WILLIAM MILLS TODD III

“The Russian Terpsichore’s Soul-Filled Flight”

Dance Themes In Eugene Onegin

Belinskij’s characterization of Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse as an “encyclopedia of Russian life” (Belinskij 1953 VII: 503) has more merit than is generally acknowledged. A diligent researcher, using the Dictionary of Puškin ‘s Language as an index to the novel, could rapidly locate a variety of illuminating entries on Russian life of the early nineteenth century: “cuisine,” “estate management,” “feet,” “marital fidelity,” “novels,” “reading habits,” “roads,” “Russian winter, attitudes toward,” and many others. Social and intellectual historians might require some other reference tools and sources, but Puškin’s novel and its drafts do not disappoint the student of dance, who finds references to audience responses, ballet theaters (in Petersburg and Moscow), ballet techniques (entrechat), choreographers (Didelot), dancers (Istomina, Lixutina), folk dances (choral forms, the squat-jig, the Trepak), roles (cupids, demons, nymphs, serpents), and social dances (cotillon, galop, Mazurka, minuet, waltz). A few aspects of Russian dance do remain untouched, among them the serf ballets that were proving too expensive for their owners by the early nineteenth century, and the work of A. P. Gluškovskij, who was the first to choreograph a ballet based on a Puškin poem (Ruslan and Ljudmila, or The Overthrow of Černomor, the Evil Wizard, December 1921). It is, nevertheless, fair to claim that only the novel’s references to literature cover more thoroughly the syncretic wealth of early nineteenth-century Russian culture with its autochthonous and foreign elements, its folk, gentry, and aristocratic levels.

Using Eugene Onegin in this way as a dance encyclopedia serves a number of purposes: documenting Puškin’s acquaintance with and interest in the dance, suggesting the nature of dance connoisseurship in the early nineteenth century, and testing our hypotheses (developed from the study of non-literary sources) about the place of various dance forms in Russian culture of Puškin’s time. We can supplement these insights with material from his other works, especially his lyrics, letters, and criticism.

But this plundering of Puškin’s novel for discrete references to individual cultural phenomena precludes what may be for the history of Russian culture a no less important reading, and one that would do more justice to Puškin’s novel as a work of imaginative literature. Such a reading would follow the dance references as they unfold in the novel, each successive one having the potential to modify a reader’s understanding of the ones that preceded it and to encourage a reader to expect more references that will be important elements in plot, characterization, and thematic reverberation. This reading would remain cognizant of the novel’s two ontological levels, each with its own “reality” and plot development: a fictional level of the text, on which the characters perform the rituals of their culture during the years 1819-25, and a fiction-making level, on which the omnipresent author-narrator makes them perform, as he himself undergoes a prolonged course of artistic maturation while writing Eugene Onegin (1823-31).¹ Read this way, the dance elements would be related to the world of early nineteenth-century Russia as elements of a fictional narrative which would itself, in its entirety as a literary work, refract various cultural orders, including the dance. The dance elements would be shown to help constitute aspects of the novel, ones involving the development of the characters, the relationship between the characters and their setting, and the very act of writing the novel. The dance elements, then, are not merely material in a repertoire but one of the text’s strategies for structuring its reception (Iser 1978: 53-103). For the dance in Eugene Onegin represents, first and foremost, an important moment in the cultural process by which the novel’s characters, including the author-narrator and the readers he projects, order and make sense of their lives.

The first mention of dance in Eugene Onegin illustrates some of these linkages. It occurs almost immediately after the novel opens, during the introduction of the hero:

As an encyclopedia entry this quotation has little to offer, only an indication that dance in its ballroom version was one of the gentry’s social rituals. Yet the terseness which makes this passage uninteresting in isolation is of thematic significance within the novel. The balls, given on name days and on festive occasions, appear as conventional, perfunctory pastimes for the gentry, like state service and bankruptcy. The author-narrator underscores this by calling our attention to the regular appearance of the balls; there is nothing sufficiently unusual about them to make them eventful and, therefore, deserving of commentary. The rest of the stanza, devoted to Eugene’s education, reinforces the sense of insouciant superficiality that these lines convey.

The following stanza, however, makes a qualitative point, as it begins to describe the hero’s involvement in the dance: “He danced Mazurkas well and bowed / Without constraint or affectation” [I.4]. This falls within the bounds of the conventional, but on a level of excellence that matches Eugene’s mastery of other social arts, speaking French and arranging amorous triangles. The deftness (legko—“lightly”—in the original) with which he dances the strenuous Mazurka and the ease that he communicates with his polished bow bespeak not only ability but also professional training in an era in which the connection between “ballet” and “ball” was not yet merely etymological.

