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My review of the film version of Moscow's Vakhtangov Theater's production of  Eugene Onegin  pales in comparison to my friend's reaction to the live version, which she saw last night. Starting with the elegant program -- a kind of invitation that also included the full text of Tatiana's letter to Eugene -- and continuing with the magic on stage, the production really was something to write home about (or at least write Ohio about). Анжела, я в восторге от спектакля! Очень необычная постановка. Сочетание классической драмы, хореографии, откровенного сюреализма.   Актерская игра тоже выше всяких похвал! Но главное, впервые как-то по-новому  услышала Пушкина.  Angela--she wrote--the play was fantastic! A very unusual production. A combination of classical drama, choreography, straight-out surrealism. The actors' performances were also beyond all praise! But most importantly, for the first time I head Pushkin in a new way. For those of us in the business, this...

About a month ago I saw a Moscow theater production , projected on a screen in suburban Cincinnati. It was breathtaking -- the scope and creativity of the theatrical version of Pushkin's classic novel-in-verse from 1831 had me rapt. Then I went to Moscow. The Moscow theater scene is all about the classics these days. There's a new musical based on Tolstoy's Anna Karenina ; the Vakhtangov is showing that Eugene Onegin , and Chekhov's plays never leave the repertoire: Uncle Vanya , Three Sisters , Cherry Orchard  etc. I was in town all of two evenings, but that didn't stop me. I got to two productions based on classic 19th century fiction, and both were utterly amazing. Opening Scene of R.R.R., featuring Raskolnikov on the typewriter At the Mossovet Theater I attended R. R. R. , a play based on Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment.  Porfiry Petrovich shows Raskolnikov his article, published under the pseudonym "R.R.R." -- Rodion Romanovich...

Wednesday evening I had a rather surreal experience. I went to see Rimas Tuminas's brilliant play of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin , staged at the Vakhtangov Theatre in Moscow. But it was one of those filmed plays that American movie theaters have taken to showing (I wrote about a National Theatre Live production here ). Which is great. I was thrilled to see it -- I'm going to Russia in a few weeks, but I won't manage to get to the theater, and theatrical offerings where I live are not on this level. I've heard a lot about Tuminas, but since I haven't really been in Moscow much in years, I've never seen one of his productions. And it was terrific. Tuminas takes the classic Russian novel-in-verse, the centerpiece, really, of much of Russian literature, and turns it into a compelling spectacle. Tchaikovsky's opera of  Eugene Onegin  is well-known, of course, and there have been numerous attempts to render the novel in film, but this staged version is the ...

Seems like kismet that I am teaching Eugene Onegin  in the week that I was asked to review a newly translated novella by Eugenia Kononenko called A Russian Story (Glagoslav Publications, 2012). This novella strikes at the heart of Russian-Ukrainian relations and the complicated post-Soviet global lives of former Ukrainian citizens. Featuring a hero named "Eugene Samarsky" ("derived not from the Russian place-name Samara on the Volga, but from the name of a minor Ukrainian river, a tributary of the Dnipro," as he never tires of explaining), the book explores the travels and travails of the post-Soviet son of Ukraine as he inexorably and with a certain self-aware incredulity follows the path of Pushkin's hero: he inherits an country estate (or at least a house) from a distant uncle, meets sisters named Tatiana and Olga, accidentally kills Olga's fiance Vladimir and has to flee the country and wander through foreign lands... In the meantime, the narrator...

In my Masterpieces of Russian Literature class, I like to start with Pushkin and Eugene Onegin . The beginning of the course can be difficult -- how can I convince my students that Pushkin really is the be all and end all of Russian literature, that poets and prose writers of the 19th, 20th, and even 21st century are often engaging with this Ur-poet? It is especially difficult because his poetic masterpieces don't always read well in English. This autumn I used "God Grant that I not Lose My Mind..." ... in an atrocious translation. I was reminded pretty quickly that in order to convince students of something, you need to show  them, not tell them. Which is why with Eugene Onegin I often use a pedagogical exercise a colleague, Romy Taylor, wrote about in  The Pushkin Review  a number of years ago. The translation I use, James Falen's, is excellent. I really like it. But as I say to the students, if Pushkin sparkles , then Falen only shines . Better than the th...