Perhaps it comes with being a Russian major, but I have become obsessed with Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin ever since I first read it. Maybe it is that the story found me at a certain moment of fleeting youth. Just as Eugene laments at his youthful years passing, it is hard for me not to reflect on my own time here at Bowdoin. I don’t think about the time I have wasted, but instead about the tragedy Pushkin points out: that no matter how the time was spent there is no way to recover it. I believe that why Eugene Onegin is as resonating today as it was when it was first published has much to do with the story’s conclusion. Much like Eugene and Tatiana must reflect on their choices, their missed timings, their youthful rashness, we too realize that the decisions of our past stalk our present, decisions which are impossible to renege.

Any visual adaptation is left with a near impossible task of how to portray the ending of Eugene Onegin, its tragic conclusion of the two old lovers coming to terms with their unbraided fates. Within the verse of the poem, the author’s self-reflection and interruption of the prose provides a fitting conclusion, “oh, much, to much you’ve stolen, Fate!”

The opera we watched for class lacks this narrator like voice, instead granting the viewer a sense of conclusion using cinematographic techniques. In the final scene of the movie where Tatiana and Eugene meet each other again, the camera intentionally alters between shots of them together and displaying them separately as individuals. This tension between who is included in the frame echoes the dialogue and turmoil between the two lovers. By bouncing between shots of them together and their individual faces the film develops tension in the visual space. The frame separates and pulls together the fated lovers, much like two different sides of a magnet. This tension persists till the film’s ending, were the two are separated on either side of the door, the closing shot altering between Eugene’s face and Tatiana’s. By concluding the film as such, the opera fortifies visually the two lover’s ultimate separation.