The tentative image of Eugene and his milieu that a reader draws from these initial dance references will be magnified and modified in many ways by ensuing dance references. Eugene’s deftness will be implicitly compared with Istomina’s virtuosity, his nonchalance with the author-narrator’s enthusiasm for the dance, his conventional responses with Didelot’s inspiration and “poetry.” Each setting will be contrasted with other settings (Petersburg, the countryside, Moscow) by the type and quality of social dancing that characterize it. And references to dance will join with references to other cultural orders as Puškin unfolds the first work of Russian literature to explore the wealth of possibilities for creativity and confusion that were made possible by Russia’s relatively recent entry into Western Europe.

For purposes of analysis, I shall examine references to ballet and to ballroom dancing separately, although, as we shall see, these two aspects of the dance were never far apart during the Alexandrine era of Russian culture. In any event, Eugene Onegin will not let us forget their proximity. I shall begin the investigation by outlining some contextual issues, biographical and historical; at times it will be appropriate to use the novel as a dance encyclopedia. But I shall focus on the thematic aspects of dance in Puškin’s text, since Eugene Onegin is the work in which Puškin himself devoted the most attention to the place of the dance in his culture and in his own creative development.

Puškin, like the hero of his verse novel, came of age in Petersburg during the second decade of the nineteenth century. Arriving in the capital in 1811, he began his schooling at the newly founded Imperial Lycée. Onegin’s future creator and “friend” was soon caught up in the dance’s artistic and social spheres. Before leaving Moscow, he had taken dance lessons and attended the “children’s balls” that were arranged by F. A. Iogel’, dance instructor at Moscow University (Cjavlovskij 1951 1:15; Čirejskij 1975: 163, 405, 420). Now, in Petersburg, not only could he continue to learn social dances, but he could share in the city’s fashionable enchantment with the ballet. Dance was everywhere. Ballets were mounted for all theatrical performances, even for tragedies. Comic operas regularly included folk dancing. Dancers played roles in dramatic works, tragediennes danced (Krasovskaja 1958: 82-85). The balletomane emperors of Puškin’s time did not limit their choreographic fantasies to the parade ground (Lotman 1973: 65); in 1836 Nicholas I set aside his designing of uniforms in order to choreograph military drills for the harem girls in Titus’s Uprising in the Seraglio (Krasovskaja 1958: 202).

The lycée trained Puškin and his schoolmates to take an active part in this continuing dance festival. Dance was one of the social skills that they would need as they climbed the rungs of the imperial bureaucracy, for which the lycée was preparing them. A succession of dance teachers provided regular lessons. The septagenarian Huard instructed his pupils in the gavotte, the minuet, and other stately dances of his time. Several years (and another Frenchman) later, his place was taken by I. F. Eberhardt, a notable professional dancer and ballet teacher. Although the official records remain silent on the point, Puškin’s family legends report that the poet received excellent marks for his dancing (Slonimskij 1974: 14).

One does not have to exaggerate either the quantity or the quality of this training to realize the background that it would have given Puškin for appreciating the techniques of ballet. Six years of weekly dance classes in the lycée were not equivalent to the six-year course to which Didelot subjected his dancers, and Puškin’s elder contemporary Aleksandr Turgenev drew a justifiably sharp distinction between recreational and theatrical dance on the basis of technique and difficulty (Turgenev 1810: 212).³ Noble amateur dancers and professionals would no longer mingle in performance as they had once done at the court of Louis XIV; but the two forms of dance used similar music and similar basic techniques: battements, the five positions, the minuet with its bows, steps, and graceful arm movements (Slonimskij 1974: 16-17). Professional dancers served as instructors of ballroom dance. All of this could give an attentive enthusiast the vocabulary to appreciate the innovations of a choreographer or the technical perfection of a dancer. The participation of lycée teachers in the Petersburg ballet— Eberhardt as dancer and Val’vil’ (the fencing instructor) as arranger of combat scenes (Tomaševskij 1956: 267)—would have helped bring the pupils even closer to the world of theatrical dance.

A young Petersburg gentleman, such as Puškin or his creature Eugene, would not be drawn to the ballet merely to sit in the audience and appreciate the technique of the dancers on stage. It was fashionable for young men to cross the audience/backstage/offstage boundaries socially and erotically, visiting ballerinas backstage or in their quarters, hovering around the younger dancers, occasionally “protecting” those who had finished their course of training. Puškin captures this in an unpublished essay on the theater (1820):

The poet, who would later admit to having chased Istomina himself (PSS XIII: 56) and who had earlier made her the leading actress in a puerile epigram (PSS II: 37), draws the obvious conclusion: “can one rely on the opinion of such judges” (PSS XI: 9)? Hardly, when “talent” comes last in the young man’s list of attributes.

Advertising the first chapter of Eugene Onegin as, in part, a “description of the social life of a young man in Petersburg at the end of 1819” (PSS VI: 638), Puškin included all of these possible relationships to the dance in his description: skilled social dancing (as we have already seen), appreciation of virtuosity, dutiful attendance at the theater. There are, however, two important young men in the novel at this point in the first chapter, Eugene and his creator, and their reactions to the dance are sharply differentiated as Puškin begins to evade a subsequently identified Byronic penchant for labeling a self-portrait with a protagonist’s name [I.46].

