Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] A Romance of Russian Life in Verse

Excerpt

Mon Portrait

Written by the poet at the age of 15.

Vous me demandez mon portrait,Mais peint d'apres nature:Mon cher, il sera bientot fait,Quoique en miniature.

Je suis un jeune polissonEncore dans les classes;Point sot, je le dis sans facon,Et sans fades grimaces.

Oui! il ne fut babillardNi docteur de Sorbonne,Plus ennuyeux et plus braillardQue moi-meme en personne.

Ma taille, a celle des plus longs,Elle n'est point egalee;J'ai le teint frais, les cheveux blonds,Et la tete bouclee.

J'aime et le monde et son fracas,Je hais la solitude;J'abhorre et noises et debats,Et tant soit peu l'etude.

Spectacles, bals, me plaisent fort,Et d'apres ma pensee,Je dirais ce que j'aime encore,Si je n'etais au Lycee.

Apres cela, mon cher ami,L'on peut me reconnaitre,Oui! tel que le bon Dieu me fit,Je veux toujours paraitre.

Vrai demon, par l'espieglerie,Vrai singe par sa mine,Beaucoup et trop d'etourderie,Ma foi! voila Pouchekine.

Note: Russian proper names to be pronounced as in French (the nasal sound of m and n excepted) in the following translation. The accent, which is very arbitrary in the Russian language, is indicated unmistakably in a rhythmical composition.

A Short Biographical Notice of Alexander Pushkin.

Alexander Sergevitch Pushkin was born in 1799 at Pskoff, and was a scion of an ancient Russian family. In one of his letters it is recorded that no less than six Pushkins signed the Charta declaratory of the election of the Romanoff family to the throne of Russia, and that two more affixed their marks from inability to write.

In 1811 he entered the Lyceum, an aristocratic educational establishment at Tsarskoe Selo, near St. Petersburg, where he was the friend and schoolmate of Prince Gortchakoff the Russian Chancellor. As a scholar he displayed no remarkable amount of capacity, but was fond of general reading and much given to versification. Whilst yet a schoolboy he wrote many lyrical compositions and commenced Ruslan and Liudmila, his first poem of any magnitude, and, it is asserted, the first readable one ever produced in the Russian language. During his boyhood he came much into contact with the poets Dmitrieff and Joukovski, who were intimate with his father, and his uncle, Vassili Pushkin, himself an author of no mean repute. The friendship of the historian Karamzine must have exercised a still more beneficial influence upon him.

In 1817 he quitted the Lyceum and obtained an appointment in the Foreign Office at St. Petersburg. Three years of reckless dissipation in the capital, where his lyrical talent made him universally popular, resulted in 1818 in a putrid fever which was near carrying him off. At this period of his life he scarcely slept at all; worked all day and dissipated at night. Society was open to him from the palace of the prince to the officers' quarters of the Imperial Guard. The reflection of this mode of life may be noted in the first canto of Eugene Oneguine and the early dissipations of the "Philosopher just turned eighteen,"— the exact age of Pushkin when he commenced his career in the Russian capital....