Poetry to Prose: The Birth of the Great Russian Novel in Alexander Pushkin's Eugene Onegin

This course will be devoted to a close reading and detailed discussion of Alexander Pushkin's masterpiece, Eugene Onegin, in the context of nineteenth-century Russian and continental literary history. We will discuss major theoretical and literary-historical questions: What is realism in literature? How does it differ from other literary epochs, movements and styles? What is the novel and how does it relate to other genres? In what way does the novel in verse differ from the novel in prose? We will also explore the relationships between the narrator and the author and\nbetween the narrator and the characters in the text. Through examination of the constituent elements of verse language, we will see Pushkin's inventive contributions to world literature.