Eugene Onegin's transcultural code in the American novel in verse

The paper discusses how the contemporary novel in verse, The Golden Gate (1986) by Indian American author Vikram Seth, interacts with the classical Russian novel in verse, Alexander Pushkin's Eugene Onegin (1832). Seth openly states that he was inspired by Pushkin's creation in "Johnston's luminous translation" and employs the form known as the "Pushkin sonnet" or "Onegin stanza" throughout his long narrative about the late 20th century California. The India-born and Stanford-educated author was inspired not only by the form but also by the content of Pushkin's novel. So he "transplants" the Byronian dandy Eugene Onegin as the Californian yuppie John Brown in an attempt to rehabilitate this type, sarcastically portrayed in the 1980s city novels, such as Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City (1984) or Bret Easton Ellis's Less Than Zero (1985). All the characters in The Golden Gate belong to the yuppie circle and schematically represent different ethnic, religious, political and sexual subcultures of contemporary America. John Brown stands for the mainstream (white heterosexual male), indifferent to everything as was his predecessor Eugene Onegin defined as the first "superfluous man" in the Russian literature. His ex-girlfriend, Japanese American Janet Hayakawa, decides to settle his loveless life and publishes an ad in his name. Thanks to this epistolary connection, parodically evoking the famous Tatiana Larina's letter to Eugene Onegin, John meets and falls in love with a feminist lawyer Liz Dorati. Understanding John's selfishness, Liz does not accept his proposal and instead marries Phil Weiss, a single father abandoned by both his wife and his male Catholic lover, who also happens to be Liz's brother. To convey this heteroglossia, Seth turns to Pushkin's example of the polyphonic novel or "the encyclopedia of the styles and discourses of the epoch", as Mikhail Bakhtin described it. To create a modern love story against the backdrop of the late 20th-century America, Seth incorporates in his narrative computer and physics discourses, words from several languages, including Russian, extracts from personal letters and art reviews. For a vernacular manner in the author's speech and in dialogue, Seth uses Pushkin's techniques of inter-stanza syntactical transfers, elliptical sentences, repetitions, intonation breaks. Interestingly, Pushkin's Eugene Onegin also inspired Lyn Hejinian's novel in verse Oxota: A Short Russian Novel (1992) written in free sonnet. Lyn Hejinian belongs to an avantgarde school of language poetry, while Vikram Seth belongs to a more traditionalist, neoformalist school. However, the transcultural code of Pushkin's text enables such diverse authors to move from binary oppositions between prose and poetry, tradition and innovation and approach a more open mode of artistic imagination.

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