The lines that propel Eugene toward the theater predict the level of his appreciation of the dance, as his fashionable French timepiece calls him to a new ballet from a fashionable restaurant:

Neither here nor in the remaining lines of the stanza does Eugene distinguish himself from the fond admirers of female stage performers that Puškin described in his article. Appreciation is limited to female parts, to isolated bits of virtuosity, to offstage familiarity.

The initial characterization (“arbiter exacting”) receives a satiric tinge from the lines that follow, as Eugene’s arrival is seen as merely conventional (“of course”), and as Eugene disappears into the collective “everyone.” The reader hardly needs biographical parallels to sense the author-narrator’s irony, but it is appropriate in this context to recall that in December 1819 Puškin taunted and nearly fought a duel with an officer whose appreciation of ballet was limited to applauding pirouettes (Slonimskij 1974: 31).

The next stanzas cast Eugene’s conventional attitudes in even sharper relief, as the author-narrator covers the same ground, but with enthusiasm and insight. Values that Puškin will reassert throughout the novel join in a stanza on the Russian theater: daring, freedom, emotion, genius, wit [1.18]. Among the artists and playwrights of the Russian stage that Puškin celebrates, there appears but a single foreigner, Didelot, “crowned with glory.” Puškin russifies him with the Cyrillic alphabet, as he had not done with the amateurs’ ballet terminology in the preceding stanza (“entrechat”). Puškin gives the French balletmaster’s work an important part in the development of Russia’s syncretic culture, but the dandy’s superficial appreciation remains unassimilated and stands outside of significant cultural experience.

The author-narrator, like Eugene, has spent his time in the wings [1.18], and he, too, pays his tribute to the leading ladies of the stage:

Yet there are important differences between the author and Eugene. The elegiac tone is occasioned by Puškin’s exile from the capital, an event to which he has earlier alluded [1.2]. Eugene will never give another thought to the ballet, once he has left Petersburg, but the dance will remain in the poet’s thoughts thousands of miles away. Indeed, as this stanza demonstrates, it will inspire his poetry. The goddesses, Terpsichore, and the enchantment that figure in this stanza—rusty accouterments of neoclassical verse—acquire a fresh luster of significance as poetic recollections of Didelot’s mythological and Anacreontic ballets and of Istomina’s inspired and innovative technique.⁵ Replacing the translator’s phrase “with aerial spirit-flight / Our Russian-born Terpsichore” with a more literal rendition of “russkoj Terpsixory dušoj ispolnennyj polet” yields “the Russian Terpsichore’s soul-filled flight,” where “soul” connotes “feeling,” “inspiration,” “spirit.” This more literal version captures Puškin’s tribute to the synthesizing power of poetic imagination as it acts upon a wealth of cultural possibilities. Puškin’s lines are couched both in the Russian language and in the international imagery of classical antiquity, and they articulate another creative unity, one of soul (in a broad sense) and technique (“flight”), for the use of mechanical “flights” (polety) to swirl the dancers through the air was one of Didelot’s innovations. In the poet’s perception of the dance there are no isolated techniques, but the recognition of animated, meaningful movement, the equivalent in another artistic medium of the stated goal of the author-narrator’s own writing, a “union of magic sounds, thoughts, and feelings” [1.59].

This particular contrast between the author’s delight and his hero’s indifference continues for two more stanzas. The author’s imagination outraces Eugene, who has lingered over his cutlet, to the theater and finds it “boiling” with excitement as the curtain rises. The lines that describe the ballet, among the best known and loved in Russian poetry, were, in fact, the very first lines from the novel to be published (without Puškin’s approval or knowledge, in Bulgarin’s Literaturnye listki [Literary Pages], 1824):

How feeble is the dandy’s recognition of an entrechat by comparison with the acuteness of these verses, whose concreteness has inspired a number of attempts to translate them into ballet terminology.⁶ Together with this concreteness, one might notice the similarity that Puškin has drawn between his art and Istomina’s: he is as obedient to the exigencies of his medium (iambic tetrameter, the Onegin stanza) as she is to the string solo accompaniment (“smyčku volšebnomu poslušna”—“Submissive to the magisterial / Musician’s wand”) and to the grammar of dance. The tempos and vertical movements that she achieves parallel the effects that he uses to capture them in verse, as he varies his own rhythms, syntax, and alliteration to match her performance. Just as Didelot creates a moment of dynamic stasis by raising the curtain on a still ballerina, Puškin creates a pregnant syntactic tension by making the reader wait for his grammatical subject (Istomina) until the end of a four-line period, an effect which Professor Arndt’s translation handsomely reproduces. As she begins her movements, the poet calls attention to them by increasing the number of stressed syllables well beyond his usual density. No fewer than four of these lines carry four stressed syllables; only one has as few as two.⁷ A series of striking consonantal alliterations and word repetitions mirror the precision and rhythm of her dancing: “stoit Istomina”; “i vdrug pryžok, i vdrug letit, / Letit kak legkij pux ot ust Eola”; “to stan sov’et, to razov’et, / I bystroj nožkoi nožku b’et.”

