En oavslutad dikt om ett oavslutat uppror

The legendary Russian literary critic Belinsky famously described Pushkin’s novel in verse Eugene Onegin as an encyclopedia of Russian life. However, this encyclopedia seems seriously incomplete in that it largely leaves out elements of oppression, war, and insurrection. There are many valid explanations for this, but one, very blunt and prosaic, is that oppression and censorship actually worked – that it is absent in the fiction because it was present in reality. As a case in point, this article presents a novel translation into Swedish, with rhymes and meter preserved, of the fragments remaining of the unfinished tenth chapter of Eugene Onegin. This tenth chapter deals with the failed Decembrist uprising of 1825, and the misrule precipitating it, and it is not surprising that it could not be published at the time it was written. Though well known in the academic community, this fragment is rarely published in foreign translations, and as far as known, this is the first translation into a Scandinavian language. The article offers some commentary on the translation and concludes with a few remarks on the value of reading the classics even in times of turmoil.