Spleen, nuda, melancholia. Czytając Eugeniusza Oniegina

The aim of this paper is to analyze the emerging theme of melancholy in Eugene Onegin. The variety of personalities of the main characters of the poem – Onegin, Lensky and Tatiana and the transition in lifestyle of the former do not allow to disambiguate their experience of melancholy. This gives impulse to consider the way of life of the main character as fluctuating, consecutive, constituting this experience dominants: nineteenth-century fashion for spleen, boredom and nostalgia. In the context of Onegin the issues of his affinity with the figure of a dandy and a Byronic hero are raised as well. The philosophical inclinations of the boredom troubling him (Pascal, La Rochefoucauld) and acedia (Bieńczyk, Evagrius Ponticus) are also investigated. Lensky’s melancholy is presented by described by Marek Bieńczyk’s model of a nineteenth-century attitude of weak entity waiting for metamorphosis. Lensky’s tomb is shown as one of the most important figures of melancholic oblivion (Starobinski), from Tatiana’s experience the elements connecting them with sentimental melancholy are extracted.