Emerson (continued): (the first setting was a ballet to Ruslan and Ludmila in 1821, a year after that long poem was published). An inventory published in 1974 listed over five hundred separate works of Pushkin that had given rise to 3,000 musical compositions authored by over a thousand composers. Not a single major poetic, prosaic, or dramatic work by Pushkin has escaped musical re-embodiment. Emerson: To this vast question let me say only that during the first half of his adult life, up through the end of the 1820s, Pushkin was the premiere poet in an elite tsarist culture that worshiped poetry. His verses mattered enough to Emperor Alexander to decree the poet exiled to the south of Russia for political insubordination in his poems (1821-24), and then consigned to house arrest (1824-26), to be pardoned only by the new tsar. But by the 1830s, the Russian literary market was changing and broadening. The reading public demanded prose. Pushkin learned to do that too — but his gem-like achievements in the short story were not always understood. He never regained the charismatic reputation he had enjoyed as a young man. Emerson: There are three central themes, I think: reading, loneliness, and poetry. Love is a factor in all three, but cannot be called the dominant force. Tatiana and Eugene are both formed decisively by the literary texts they “grow up on” — he, on Lord Byron’s poems and skeptical French novels, she on sentimental romances. Heroes and heroines from those works mold their appetites and behaviors. Pushkin treats this situation comedically, with gentle irony. The romantic couple falls in love, but out of step with each other, and this means that the love is not consummated. But this loneliness also means that the love never dies or grows old: it is suspended as an ideal. The theme of poetry is at the core. Eugene Onegin is a novel in verse, a perfectly proportioned genre hybrid. It partakes equally of novel and poem. The ‘novelistic’ factors include a chatty and digressive narrator, abundant everyday detail, heroes who mature over several years, and unimpeded conversation that fits effortlessly into lines of verse. (continued)