I probably wouldn’t have ever read this novel in any other setting, form, or product than this one.
What I found is this: https://tinyurl.com/y2wcr6yp
I found downloads of Stephen Fry, of Stephen Fry fame, reading Alexander Pushkin’s seminal Russian novel Eugene Onegin. If you don’t know it, like I mostly didn’t, it’s a relatively short novel, but it’s written entirely in verse. It sets up the argument about the importance of poetry and the supreme imminence of Russian poets of the 19th century both in its format, its argument, and in its near constant reference to other poems, novels, poets, and writers.
The book is a mopey Russian aristocrat who gets bored with life in Moscow and moves out to his family estate, where he finds that life is just as mopey if you’re mopey. But he falls in love and gets involved in a horrifying duel. He also reads poetry, looks around the countryside, takes in nature, thinks about life and the city and the Russian character.
This is one of those works that so many other works reference the importance of. It’s an impressive feat to be sure, and feels a little quaint here — sort of like reading long Poe poems….rhyming both internal and end rhymes, forcing here and there, and a similar structure. The obvious issue of course is that while this is a perfectly good novel to listen to, I have absolutely not expertise or business in determining whether or not this is a very good translation.
But it’s a lot of fun to have Stephen Fry read it, and I got it for free to boot.
(Photo: https://www.amazon.com/Eugene-Onegin-Oxford-Worlds-Classics/dp/0199538646/ref=sr_1_2?crid=Y8YIXQKXOMN3&keywords=eugene+onegin&qid=1557692811&s=gateway&sprefix=euge%2Caps%2C147&sr=8-2)
