A powerful love story set in the class-conscious Tsarist Russia of the early 19th century. It embraces every level of that society serf, provincial, aristocrat in verse which is by turns beautiful, witty, wickedly perceptive and always readable.

This is essential reading for anyone with a love of Russian literature, because this is where it all began. There is little pre-history to that golden age of 19th century novels. Lomonosov, a fisherman's son turned scholar, took church Slavonic, peasant Russian, mixed in a few 'Loan translations' and gave a French-speaking aristocracy a literary language; Pushkin was the first truly great poet to use it; Yevgeny Onegin is his greatest work.