Istomina’s magic unites the entire theater, save Eugene, in delight. He finally arrives at the theater, having missed this scene, and enters, like the young man in Puškin’s article, by stepping on the feet of the people in the stalls. The stanza that follows completes the contrast between hero and creator by circling back to the situation of two stanzas before. There the author-narrator imagined himself at a future time elegiacally lamenting replaced ballerinas, casting a disenchanted lorgnette about the theater, and yawning as he would remember the past [1.19]. Eugene, who had fallen behind the author in reaching the theater, now surges ahead in disenchantment:

Here the poet consigns the roving lorgnette, the yawn, and the boredom to his hero. Onegin comes to experience what the poet had imagined, but he does so without first knowing the sense of creative identification with the ballet that the author has come to celebrate. The two young men are separated here not by a difference of taste, but by life experience and by the poet’s ability to participate to the fullest in their common culture. The sullen rake’s call for “change” (smena) reminds the reader of the poet’s graceful play on words, “smeniv, ne zamenili vas” (“barred, yet not replaced you all”) to Eugene’s disadvantage.

The poet concludes this important moment in the characterization of himself and his hero with a footnote that rebukes Eugene for his comment on Didelot: “a trait of chilled sentiment worthy of Childe Harold. Mr. Didelot’s ballets are filled with liveliness of inspiration and unusual charm. One of our Romantic writers found much more poetry in them than in all of French literature” (PSS VI: 191). A draft version of this footnote identified the “Romantic writer” as Puškin himself (PSS VI: 529). The note was published together with the separate first edition of the novel’s opening chapter in 1825, when the balletmaster was beginning to experience some of the difficulties that would drive him from the stage; Puškin retained it in the first complete edition of the novel (1833), which appeared after Didelot had “retired.” Thus the footnote stands not merely as a rebuke to the fashionably Byronic Eugene, who would fail in all attempts at poetry [1.7, I.43, VIII.38], but as an aesthetic manifesto, and as a bold expression of gratitude to Didelot for occasioning the ballet stanzas, with their liveliness and their significance that transcends mere virtuosity.

In these stanzas, as we have seen, Eugene alone will not join in appreciating the dance; the boxes, orchestra, stalls, and gallery with their different economic and social groups have participated in the celebration of Didelot, Istomina, and the new ballet [1.20-21]. Now the author-narrator directs the reader’s attention from Eugene to a new contrast:

With a deftness that recalls Pope’s “Rape of the Lock,” the author-narrator locates the fairy-tale world of the unidentified Didelot ballet in a world of social and economic inequality. The footmen, resting on their masters’ robes, and the coachmen, clapping their hands to keep warm, belong to the order which made it possible for Eugene to be inside, yawning. As the novel continues, groups that are not party to the cultural advantages of Petersburg and of the urban nobility will be assigned a relationship to the dance, but ballet themes will virtually disappear from Eugene Onegin as its author turns to more sober styles and motifs. Puškin dropped a subsequent reference to Istomina from the fifth chapter (PSS VI: 609, 650). Although he sent his provincial heroine, Tat’jana, to a Moscow ballet in Chapter VII, he specified neither the choreographer, nor the dancers, nor the ballet, nor its roles. Theatrical dance remains outside Tat’jana’s range of cultural experience, and it becomes relegated to the interests of the matured poet’s youth:

The interest and the memories remain, but the balletmaster no longer helps to choreograph the poet’s lines.

Dance, now banished from the novel’s theatrical stages, continues to appear in the ballroom, and in no less broad a context of social convention, sensual desire, and aesthetic creativity. For a ball was no less a manifestation of Russia’s cultural syncretism than a ballet mounted by a French balletmaster for Russian dancers on themes from classical antiquity. Peter the Great had introduced balls (then called “assemblies”) to Russia a century before the opening of Eugene Onegin, as part of his campaign to create a Western European civilization for Orthodox Muscovy, and he began to establish the necessary conventions for a nobility that had theretofore sequestered its women and looked askance at Russia’s own rich tradition of folk dancing. In a short time the balls became strictly organized manifestations of gentry life, with sequences of dance forms, types of conversation, and set activities (Lotman 1983: 79-89).

Among the sources of Puškin’s knowledge about these developments was an 1823 essay, “On the First Balls in Russia,” by Aleksandr Kornilovič. The essay outlines the evolution of balls during the eighteenth century, but most important for our purposes is the persistent vision of ritualistic conjunction that it conveys. Social distinctions, economic status, civil service ranks, even sex differences disappear or transform themselves as the eighteenth-century balls join their participants in harmonious community. Commoners dance with the royal family, forgetting their rank; Russians dance with captive French officers and are trained for the dance by Swedish ones; the empresses dance both the minuet and Russian folk dances; men disguise themselves as women, and vice versa (Kornilovič 1960: 201-204).⁸ Competitive games—first chess and draughts, later cards— would be included in the evening’s festivities, but the winners and losers that these produced did not (at least in Kornilovič’s idealization) destroy the sense of common pleasure.

