How Devils drew on Eugene Onegin
A documented line of influence: Fyodor Dostoevsky demonstrably engaged Alexander Pushkin’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
Eugene Onegin
Alexander Pushkin · 1833
RomanticismThe influenced
Devils
Fyodor Dostoevsky · 1872
The Age of the NovelRelevance
5/10
On Devils’s page
- Stavrogin is Onegin taken further into the dark — the same chill aristocrat, now incapable even of the feeling Pushkin allowed his hero
- Dostoevsky prized Eugene Onegin as "the very first beginnings of our agonising consciousness"; the superfluous idealist Pushkin originated becomes his target in Stepan Verkhovensky
- Reading Onegin first shows you the type Devils is pushing past — "beyond Pushkin," as Dostoevsky meant it
On Eugene Onegin’s page
- Pushkin invents the type Dostoevsky would spend a career anatomizing — the bored, duel-provoking Russian aristocrat who cannot love
- Dostoevsky called Eugene Onegin "the very first beginnings of our agonising consciousness," the seed of his 1880 Pushkin Speech
- In Devils, Stavrogin is Onegin gone colder — the next, crueler iteration of the man Pushkin first drew