's own fiancee at a party, provoking Lensky to challenge him to a duel in which Onegin kills his friend. Years later Onegin encounters Tatyana again, now a poised and married noblewoman, and realizes he has fallen in love with her, only for her to refuse him out of loyalty to her husband despite admitting she still loves him. Eugene Onegin is regarded as a foundational work of Russian literature and Onegin himself as the archetype of the superfluous man, a recurring figure in nineteenth-century Russian fiction whose talents and privilege leave him unable to find real purpose or connection.