Eugene Onegin By Alexander Pushkin Essay

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In Alexander Pushkin’s novel, Eugene Onegin, Pushkin immerses the reader into Russian high society in the 1820s and focuses on a “fop” (Pushkin 15) called Eugene Onegin. The namesake characters’ personality is truly an illusion. In the two stanzas describing Eugene’s dressing room, the word choice, personification and the use of simile gives the reader insight into the state of Eugene’s ingenuity and why both he and Russian high society are driven by vanity. The narrator spends considerable time focused on the contents of Eugene’s dressing room, which indicates the importance these belongings have to Eugene. By dedicating a substantial amount of detail into describing Eugene’s objects, these belongings begin to become symbols of himself. The things he owns have value more than what they are; they represent how he wants to present himself to the world. In the second line of Stanza 25, there is an emphasis on the fact that Eugene’s belongings are “all displayed” (Pushkin 15) which implies that Eugene’s belongings main use are to impress and to be seen by others. The use of the word “displayed” (Pushkin 15) also brings to mind how the members of high society put themselves on display for each other at social events. The purpose of going to the opera, or a masquerade is not to watch …show more content…

These words illustrate how intensive the process of Eugene getting ready is and how exhausting it must be to exist in the perpetual state of pretending to be someone else. The vanity immersed in Eugene’s life is what his persona is shaped around. This becomes even more apparent with the simile and allusion to the goddess of beauty “Venus” (Pushkin 15) in the second stanza. With this comparison, the narrator gives the reader a clear view of Eugene’s most prominent and defining trait,

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