By Puškin’s time, satires and novels would come to challenge this vision of ritual harmony. Griboedov’s Woe from Wit (1822-24), which Puškin quotes in Eugene Onegin, achieves its climax in a ball scene that brings incompatibility into the open, ruins reputations, exposes an imposter, and leaves the hero calling for his carriage. In Baratynskij’s narrative poem The Ball (1828), the heroine commits suicide rather than attend a ball at which her former lover will be present. Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time (1840) transforms the ball from an event of communal concord into one of vicious competition; the first ball scene of Gogol”s Dead Souls (1842) brings the society of that novel properly together, but the final ball witnesses an explosion that breaks nearly all ties—friendship, infatuation, business acquaintance, even the connection between signifier and signified. Other examples abound. In all of these cases, the ideal civilizing function of balls serves as the background against which a reader would perceive the actual disasters of individual heartache or social fragmentation.

Puškin’s writings, including Eugene Onegin, capture both possibilities, harmonious and disjunctive, and balls figure in a number of his texts. For every youthful poem that celebrates a ball, there is a letter that describes his boredom at these gatherings and shows the poet dozing off, or eating ice cream and complaining about his lowly court rank that required him to attend. Where literary convention conveys personal experience and where it does not in his epistolary treatment of balls is not easy to determine. Memoirs differ on the quality of his dancing and on the extent of his enthusiasm for balls. In any event, his family and school trained him to dance and to analyze the appropriate dances, as we have seen. His fiery temperament and remarkable eye for physical details prepared him both to participate in and to observe creatively these social functions that combined dancing, gaming, dining, and attendant pursuits—seduction, writing malicious epigrams, dueling. One thing is clear: in none of his works are the social dances and balls so thoroughly detailed as in Eugene Onegin. In these passages, as in the ballet stanzas, the dance plays an important part in characterization, plot, and cultural contrast.

In the first chapter the transition from ballet to ball is provided by Eugene, who rushes from the one to the other, paying more attention to his toilet than he had to the new Didelot ballet. A series of images join ball and ballet—Eugene arrives late at each; the “crowd” of nymphs surrounding Istomina is replaced by a “crowd” of dancers; Istomina’s deft feet yield to the feet on the ballroom floor that set off a famous pedal digression of five stanzas [1.30-34].

Unlike the Istomina passage, with its opening of pregnant motionlessness [1.20], distinguishing the disorderly audience from the deliberate artists on stage, the ball scene is all motion, as forms of the verb “to fly” appear three times in the initial stanza:

The insistence on flying is even clearer in the original, where the verb appears anaphorically at the beginning of the tenth and twelfth lines. Sound, too, in this stanza is more disorderly than in the ballet scene, as the “magic wand” of the theater orchestra’s violinist yields to storming, hum, hubbub, ringing spurs, and the skirling fiddle.⁹

Inspired by this chaos of sounds and movement, the poet abandons his hero’s plot line and is swept away in an exhaustive, exhilarating series of digressions that are as appropriate for the ball scene as was the poet’s disciplined, precise account of Istomina’s dancing for the ballet stanzas: “When ardent dreams and dissipations / Were with me still, I worshipped balls” [1.29]. The “madness” of this worship (“Ja byl ot balov bez uma”) has its erotic, amorous implications, and so Puškin adds, with mock indignation, moral chaos to the general uproar, before he resumes his obsession with feet—through reminiscences that encompass seasons, climates, and landscapes until, at last holding a lady’s stirrup, he feels a dainty foot in his hands and his “imagination boils” [I.34].

The erotic and the poetic achieve this climax simultaneously, but Puškin has not let the reader forget—amidst this chaos of sounds, memories, and desires—that achieving it has been a culturally mediated process. He emphasizes this in a passage that focuses on the conventionality of poetry, the dance, and desire itself:

The magic and enchantment of the ballet passage [1.17, 1.18, 1.20], generally replaced by chaotic “madness” in this ball scene [1.29, 1.31], return here, as Puškin underscores the aesthetic (“Terpsichore”) and conventionally significant (“token”—uslovnyj) aspects of the dance. The conventional allusions to classical mythology are each paired with an object of erotic fascination (Diana’s breast, etc.) to reinforce this union of culture and desire, which is further strengthened by the association of the ballet role of Flora (and possibly of Diana) with Istomina, “the Russian Terpsichore.”¹¹

Turning to the first stanza of the ball passage [1.28] quoted above, one can see that the ball is, in fact, fulfilling its ritual function of “putting at the service of the social order the very forces of disorder that inhere in man’s mammalian constitution” (Turner 1977: 93). The energies and desires of the throng are channeled into a polite social form, the ball, which permits these energies to be harmlessly dissipated in hours of exhausting physical activity. Jealous gibes and whispers that might have sown discord are drowned by the fiddle music. Even Eugene, who has been unable to join in the public enthusiasm for the ballet, disappears totally into the festivities. After the poet sends him running into the ball, we are not permitted another view of him until he emerges nearly eight hours later, “worn out by the ballroom’s clamor” [1.36]. One might infer that there has been nothing eventful in his behavior, as there had been at the ballet.

