Status Updates From Евгений Онегин (Russian Edi...

"But minds are all unhinged at present,
True worth is boring to this age;
outside of novels, vice seems pleasant,
And in them, it is all the rage."

"Today a mental fog enwraps us,
each moral puts us in a doze,
even in novels, vice entraps us,
yes, even there its triumph grows."

"Some future dunce with scant gray matter
will spy my portrait, point, and say,
"They don't make bards like him, today!
Accept my grateful salutations,
Admirer of the muses' strains,
O you whose mem'ry still retains
Odd remnants of my light creations,
Whose loving hand runs gently o'er
The laurels of this bard of yore."

He wrote this when he's hardly 24!

"I'm blind to every apparition;
and yet a distant admonition
of hope sometimes disturbs my heart;
it would be painful to depart
and leave no faint footprint of glory…
I never lived or wrote for praise;
yet how I wish that I might raise
to high renown my doleful story,
that there be just one voice which came,
like a true friend, to speak my name."

"The seed of every generation
Strikes hurried root, and fruits, and fails,
And new seed rises in its trails…
Thus our own giddy wave goes rolling,
Swells high, and tosses foam, and raves,
And sweeps us to our forebears' graves.
Our own bell, friends, is tolling, tolling,
Our children's seed will come of age
And swiftly crowd us off the stage."

Habit is Heaven's own redress;
it takes the place of happiness.

youth is a fever; we must spare
its natural right to rave and flare.

My pen forgets my former folly:

Alas, in fripp'ry light and trifling
I've frittered much of life away.
Take balls—for moral growth, they're stifling;
If not, I'd love them still today
I love youth's frenzy and its bluster,
Its joy, its ardor, and its luster,
And ladies' fancy, frilly clothes;
I love their limbs, though I'd suppose
You'll find in Russia three or fewer
Well-tapered pairs of ladies' legs
But there's one special pair that plagues…

I burnt so much of life's brief candle
In levity I now regret!
Still, balls—but for the model scandal
They breed, I should adore them yet.
I thrill to ardent youth's outpouring,
The crush and blaze, the spirit's soaring,
Those beauties artfully arrayed;
I love their feet—though I'm afraid
Throughout our land you won't discover
Three pairs of shapely female feet.
Ah—one I long could not delete
From memory…