Chapter 4 - Olga, Lensky and the duel

Summary

The most fully authenticated characters in Eugene Onegin are Onegin and Tatyana. Nevertheless, important roles are played also by the more thinly drawn Lensky and Olga, to whom we must now turn.

The younger sister

Olga appears in only about twenty stanzas, a third of the space devoted to Lensky, and she does not develop sufficient interest or complexity to detain the critical eye for long. She does not actually do very much, her role being to react to others and to be there in the background as an important reference point. Lensky is partly defined by her slender personality; he is so easily satisfied, indeed transported, by her childish charms that we must account him little more than a boy himself. Everything about Olga is obvious: her physical appearance, her passion, her innocence, her uncomprehending attitude and naive acceptance of everything, down to the rapid transference of her affection to a soldier quite soon after Lensky's death.

Critics have done her a disservice by taking her too seriously. Sometimes she is merely rejected in passing with disparaging epithets such as ‘doll-like … the very pattern of a mindless country miss’ (Brown, History of Russian Literature, p. 81). Sometimes she is more roundly criticised for being ‘temperamentally incapable of not responding to [Onegin's] attention’ (Bayley, Pushkin: A Comparative Study, p. 257), or for a ‘failure to observe her duty to her betrothed’ (Freeborn, Rise of the Russian Novel, p. 31).