Eugene will soon forsake this conventional attraction to the Petersburg balls, however. His fashionable spleen comes to preclude it. The authornarrator, unwilling to share Eugene’s disenchantment with the ballet, now steps onto the fictional level of the novel to befriend his hero and to join him in shutting his ears to “society’s clamor” (sveta šum [I.37]).¹² Yet the madness and noise of balls and social dancing will not disappear from the remaining seven chapters as will the enchantment and magic sounds of the ballet. For the poet and his characters will encounter them as indelible expressions of each cultural setting in the novel, be it urban or rural, gentry or folk. Some mention of these forms of dancing will appear in each of the remaining chapters—if only in metaphor or memory—as Puškin continues to examine the dance for its conjunctive and aesthetic functions.¹³

The central chapters of the novel find the exiled poet and his hero in the countryside. Here the syncretic complexity of Russian culture acquires a new dimension, one of folk tradition. The rural gentry, poised between the culture of its serfs and that of the Westernized urban aristocracy, had rich opportunities for drawing on each, and Puškin makes this an essential part of the gentry’s life experience. The novel’s heroine and her family will order and comprehend their lives according to cultural patterns of both folk and Western European origin.

The folk’s choral dance (xorovod) dominates the dance theme in these early chapters, to the extent that the poet, viewing a sunrise through his heroine’s eyes, will choreograph the stars in this roundelay form [II.28]. In the lyrics of his youth, Puškin had used the term xorovod to signify any choral dance—Greek, Circassian, imaginary. Here, for the first time in Puškin’s work, the term takes on Russian folk specificity in contrast to other dance forms in the novel. The xorovod becomes one of the many aspects of age-old Russian culture that the Larins, members of the gentry, preserve:

Had Puškin given the Larins more wealth, or had he set the novel a few decades earlier, he might have given them a troupe of well-rehearsed serf dancers to perform the xorovod in highly polished fashion and in lavish costumes.¹⁴ Given the family’s more modest circumstances and the fall from fashion of such troupes, it is most likely that on the Larin estate the xorovod was a dance for serfs that the gentry took pleasure in observing, but which preserved its festive, recreational nature. So it will seem when Tat’jana takes an evening stroll in spring 1821 [VII.15] as the choral groups are breaking up for the evening.

A serf’s life was not all dancing, of course, and the peasants obviously served less to entertain than to feed the gentry. The most detailed and poignant reference to the xorovod in Eugene Onegin occurs in this context. The xorovod could take many forms; it could perform entire dramatic scenes and pantomimes to the accompaniment of singing. Typical themes might include field work, a girl’s desire to enjoy herself with a young man, or an attempt by a young man (dressed as a hare) to break out of the circle (Krasovskaja 1958: 9-10, 12). But at the end of Chapter III the dance component is taken out of the serf-girls’ xorovod, and they are forced to sing the song, which Puškin adapted from folk motifs, while they pick berries, so that they will not be able to consume the fruit. The conditions of their work do not restrain the frolic, charm, and independence of their song, but their crafty masters’ love of the xorovod [II.35] has led them to find not only aesthetic but also material uses for it, and, in so doing, to constrict its movement.¹⁵

The provincial gentry find practical uses for their own dances as well, matchmaking foremost among them. The longest ball scene of the novel is occasioned by Tat’jana’s name day, and the guest list includes eligible suitors for this marriageable young lady. Her female relatives (not knowing that Eugene has already rejected Tat’jana’s love) make certain that he is invited [IV.49]. Puškin takes every opportunity to explore the event as art and ritual. He assembles all of the novel’s major characters (except himself) for it, and he uses it to separate the characters irrevocably from each other through the heartache, duel, and death that proceed directly from it. Ol’ga, Tat’jana’s sister, will leave her family; Tat’jana will be parted from Eugene; Ol’ga’s engagement to Lenskij will never lead to marriage; Eugene will kill Lenskij in a duel.

The scene begins as the guests assemble for the festival, and Puškin lists with relish the unlikely material that will be harmoniously united in feasting and the dance, giving each guest a comic surname. Only two participants fail to lose themselves in the general celebration: Tat’jana, painfully embarrassed by Eugene’s presence; and Eugene, angry at having been tricked into attending such a large, noisy gathering. Their emotions remain unnoticed, however, as food, drink, and a poem of clumsy scansion occupy the throng. The author-narrator stresses the harmony of the evening by presenting the obligatory card games not as disjunctive competitions, but as a means of circulating the guests, who change partners before each rubber, in orderly fashion [V.36].

