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Onegin stanza (Russian: онегинская строфаoneginskaya strofa), sometimes "Pushkin sonnet", refers to theverse form popularized (or invented) by the Russian poetAlexander Pushkin through his 1825–1832 novel in verseEugene Onegin. The work was mostly written in verses ofiambic tetrameter with therhyme scheme aBaBccDDeFFeGG, where the lowercase letters representfeminine rhymes (stressed on the penultimate syllable) and the uppercase representing masculine rhymes (stressed on the ultimate syllable). For example, here is the first stanza ofOnegin as rendered into English byCharles Johnston:
My uncle—high ideals inspire him;
but when past joking he fell sick,
he really forced one to admire him—
and never played a shrewder trick.
Let others learn from his example!
But God, how deadly dull to sample
sickroom attendance night and day
and never stir a foot away!
And the sly baseness, fit to throttle,
of entertaining the half-dead:
one smoothes the pillows down in bed,
and glumly serves the medicine bottle,
and sighs, and asks oneself all through:
"When will the devil come for you?"
Like theShakespearean sonnet, the Onegin stanza may be divided into threequatrains and a closing couplet (normally without stanza breaks or indentations), and it has a total of seven rhymes, rather than the four or five rhymes of thePetrarchan sonnet. Because the second quatrain (lines 5–8) consists of two independent couplets, the poet may introduce a strong thematic break after line 6, which is not feasible in Petrarchan or Shakespearean sonnets.[citation needed]
In Russian poetry following Pushkin, the form has been utilized by authors as diverse asMikhail Lermontov,Vyacheslav Ivanov,Jurgis Baltrušaitis andValery Pereleshin, in genres ranging from one-stanza lyrical piece to voluminous autobiography. Nevertheless, the Onegin stanza, being easily recognisable, is strongly identified as belonging to its creator, and its use in œuvres of any kind implicitly triggers a reading of the particular text against the backdrop of Pushkin's imagery and worldview.[citation needed]
John Fuller's 1980 "The Illusionists" andJon Stallworthy's 1987 "The Nutcracker" used this stanza form, andVikram Seth's 1986 novelThe Golden Gate is written wholly in Onegin stanzas.
The Onegin stanza is also used in the verse novelEquinox by Australian writerMatthew Rubinstein, serialized daily in theSydney Morning Herald and currently awaiting publication; in the biography in verseRichard Burgin byDiana Burgin; in the verse novelJack the Lady Killer byHRF Keating (title borrowed from a line inGolden Gate in Onegin stanza rhymes but not always preserving the metric pattern); in several poems by Australian poetGwen Harwood, for instance the first part of "Class of 1927" and "Sea Eagle" (the first employs a humorous Byronic tone, but the second adapts the stanza to a spare lyrical mood, which is good evidence of the form's versatility); and in the verse novel "Unholyland" by Aidan Andrew Dun. The British writer Andy Croft has written two novels in Onegin stanzas,Ghost Writer and1948. Brad Walker used the form for his 2019 novellaAdam and Rosamond, a parody of Victorian fiction,Michael Weingrad uses it for his 2024 novel of coming of age in early 1980's Philadelphia,Eugene Nadelman.
Some stanzaic forms, written in iambic tetrameter in the poetry ofVladimír Holan, especially in the poems "První testament"[1] and "Cesta mraku", were surely inspired by Onegin stanza.