The Duel Part of Onegin

After Onegin flirted with Olga, Olga apparently attracted to Onegin. Due to his exaggerated earnestness and inexperience, Lensky is wounded to the core and issues a challenge to Onegin for a request of a duel. However Onegin does not want to have a duel with Lensky, since he is Onegin’s best friend, and there must be someone’s death. So he reluctantly accepts the duel. In the next day, Lensky waits with his assistant who counts the exactly third-two steps for the distance. It is Lensky’s first time to duel, and actually he has no experience about that. However, Onegin is expert at this cruel “game”. Therefore, neither of them shoots to the other one at the beginning, what they do is just walking closer towards each other. 

In the movie, Lensky shoots first, but misses. Then Onegin holds down the gun then shoot Lensky in the head. Then Onegin steps up to Lensky, feeling so regretful. However, things are a little bit different in the novel. Actually Onegin shoot first and Lensky just falls down and lies on the ground, them the assistants take Lensky away as Onegin turns around and leaves.

After that, Onegin then quits his country estate, choosing travel as a means of deadening his feelings of remorse.

The Extremes in Tatiana's Letter

Tatyana’s letter to Onegin. 

Another! No, no one on this earth 

Is there to whom I’d give my heart! 

That is ordained by highest fate… 

That is heaven’s will- that I am yours; 

My life till now was but a pledge, 

Of meeting with, a forward image; 

You were sent by heaven of that I’m sure 

To the grave itself you are my savior… 

In dreams you have appeared to me 

Though yet unseen, I held you dear. 

I see this part of is the most extreme part of the poem. Tatyana indicates that Onegin is the only one she would give her heart to, and even “that is ordained by highest fate” and “heaven’s will”. These words in the poem show Tatyana’s great passion of love to Onegin, and strong will to belong to Onegin. “You were sent by heaven” and “you are my savior”, these two pieces of poem absolutely show the image of Onegin in Tatyana’s eyes. 

Usually, a girl will not say such extreme thing to the man she loves. Therefore, I consider it as the most extreme part of the poem. 

Does art depict life or does life depict art?

In my personal perspective, the art depicts life.

The art is from the life, and what it does is to reflect the life in another way. Eugene Onegin, one of Pushkin’s most famous works, is really a good example of my point of view. In this novel, the main character Onegin shares a similar life with its author, Pushkin. Both of them are born in the upper-class family, grow up in the good circumstance, get well education. Both of them have grand dreams, want to change something, and world-weary. Additionally, the time cost for Pushkin was really long. He did not finish the whole story in several months, but seven years. He actually did not have a planned structure of the novel when he started. What he did was to publish the novel section by section, and see what would happen as he experienced more. Therefore, in these characters he created, we are able to see the reflection of him. Not only the people in literature get the inspiration from the life, many painters were strongly influenced by it as well. One typical example is Vincent Van Gogh, who is the most well known painter in 19th century. The topic in his paintings was really related to his personal experience. The Sunflowers, a series of paintings, reflected his glorification to love, his pursuit to the freedom, and his idiographic comprehension of life when he was so depressed about the life he had at that period.

General speaking, art usually depicts life since life is the best source for artisans to get inspiration.

Eugene Onegin Reading Log

We started to learn Onegin today. As I saw the website, I noticed that this story is really long and the translation from Russian to English seems so complicated. However, i heard about it before, and hopefully there is some chinese version to help me understand this great book.

• Eugene Onegin is a novel in verse written by Alexander Pushkin published between 1825 and 1832. 
• It is a classic of Russian literature, and its eponymous protagonist has served as the model for superfluous men.
• Almost the entire work is made up of 389 stanzas of iambic tetrameter with the unusual rhyme scheme "AbAbCCddEffEgg", where the uppercase letters represent feminine rhymeswhile the lowercase letters represent masculine rhymes. This form has come to be known as the "Onegin stanza" or the "Pushkin sonnet."

Four main characters:

Eugene Onegin: A dandy from Saint Petersburg, about twenty-six years old. He is good at socializing and educated. But he is also a arrogant, selfish and world-weary cynic.

Vladimir Lensky: A young poet, about eighteen years old. He is a very romantic and naive dreamer. He was killed by Onegin in a fight from Olga.

Tatyana Larina: She is a shy and quiet girl, but also the passionate landowner's daughter. She loves Onegin and writes letter to him. However, she get rejected at the beginning. 

Olga Larina: A beautiful and romantic girl, but also a vapid coquette.