As the guests leave their teacups to begin the dancing, the authornarrator digresses from the description of it momentarily and transfers our attention to the second plot level of the novel, that of his poetic maturation. Recalling his pedal digression from the Petersburg ball in Chapter I, Puškin promises to become more sensible and correct by purging this fifth chapter of such digressions [V.50]. His ironic promise—he must digress to make it—has the effect of ensuring that the reader will perceive these ball scenes thematically, comparing one with the other, not viewing them in isolation, without relationship to each other. Puškin will insist on such a contrastive thematic reading even more emphatically two stanzas later when he compares the old-fashioned rural Mazurka with the modish urban variation.

This explicit ordering of our ideations invites the reader to note similarities and differences between the two dance scenes. First of all, the poet takes greater interest here in describing the dances themselves. His account begins with a waltz:

The first line contains two adjectives and a conjunction in the original, “odnoobraznyj i bezumnyj” (lit. “monotonous and mad”). The second of these adjectives recalls the poet’s relationship to the Petersburg balls. Here “madness” seems to bear some of the erotic overtones that it did in the earlier passage, especially since it is the Petersburg dandy, Eugene, whom we see sweeping Ol’ga away in the waltz. But Puškin also stresses the persistent rhythm of the waltz with the heavily stressed lines that follow (three stresses, four, and three, respectively). The heaviness of these stresses, the pounding alliterations, and the twofold word repetitions (pair-pair, pulsepulsing) would seem inappropriate to a modern reader, used to the gliding three-step waltz. But, as Jurij Slonimskij has noted, Puškin is re-creating (and quite adequately) with the sound patterns of his verse a more swiftly revolving valse deux temps (Slonimskij 1974: 11).¹⁶

The country Mazurka yields nothing in vigor to this waltz:

Here is none of the deftness of the Petersburg Mazurka that Eugene had learned [1.3]. The poet momentarily becomes a dance historian to record the evolution of this proud, vigorous dance from its rural, folk origins to its refined, social variation (which could, nevertheless, still set spurs clanging and dainty feet flying in Chapter I, as we have seen). The edition of Chapter V that Puškin published separately in 1828 continued the Mazurka for another stanza, in which he described some of the solo improvisations that this dance licenses (PSS VI: 610).

Perhaps Puškin omitted this second Mazurka stanza from complete editions of the novel in order not to distract the reader’s attention unduly from his plot, which at this point in the novel is producing another important contrast with the ball scene in the first chapter. There spitefulness in jealous whispers and incipient seductions figured in the ball scene, but the whirl of the ball could drown out the whispers and exhaust the amorous play to no ill effect, except occasional boredom. But the rural festival in Chapter V features scheming that goes beyond the innocent play of matchmaking.

The Larins’ ball seems to fulfill its ritual harmonizing function successfully, especially when Tat’jana overcomes her emotion and performs as all expect her to. But the text complicates this situation by introducing an element of competitiveness into the event. Eugene, irritated that he has been tricked into attending a large function, seeks to slake his anger by declining an opportunity to dance with Tat’jana, dancing instead exclusively with Ol’ga and striking up a casual flirtation with her, to the amazement of all present [V.41]. In this way he frustrates the Larins’ expectations that he will court Tat’jana, and he enrages Lenskij by competing for the attention of his frivolous fiancée. Lenskij’s casually conveyed invitation is repaid with casual teasing by Eugene that comes to bore both him and Ol’ga, but when neither Lenskij nor Ol’ga can deal with this maneuver, the tragic violence of a duel provides the dénouement. Competitive card games can be assimilated into the conjunctive process of a ball, but not an unwanted form of amorous play, and the country ball, for all the vigor of its dances, ultimately proves too inflexible to serve its ritual purpose.

The failure of this ball to produce a fiancé for Tat’jana forces her family to try its luck on the Moscow marriage mart—a round of dinners, theater visits, and balls, all functions of the “hollow monde” [VII.48]. These scenes are colored by Tat’jana’s heartache and, on his level of the plot, by the poet’s growing inclination toward “austere prose” [VI.43]. The ball that Tat’jana attends at the Russian Assembly of the Nobility, like the ballet to which she is taken, is granted a certain vitality by the poet, but little detail. As befits this city in which the rural gentry and the aristocracy could meet more readily than in Petersburg, the ball combines features of the novel’s earlier ball scenes: “Where hubbub, heat, the music’s gale / The whirling couples’ swish and swagger / The senses all at once assail” [VII.51]. Here the whirling couples recall the description of the country waltz [V.41]; the Russian uses identical vocabulary—vixor’ (“whirlwind”) and mel’kat’ (“to flash”). The “thundering” hussars that “fly” out of the stanza conjure up images that invite the reader to remember the Petersburg ball of Chapter I: “Here flock hussars on leave, invading / This onenight stage, to bluster on [progremet’], / To glitter, conquer, and be gone [vletet’]” [VII.51]. The list of dances is similar to those of the previous balls, as we would expect from the conventionality of this social form: galop, mazurka, waltz [VII.53]. But Puškin shows the passage of time between the earlier scenes and this by introducing a new dance, the galop, into this Moscow scene. A lively round dance in two-in-a-measure time, it was rapidly gaining popularity all over Europe, but could not have been expected to have reached the provinces or the Petersburg of Chapter I.

