Status Updates From Eugeni Oneguin

"…Love's a bore."

"Happy a hundredfold, whoever
can lean on faith, who can dismiss
cold reason, sleep in sensual welter
like a drunk traveler in a shelter,
or, sweeter, like a butterfly
in flowers of spring it's drinking dry;
but piteous he, the all-foreseeing,
the sober head, detesting each
human reaction, every speech
in the expression of its being,
whose heart experience has cooled
and saved from being charmed or fooled!"

"We each enjoy a special hobby,
each of us has his favorite lobby:
one sees a duck and aims his gun,
one raves in verse like me, and one
hunts cheeky flies, with swatter sweeping,
one leads the multitude in thought,
one finds in war amusing sport,
one wallows in delicious weeping;
the wine-addict adores the cup:
and good and bad are all mixed up."

"Where Love is, Satan likes to play."

"…Just let yourself be your whole care,
your loved one, honorable reader!
Deserving object: there can be
nothing more lovable than he."

"Whom then to credit? Whom to treasure?
On whom alone can we depend?
Who is there who will truly measure
his acts and words to suit our end?
Who'll sow no calumnies around us?
Whose fond attentions will astound us?
Who'll never fault our vices, or
whom shall we never find a bore?
Don't let a ghost be your bear-leader,
don't waste your efforts on the air.
Just let yourself be your whole care,
your loved one…"

Pushkin is a d o g and im not even mad about it. He has game.

"Spent dreams, spent years there is no reliving."

"Imagine, can you? I'm alone,
There's no one here who understands me,
My very reason countermands me.
And doomed to die, I'm mute as stone.
I now must wait for your decision:
Please smile and flood my heart with light!
Or else please dash my dreams tonight.
Alas, for what they're worth: derision."

"My head was filled with sundry lore
Of damsels, goblins, spooks of yore.
But memories fade—it's quite uncanny.
What once you knew, you've plum forgot.
It's sad but true—a mind will rot
As youth recedes…"

"I need to rest from all this rhyme:
I'll end my tale some other time."

"The less we love her, the more surely
We stand to gain a woman's heart
And ruin her the more securely
Ensnared by the seducer's art."

Pushkin’s clamor for — not as much as moral-purity but — moral authenticity! 👌❤️‍🔥❤️

”I’ve known too many a haughty, beauty,
cold, pure as ice, and as unkind,
inexorably wed to duty,
unfathomable to the mind;
shocked by their modish pride, and fleeing
the utter virtue of their being.”

”Because she loved and was not artful,
Gave in to impulse, with her heart full,
Her nature too confiding-swift,
Endowed by heaven with the gift
A thousand fancies to engender,
With wits and will above her kind,
Originality of mind,
A heart inflammable and tender?
Would you not hesitate to scourge
The recklessness of passion’s urge?”

"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: