Notes on Prosody; From the Commentary to the Author's Translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin

by Vladimir Nabokov

Two appendixes from Nabokov's famous edition of Eugene Onegin : his study of versification in English and Russian poetry, and his "term paper" on Pushkin’s Ethiopian ancestor.

Originally published in 1965.

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Genres: Poetry, Literary Criticism, Nonfiction

192 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1969

About the author

Vladimir Nabokov (Russian: Владимир Набоков) was a writer defined by a life of forced movement and extraordinary linguistic transformation. Born into a wealthy, liberal aristocratic family in St. Petersburg, Russia, he grew up trilingual, speaking Russian, English, and French in a household that nurtured his intellectual curiosities, including a lifelong passion for butterflies. This seemingly idyllic, privileged existence was abruptly shattered by the Bolshevik Revolution, which forced the family into permanent exile in 1919. This early, profound experience of displacement and the loss of a homeland became a central, enduring theme in his subsequent work, fueling his exploration of memory, nostalgia, and the irretrievable past.
The first phase of his literary life began in Europe, primarily in Berlin, where he established himself as a leading voice among the Russian émigré community under the pseudonym "Vladimir Sirin". During this prolific period, he penned nine novels in his native tongue, showcasing a precocious talent for intricate plotting and character study. Works like The Defense explored obsession through the extended metaphor of chess, while Invitation to a Beheading served as a potent, surreal critique of totalitarian absurdity. In 1925, he married Véra Slonim, an intellectual force in her own right, who would become his indispensable partner, editor, translator, and lifelong anchor.
The escalating shadow of Nazism necessitated another, urgent relocation in 1940, this time to the United States. It was here that Nabokov undertook an extraordinary linguistic metamorphosis, making the challenging yet resolute shift from Russian to English as his primary language of expression. He became a U.S. citizen in 1945, solidifying his new life in North America. To support his family, he took on academic positions, first founding the Russian department at Wellesley College, and later serving as a highly regarded professor of Russian and European literature at Cornell University from 1948 to 1959.
During this academic tenure, he also dedicated significant time to his other great passion: lepidoptery. He worked as an unpaid curator of butterflies at Harvard University's Museum of Comparative Zoology. His scientific work was far from amateurish; he developed novel taxonomic methods and a groundbreaking, highly debated theory on the migration patterns and phylogeny of the Polyommatus blue butterflies, a hypothesis that modern DNA analysis confirmed decades later.
Nabokov achieved widespread international fame and financial independence with the publication of Lolita in 1955, a novel that was initially met with controversy and censorship battles due to its provocative subject matter concerning a middle-aged literature professor and his obsession with a twelve-year-old girl. The novel's critical and commercial success finally allowed him to leave teaching and academia behind. In 1959, he and Véra moved permanently to the quiet luxury of the Montreux Palace Hotel in Switzerland, where he focused solely on writing, translating his earlier Russian works into meticulous English, and studying local butterflies.
His later English novels, such as Pale Fire (1962), a complex, postmodern narrative structured around a 999-line poem and its delusional commentator, cemented his reputation as a master stylist and a technical genius. His literary style is characterized by intricate wordplay, a profound use of allusion, structural complexity, and an insistence on the artist's total, almost tyrannical, control over their created world. Nabokov often expressed disdain for what he termed "topical trash" and the simplistic interpretations of Freudian psychoanalysis, preferring instead to focus on the power of individual consciousness, the mechanics of memory, and the intricate, often deceptive, interplay between art and perceived "reality". His unique body of work, straddling multiple cultures and languages, continues to

Reviews

[Jack Granath · Rating 3 out of 5]

Notes on Prosody, Nabokov’s book about poetic meter, is often dismissed as crotchety. It actually succeeds in its stated goal, though, of shedding light on Pushkin’s metrical practice in Eugene Onegin. I recently made my way through Babette Deutsche’s somewhat clomping translation of the book-length poem and suspected what Nabokov shows, that Russia’s high-art verse overlaps with certain light-verse effects in English, freighting the task of translation with more perils than its perilous usual.

As for the crotchets, Nabokov accurately diagnoses prosodic theory in English (“muddleheaded”) and tries to start afresh with his own terminology, replacing “reversal” or “inversion” (“stamped on” in the line, “Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things”) with “tilt,” while ousting “pyrrhic” (a foot in which a lexically unaccented syllable takes the metrical beat, as “on” does in the line, “The gentle knight was pricking on the plain”) for “scud.” Tilts and scuds. These terms do a great job of expressing the effects that each variation creates, and I’m glad to have them, even if introducing new, colorful terminology isn’t likely to clear up an existing muddle.

What about spondees? Like many others, Nabokov doesn’t believe in them on the grounds that stress is relative in a poetic context. That’s true. But why make so much of the one effect (scuds) and nothing of the other (“false” spondees)? Neither of them “exist” as metrical variations in the duple line, but both bring important modulations to the phrasing. The answer is that Russian (with its longer words) is a scud-ridden language, and Nabokov is trying to show the non-Russian reader the poetic effect of this linguistic difference. Nevertheless, it’s a little weird (even crotchety) to scan a hyperstressed line like “They must live still—and yet, God knows” as perfectly regular.

Actually, it’s more than a little weird coming from a guy whose ear for English, Russian, French, and German poetry is so fine-tuned that he needs new taxonomies for effects that other prosodists aren’t even aware of. He classifies tilts, for example, according to the way they play out over various combinations of mono- and polysyllables (split tilts, short tilts, duplex tilts, long tilts, even duplex reverse tilts).

This book also contains a second meditation on Eugene Onegin--the astonishing and sometimes insane Abram Gannibal, a sixty-page investigation of a footnote to the text. In that footnote, Pushkin alludes to his African ancestor (Abram Gannibal), and I suppose if Shakespeare had done the same we would have a few disproportionately long treatises on it. Pushkin makes a romance of his heritage, and certain biographers have done the same. Reader’s of Paul Veyne’s Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths? might find something here to chew on, but most of us will come to the book more interested in Nabokov than Pushkin. It’s fun to see him disassemble the fiction, even if it sometimes feels like watching one of the twentieth century’s most interesting minds spinning its wheels in an icy parking lot.

But I go on. . .

[Raymonds009 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not for the faint of heart. I thought that I knew a bit about meter and scanning, but this was truly dense--really more like a graduate seminar. I almost gave up but am glad that I didn't. Fascinating deductions about the relationship between prose and poetry slowly worked their way into my brain.

The second half was much more accessible and covered the heritage of Pushkin's ancestors and a general introduction into the relationship between Russia and Turkey during the 18th century. If you are hopelessly fond of Nabokov as I am and you haven't found this little work yet it will be well worth your while. Approach with ardor!

[Patrick Whitman]

I have 2. Commentary One to Five.

[Kit · Rating 5 out of 5]

addenda to the Onegin translation that are interesting in their own right, especially if one wants to know about the comparative history and character of English and Russian iambic tetrameters.