Vladimir Nabokovs famous and brilliant commentary on Pushkins Eugene Onegin When Vladimir Nabokov first published his controversial translation of Pushkins Eugene Onegin in 1964 the great majority of the edition was taken up by Nabokovs witty and exhaustive commentary. Presented here in its own volume the commentary is a unique scholarly masterwork by one of the twentieth centurys greatest writersa work that Nabokov biographer Brian Boyd calls the most detailed commentary ever made on Onegin and indispensable to all serious students of Pushkins masterpiece. In his commentary Nabokov seeks to illuminate every possible nuance of this nineteenth-century classic. He explains obscurities traces literary influences relates Onegin to Pushkins other work and in a characteristically entertaining manner dwells on a host of interesting details relevant to the poem and the Russia it depicts. Nabokov also provides translations of lines and stanzas deleted by the censor or by Pushkin himself variants from Pushkins notebooks fragments of a continuation called Onegins Journey the unfinished and unpublished Chapter Ten other continuations and an index. A work of astonishing erudition and passion Nabokovs commentary is a landmark in the history of literary scholarship and in the understanding and appreciation of the greatest work of Russias national poet.
