Tchaikovsky’s Opera rendition of the Russian classic “Eugene Onegin” surprisingly disappointed me. The original poem is probably my favorite work of Russian literature to date, and it was the first text that got me involved with Russian culture. Probably my favorite aspects of the book were the idea of the Russian “superfluous man,” the stylized Pushkin’s own dialogue (especially the wacky elements of it i.e. the love of feet), and how the text was portrayed through the third person Eugene perspective. The Opera version of this text mostly scraps all those aspects, and, in my opinion, ruins Eugene’s character in the first half of this Opera. There is one section in the dinner sequence where Tanya says that she “cannot understand Eugene’s behavior,” which I feel is a very appropriate (and ironic) response. The poem focuses on Eugene’s superfluous tendencies seen through his almost constant remarks of boredom, how easily he gets bored of his Uncle’s massive library, and how he even gets bored of being a playboy after consistently using them to fill his own void. His treatment of Tanya in this text doesn’t give the proper context for why Eugene denies Tanya. He states that it’s because “a married life would mean us torment,” but this sentence doesn’t make sense unless the viewer knows that it’s because Eugene gets bored of EVERYTHING if he has to deal with it for long enough. In a sense, I see this choice to veto the beginning of the poem as a way to romanticize and dramatize the work even further than original. The Opera is portrayed through Tanya’s perspective, a character who is engulfed by her love of french romance novellas, and this leads to the work being more dramatic. This is most evident in the dinner scene where Eugene and Lensky have a verbal disagreement, which gains a massive crowd and causes Olga to faint, rather than the letters they originally sent each-other. Overall, the second half of the Opera was far more faithful to the text. I love how in the ending the viewer comes to understand love as a sacrifice in Russian culture rather than a gift, but I was disappointed with the entire work