Tat’jana’s inviolable inner world commands the poet’s attention throughout these stanzas, and he does not set her to dancing in this world, whose agitation she hates [VII.53]. Although her mind is far away from the dancing, the Moscow ball does its conjunctive work. Tat’jana is finally noticed by a stout general [VII.53], who will (we are invited to assume) reappear as her husband in the last chapter of the novel [VIII.14]. The “fate” [VIII.47] that has found her is the institution of marriage, in which balls played a significant role.

No dancing lightens the final chapter of the novel with flashing feet, thundering heels, or soul-filled flights. This is no casual oversight on the part of the author-narrator; he characterizes the dominant social gathering here as a “rout” and then defines the word in a footnote, lest the reader miss his point: “an evening assembly without dances” (PSS VI: 195). The author and his characters have matured and grown sober, relegating the whirlwind of the dance to memories of youth [VIII.3]. The role of bringing the members of society into harmonious relationship with each other is no longer played by balls, and another conventional form fulfills this function, the salon. As Puškin presents these two forms in his novel, a salon differs significantly from a ball in assigning its hostess a more responsible, creative role. Following conventional patterns of supper, cards, and dancing, the balls in the novel have more or less organized themselves.¹⁷ Who hosted the balls in the first and seventh chapters? The poet does not tell us. What role did Tat’jana’s mother play in the ball in Chapter V? None. But a salon or a rout depends more upon the personal qualities of the person who organizes it. The rout that Puškin’s muse admires at the beginning of the final chapter has a hostess [VIII.6, VIII.14]; Tat’jana transcends her dislike of society and forms a salon that is aesthetically pleasing and, in its civility, morally effective [VIII.23]. In imposing this aesthetic order upon the unpromising materials that society offers her, she has come to play the most creative role available to a gentlewoman of her time. It is, therefore, appropriate that Puškin approaches her with the same title of adoration, “goddess” [VIII.27], that he had previously reserved for Istomina and her fellow stage performers [1.19]. Where their feats had inspired his youthful verse, Tat’jana’s social-cultural creativity now serves as an “ideal” for the novelist.

Despite the gradual disappearance of dance themes from Eugene Onegin, one may still conclude that the dance has fulfilled important functions in nearly every aspect of Puškin’s novel. Dance occasions bring the characters together and drive them apart. The dances of each setting in the novel, and the uses to which these dances are put, help the reader to understand distinctions that Puškin draws between the various spheres of Russian culture. Similarly, ways in which the characters (including the authornarrator) join in the dancing help us to understand them and to draw distinctions between them; for “character” in Puškin’s novel is manifestly a relationship to cultural possibilities, a manner of choosing between them, and not an inner essence that the text pretends to define.

The dance itself can embody many of the novel’s highest values— creativity, beauty, vitality, and poetry (the imaginative and significant fusion of meaning and technique). Although dance is not a verbal art form, it can convey meaning in Eugene Onegin because, like literature or social behavior, it has a place in culture’s network of conventional signifying processes. Depending on their own and their audience’s skill, knowledge, and ideation, the characters express soul, emotion, desire, and liveliness of imagination through the language of dance. Indeed, the ballet, the most demanding and imaginative dance form in Eugene Onegin, is granted a magic power to enchant its audience. It certainly has the power, at the opening of the novel, to inspire the poet’s search for an artistic union of “magic sounds, feelings, and thoughts.”

Nevertheless, Puškin’s verse novel remains an account of the poet’s maturation, as he moves from the fairy-tale world of Ruslan and Ljudmila [1.2] to “austere prose” [VI.43] and the novel, coming to see life itself as a novel in the last stanza of Eugene Onegin [VIII.51]. Thus the poet’s attention turns from an enchanting ballerina and her “poetic” balletmaster to a young woman, Tat’jana, whose life and thought would be shaped by her reading of novels. The charming feet of the ballerina or ballroom dancer yield the parquet to the resounding spurs of Tat’jana’s husband, tolling an end to sentimental dreams and proclaiming a novelistic world of social relationships, family, and irreversible decisions. To be consistent with the traditions of the novel as a genre, Eugene Onegin had to banish all forms of magic and enchantment, including the ballet.

And banish them it did. But the “retirement” of Didelot and Puškin’s “goddesses” during these very same years gave the dance-bereft eighth chapter of the novel a historical analogue. The absence of dance from its final chapter makes Eugene Onegin less of a straightforward dance encyclopedia, perhaps, but no less significant an evocation of dance developments in Russian culture during the 1820s.¹⁸