Pushkin's novel in verse took eight years to write and invented Russian literature. Onegin, the bored Petersburg dandy, rejects the love of Tatyana, a provincial girl who pours her soul into a letter; years later, the positions reverse. The plot is simple; the execution is miraculous. Pushkin's stanza form, with its intricate rhyme scheme, becomes invisible through sheer mastery. Nabokov's translation with its four-volume commentary is itself a masterpiece of obsessive devotion. The poem is funny, sad, and wise about how we ruin what we do not value until it is too late.