I think this novel is strongly related to the author himself, and I consider the Onegin as the reflection of Pushkin. Onegin is a guy from the Russian upper class, however although he is cultured and really good at socializing, he still has the common problem shared by most of the upper class people, arrogant and selfish. Also, both of Onegin and Pushkin are world-weary. They are tired of the life they had before, and try to change. Additionally, both of them are the loser in the love. Onegin finally could not be with Tatyana, the girl he truly loves, while Pushkin's marriage was the miserable.

Book 1:The first part of the novel mainly introduces the main character Eugene Onegin. Onegin is an educated man form St. Petersburg and very world-weary. He is really good at socializing and very popular among the upper class society. He lives in a luxurious way however, he gets bored with this country life.

Book 2: He meets Lensky, a young romantic poet engaged to Olga. Then the author introduces Olga’s sister, Tatiana. Tatiana is a shy, emotionless, beautiful and smart young woman.

Book 3: After Onegin meets Tatiana, Tatiana believes that she falls in love with Onegin. So she writes a letter to Onegin, and wishes him to answer that. However, things do not happen in the way she expects. Onegin does not reply anything, and Tatiana is so depressed.

Book 4: Onegin does not want to marriage and love right now, but he does love the way that Tatiana expresses her love. Also, the beauty and honesty attract him very much. However, Onegin does not think he is ready now, since in his opinion, the marriage is dreary and depressing and it absolutely does not fit the way he lives.

Book 5: Later Lensky invites Onegin to Tatiana’s name day celebration and try to make Onegin and Tatiana o be together. However, Onegin was late to the party, and even after he arrives there, he starts flirt with Lensky’s girl, Olga, Lensky is so mad that he has to use a duel to end this. So he decides to fight with Onegin. In the end, Onegin unwillingly kills Lensky who is his best friend.

Book 6: Onegin could not forget the death of Lensky even 16 years have been passed. By an accidental chance, Onegin meet Tatiana in a dance. He notices that Tatiana has become the wife of a duke.

Book 7; Onegin finally finds out that Onegin is the true love he has been looking for so long. Therefore, he falls in love with Tatiana like a child, and tries to get her favor. However, although Tatiana still loves Onegin, she could not betray her husband. So she chooses to reject Onegin and leaves away sadly.

Howl and Leaves of Grass

I am sorry to post this so late since I was working on my science presentation and paper these days.

Here is the question: Compare and contrast Howl and Leaves of Grass. 

The idea is different: 

Howl is considered to be one of the great works of the beat generation. It criticizes the people in that generation for their sexual, open and alcoholic life. In his opinion, America is falling apart. 

For the Leaves of Grass, Whitman glorifies the energetic America which gradually became the best country in the world. Additionally, Leaves of Grass shows Whitman’s great love to his country. Thus, compared to the idea in the Howl, the idea here is more positive since it was really passive in Ginsberg’s work. 

The format is similar: 

In both of their works, the formats are pretty similar to each other. I guess the main reason for that is because Ginsberg sets Whitman’s format of writing poems as a model. They both start with a idea, and use some examples to prove that.

The Love Song of J. Alfred - T.S. Eliot

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock is a posem by T.S Eliot. It shows the two most important characteristics of Eliot’s early poetry. First, it is strongly influenced by the French Symbolists. Second, the use of fragmentation and juxtaposition. 

This story happens at a unpleasant night. In the beginning, Eliot describes the scene around the street. “half-deserted” street, the yellow frog and smoke, makes it more uncomfortable and dirty. In the next half of the story, Prufrock wants to know a girl. However, he is hesitated since he does not look well. He does not know how to start the conversation. At the end, he chooses not to go, and the story ends in the sad mood. 

I think this poem expresses Eliot’s sense of isolation and loneliness, and his inability to fit into a world that he perceives as hostile. He thinks, to be a creature like a crab which is protected by a thick outer armor and better still is better for him. So that, he does not have to truly interact with anyone or care about what they think of him, or he of them.

Project 7: My Hemingway Project

I am sorry for this empty projects, I did not mean to do this. Actually, I was going to put something here on Thursday, however, as you told us the people who had AP or SAT could have more time to do work, so I just left this blog here and reviewed for the test in the next few days. I am going to do the work in today's class, and during the study hall tonight. I will try to finish the paper as soon as possible.

I think the project is going well now, and I already had the basic idea of the paper. Therefore I do not think it will be hard for me to do the paper work. By the way, thank you for the extra time to review for the APs and SAT 2 tests, I think I did pretty well in those exams.

Again, I am really sorry for the empty blog here. Additionally, I will do another blog post tonight to show the process of my project paper.