Writer and dramatist Stephen Fry reads Eugene Onegin

British author and presenter Stephen Fry has recorded a reading of the verse novel Eugene Onegin for the English-speaking world.

Moreover, the project is available as a free download available from the website 'Fry Reads Onegin' in mp3 and mp4 format for iTunes, or you can listen to it online.

The website has a short vignette about the various English translations of Eugene Onegin  – of which there have been more than 40 attempts. The first English edition of the novel was translated by Henry Spalding in 1881, a full 48 years after the original Russian publication.

This was originally written and published as a part-work, but grew to be a serious literary work that advanced the Russian language and the overall genre of the novel.

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The novelist Vladimir Nabokov created his own very literal translation, quite unlike any of the others, which was published in 1964. According to the website: “While working on the translation, he came to the conclusion that creating a relevant poetic text in English is impossible.”

One of the most renowned modern translations is that of Stanley Mitchell but Fry has recorded the translation by James E Falen (1990). A complete list of the novel’s translations is available here.

Although overshadowed in the Western world by Dostoyevsky, Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin was a literary inspiration for Byron’s Childe Harold. After the striking reading of the novel by Stephen Fry, Onegin will no longer languish in Raskolnikov’s shadow, nor share his crime and punishment.

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