Eugene Onegin

Eugene Onegin Imagery

St. Petersburg

The novel begins by painting a picture of St. Petersburg life as Onegin rides through the capital from one social function to another. As the next day dawns and Onegin heads to bed, Pushkin shifts the focus to the common people of the city who arise for the day's work. In another scene, Pushkin describes himself and Onegin drinking by the Neva, the river which runs through St. Petersburg. 

Countryside

When Onegin first arrives in the countryside, he finds some peace in the pastoral surroundings of the estate his uncle left him. Even though he soon loses interest in nature, Pushkin finds in Tatyana a lover of the forests and streams. Her frequent moonlight walks provide opportunities for tender descriptions of the nighttime scenes in the countryside.  

Moscow

When Tatyana rides into Moscow in Chapter 7, she flies past buildings, streets, and people of all sorts, and later on she is taken to a variety of social events where the masses of people chatting bewilders her. An especially poignant image is when she sits on the windowsill of her house in Moscow, as she did in her countryside house, and looks out the window, only to see a shed and stable instead of the fields and forests she so loved to see. 

Tatyana's Dream

Tatyana's dream contains a great range of vivid description, beginning with her wandering through a gloomy, snowy landscape and seeing a flimsy bridge over a churning river, and ending in the house where Onegin drinks with monsters.