Don Onegin
T was a rather strange coincidence which brought together, on successive nights, anyhow, a canto of Byron’s Don Juan, read by Tyrone Power in ZB Sunday Showcase and a BBC dramatisation of Pushkin’s Eugen Onegin from 1YC on Monday. For Eugen Onegin, at least as it appears in Babette Deutsch’s translation, is a very Byronic affair indeed, a satirical narrative blending the cynical with the sentimental, with much incidental beauty and all kinds of witty digressions. Dramatised, however, it lost much of its charm, and sounded more like a Somerset Maugham play than one of Russia’s great literary works. The rejection of the self-centred Eugen by the mature woman he had himself rejected as a girl was treated as a gimmick rather than as the ironical climax Pushkin makes it. By contrast Tyrone Power's spirited reading of Don Juan revealed the wonderful narrative flow of Byron’s poem, its urbane humour and gaily sardonic view of human nature. A somewhat unexpected choice for Sunday night, this, one which I hasten to applaud. But I couldn’t help wondering how many listening ears were burning at Juan’s boudoir exploits. Plus ca change-as I believe they say.
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19561019.2.34.4
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 898, 19 October 1956, Page 17
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195Don Onegin New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 898, 19 October 1956, Page 17
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