Pushkin's Tatiana

ONE OF THE most discussed and elusive female characters in the Russian literary tradition, Pushkin's Tatiana Larina is the progenetrix of an impressive list of heroines ranging from Tolstoy's Anna Karenina to Pasternak's Lara Guishar in Doctor Zhivago. In this provocative new book, Olga Hasty offers the first study of Pushkin's novel-in-verse Eugene Onegin that focuses systematically on Tatiana. A major revisionist reading of one of the central texts of the Russian canon, Hasty's "Tatianacentric" approach to Eugene Onegin revitalizes our understanding of both Pushkin's heroine and the novel in which she appears. Hasty shows, with elegance and psychological insight, how Tatiana is able to realize her imaginative potential in a context full of real risk and constraint. Tatiana emerges as a new literary, psychological, and cultural model who enacts precisely those creative tensions and possibilities on which Pushkin himself drew. Pushkin's Tatiana recovers the erotic energy, self-control, and expressivity of Pushkin's most beloved heroine, freeing her from the cliched image of self-sacrificial woman. Hasty concludes with an insightful exploration of Tatiana's subsequent role in the self-presentations of the Russian poets Karolina Pavlova and Marina Tsvetaeva.