Glad I waited for this.

This is one of those great works of world literature I was always going to get round to! So glad I waited. This is an excellent prose / verse translation of Pushkin’s masterpiece, which works very well in English. That, coupled with a very good narrator indeed, has made listening to this a pleasure. The Ralph Fiennes and Liv Tyler movie Onegin is well worth searching out too, and is a great companion to a fine audiobook.

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Listened to this repeatedly

This is a wonderful translation, beautifully read. It's short so you have a chance to listen over and over and really get into the text. Absolutely vivid.

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Pushkin’s Masterpiece…

The great Pushkin’s Masterpiece brought brilliantly to life with an expressive and thoroughly commanding performance.

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Very energetic narrator, interesting story. Recommended to teenage girls.

As above. Nothing to add. Review must be 15 words minimum. I have made it.

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Passion in all it's guises

I read this first, so wanted to hear it read to me and very glad I chose this rendition. The narrator was superb!

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1 person found this helpful

Just let the rhythm overtake you

A poem about love and regret and Russia is so full of both, beautiful and light, like a waltz that ends in tears.
Again we explore how destructive living by ideas instead of sentiments can be and how time can reverse positions if not outcomes. Romantic and tragic, all of Onegin decisions are in the first part of the novel, are those of a man that has lost his way his joy in life but pretends to be superior, while lost and bound by social conventions. Tatiana, on the other hand in her youth is pure an true to her feeling but also in command of them but in the end both are slaves to the culture and its demands in their lives.
Sad but beautiful, a classic for the world.

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6 people found this helpful

Excellent

Brilliantly written. sad, amusing and fascinating. Preformed with elegance and passion. Will look further book by these authors

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Nice story but nothing special

This was the first Pushkin I have read, and I was disappointed by this book, given the high reputation of Pushkin.
It was a nice story in itself, but nothing special or with any particular depth. From the poetry perspective I don’t find it anything special either. Maybe it all gets lost in translation?

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Call me a Philistine

I'm well aware this is considered one of the greats of Russian literature, so I must be a Philistine, because I hated it. Onegin is a dislikeable and tedious character, and so it seems are all the other characters in the book, I couldn't wait to be rid of them.
The rhyming scheme is very clever but it very soon becomes irritating and distracting, like listening to a 4 hour long Limerick. There's a few mildly amusing pieces, but I wasn't expecting comedy, so even that didn't help.
I'm not sure what I was expecting, maybe the Russian equivalent of Under Milk Wood, maybe a Russian Dickens? whatever I expected I didn't get it.
Maybe it's better to read rather than listen, maybe it's better in Russian than translated, but I failed to finish it I'm afraid.
Maybe Russian literature isn't my thing, I've tried Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Bulgakov, Solzhenitsyn and even some modern Russian writers, and with the exception of Solzhenitsyn (who I loved), I struggled with them all,

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