Pushkin-Shlonsky Souvenir Sheet
Israel-Russia Joint Issue
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Issue: November 1997
Designer: Pekarskaya Marina Yefimovna
Souvenier Sheet of 1 stamp (75mm x 60mm)
Stamp size: 25.7 x 40mm
Printers: E. Lewin-Epstein Ltd.
Printing Method: Offset
ushkin took more than seven years to write his famous Eugene Onegin, which he called "a novel in verse." Initially, the poet was reluctant to publish the novel, which he conceived as a satirical picture of high society, because he was sure that censorship would never allow it to be printed. Later the author's intention changed greatly and the publication of the novel became possible.Defying assumptions that he would continue in the Byronic style of his southern poems, Pushkin's new work was not kindly received by critics. But this had no influence on the success of Onegin. Readers immediately recognized it as Pushkin's best work -- an opinion seldom doubted in later criticism.
With its varied and broad picture of contemporary life and its new form (the so-called "Onegin stanza"), Eugene Onegin is renowned for the vividness of its observations of St. Petersburg's high society and life in Kishinyov and Odessa. Its double plot, with one strand narrating the characters and the other the author himself, suggested to many readers and critics that the heroes of the novel were borrowed from real life. Belinsky called Onegin an "historical" novel, an "encyclopaedia of Russian life." Eugene Onegin has become one of the most popular works of world literature, reprinted numerous times and translated into 86 languages.
Extracts from the novel were first translated into Hebrew towards the end of the 1870's in Russia, but the most complete and authoritative translation of Onegin was by Abraham Shlonsky (Karyokov, Ukraine 1900 - Tel-Aviv, 1973), one of the leading poets of the Third Aliyah. Immigrating to Palestine in 1921, Shlonsky was among the first to incorporate modernism into Hebrew poetry.
The Ukraine-born poet often turned to Eugene Onegin for inspiration. Then, paying careful attention to metre, rhyme and content, Shlonsky produced a Hebrew version of the "novel in verse" no less enjoyable than the original Russian.
Shlonsky's work was doubly successful. It proved Hebrew to be a modern and lively language, capable of expressing the most delicate and profound of Pushkin's thoughts and ideas. And it confirmed a great shift in Israeli literature, which until then had been dominated, at least stylistically, by the Bible.
UNESCO has declared the year 1999, the 200th anniversary of the poet's birth, as "Pushkin Year."
Department of Russian Studies
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
