Onegin: A Fourfold Miniaturization of Alexander Pushkin's Classic Novel-In-Verse Eugene Onegin (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781728331423)

Marilyn Stone grew up in Indianapolis, Indiana, and in 1980 moved to Bloomington, where she ran a preschool called Sunshine Montessori in her house for several years, and completed a degree in education at Indiana University. She was expecting to teach for many more years, but in 1996 a serious car accident put an end to that plan. As is sometimes the case, however, misfortune created a new opportunity. She had already done some writing, and her friend Douglas Hofstadter, an Indiana University professor, was a great admirer of it. In fact, on his suggestion, in 2001, the two of them co-wrote a novel called Kate and Casey (which will soon be published). Shortly thereafter, Hofstadter suggested that his friend might enjoy the challenge of composing a highly condensed version of Russian poet Alexander Pushkin's novel-in-verse Eugene Onegin, of which he had recently published a full-length verse translation. Marilyn Stone was quickly hooked on this quirky challenge, and over the course of three years, she devotedly studied and retyped six different English-language verse translations of Eugene Onegin, all dating from earlier decades. Then, proceeding one stanza at a time, she was able to distill a concise shared essence from these six translations, thereby creating her miniature version. Her resulting Onegin, exactly one quarter the original's length, faithfully exploits the "Onegin stanza" - Pushkin's specially devised fourteen-line poetic medium - from start to finish.

Facing each Onegin stanza in this volume is an illustration by Soonran Youn, who at the time was an IU graduate student in fine art from Korea. She enthusiastically delved into the novel and created roughly 100 drawings complementing the text. Soonran Youn's imaginative pen-and-ink drawings are exquisite, featuring beautifully flowing lines and subtle hints of color. And thus, Alexander Pushkin's marvelous verses, Marilyn Stone's bubbling miniaturizations, Soonran Youn's refined artistic sensibility, and Douglas Hofstadter's kind encouragement came together and resulted in this most unusual book.