Eugene Onegin

This verse novel, completed in the early 1830s, is set among the Russian gentry of the 1820s. Eugene Onegin, a bored St Petersburg dandy, inherits a country estate and befriends the young poet Lensky. Through Lensky he meets the sisters Olga and Tatyana Larina. Tatyana, unlike the social world Onegin has exhausted, writes to him; he answers with a lecture on his unsuitability. The rural plot tightens around friendship, a name-day gathering, and a quarrel that Onegin does not take seriously enough. Written in a fourteen-line stanza that constantly addresses the reader, the poem is both a love story and a social portrait of fashionable and provincial Russia.

Bound in blue-grey cloth cover blocked in black and white with a drawing by Anna and Elena Balbusso. Dark blue slipcase.