Got some work done, working off of a precise list of Things To Do over the next two days. (As they used to say in seminars: it's amazing how much you get done on the day before you go away for vacation – and wouldn't it be even more amazing if you could be that effective all the time?) But my resolve to go to bed at a decent hour failed before the prospect of a late movie – Onegin, the 1999 film with Liv Tyler and Ralph Fiennes, was too tempting.
I've written elsewhere of the impact on me of Marcia Haydée's Tatiana, with the Stuttgart Ballett; it was an amazing performance, and I'll always associate Pushkin, and any version of Evgenii Onyegin, with that one. Especially appropriate because I was a lovelorn adolescent when I saw it, and Tatiana is the ultimate lovelorn adolescent (at least in the first half of the story).
But the movie didn't quite work. Yes, polished, yes, classy, yes, well acted – but they got it wrong: the first half, culminating in Tatiana's letter to Onyegin, should be more anguished; and the second half, ironically climaxing in his letter to her, should be cooler, more wintry. She says in the poem, "I can't help these tears," but they are sad, not anguished; she is not shattered when they meet years later, she is reserved and articulate, asking him to leave with her dignity and, undoubtedly, her makeup intact. Although Liv Tyler acts beautifully and well, it doesn't fit the story or the situation – she is simply too broken up in the movie for it to be properly satisfying.
I realize of course from my translation, and various explications of it, that non-Russians can never find the poem as exciting as Russians do – there's no way of recreating the impact of a newly made, supple, modern Russian, which this poem literally achieved, in languages that developed so differently (and frankly so much earlier). And all the poem's scenery, all the detailed moments and minor characters, just don't seem as interesting from a non-Russian (or perhaps from a modern) point of view. So, what we experience ends up limited to the plot, which in this case is really just the two great love letters and the supercharged scenes they create – even the duel is actually subsidiary to them, as it is the ironic break in power relations that will change everything, so that we must move from the first to the second.
Which means that, by "properly satisfying", I really mean that I think that Tatiana wins, she has her revenge. I know that she doesn't seek revenge, that she doesn't even want it, but despite his name in the title it ends up being her story – and that is what makes the story so attractive to heartbroken adolescents: the prospect that someday, somewhere, your situations will be reversed, and that arrogant bastard will throw himself at your feet, begging you to come away with him. And you'll have the confidence, the strength, to tell him: no.
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