How did Vladimir Nabokov see Onegin?
Most carefully Vladimir Nabokov spent many years (some say decades) translating Aleksandr Pushkin’s great Russian epic into English. Nabokov was a master of languages, besides being a great writer of fiction, and the very fact that he spent so much time turning his native Russian classic into fluent English is testimony to the importance he gave to it, giving readers in England (where he went to school at Cambridge University) and in America (where he taught at Cornell University, and elsewhere as a visiting professor) indicates his mastery of both written language and idiom. He should have won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Nabokov’s book, Eugene Onegin, (1825-33) was originally serialized; thus, it is both a novel in verse (as it is subtitled) and a scholarly work, including a foreword, “revisitation,” transliteration, calendar, and appendix of abbreviations and symbols. It includes the translator’s introduction, in which may be found a “description of the text,” discussion of the O
