Subject
Fiennes' Onegin (fwd)
Date
Body
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A substantial article in today's London Daily Telegraph (May 27, 99), headed
RALPH TAKES A SHOT AT PUSHKIN, comments on a new "£11 million film adaptation
of Alexander Pushkin's verse novel Eugen Onegin". The actor Ralph Fiennes,
the prime mover in this enterprise, is quoted as follows: "I loved the poem,
especially in the Nabokov translation, and the character."
This is (perhaps) the strongest endorsement to date (known to me, at any
rate) of what I cannot help thinking of as a bemusing curiosity. Whereas I
tend to agree somewhat with Auberon Waugh, that Pale Fire is fundamentally
serious --- and, for me, the most intellectually stimulating creative work
in English prose since Carroll's equally stimulating (and ultimately serious)
Through the Looking Glass --- N's Eugen Onegin has struck me as possibly a
sort of monumental academic joke, of the most elevated and rarefied kind.
>From under the magnificent mountain of riveting commentary, and through the
literal Anglo-Zemblan of the version itself, I confess to being barely able
to discern the beauties of what I know to be, but cannot access: a Russian
verse masterpiece. Has here a butterfly not been broken upon a wheel? I am
already ducking in anticipation of the brickbats that this opinion invites.
Charles Harrison Wallace
A substantial article in today's London Daily Telegraph (May 27, 99), headed
RALPH TAKES A SHOT AT PUSHKIN, comments on a new "£11 million film adaptation
of Alexander Pushkin's verse novel Eugen Onegin". The actor Ralph Fiennes,
the prime mover in this enterprise, is quoted as follows: "I loved the poem,
especially in the Nabokov translation, and the character."
This is (perhaps) the strongest endorsement to date (known to me, at any
rate) of what I cannot help thinking of as a bemusing curiosity. Whereas I
tend to agree somewhat with Auberon Waugh, that Pale Fire is fundamentally
serious --- and, for me, the most intellectually stimulating creative work
in English prose since Carroll's equally stimulating (and ultimately serious)
Through the Looking Glass --- N's Eugen Onegin has struck me as possibly a
sort of monumental academic joke, of the most elevated and rarefied kind.
>From under the magnificent mountain of riveting commentary, and through the
literal Anglo-Zemblan of the version itself, I confess to being barely able
to discern the beauties of what I know to be, but cannot access: a Russian
verse masterpiece. Has here a butterfly not been broken upon a wheel? I am
already ducking in anticipation of the brickbats that this opinion invites.
Charles Harrison Wallace