Евгений Онегин / Eugene Onegin

The military and naval grades from the 14th up to the 7th confer personal nobility only, whilst above the 7th hereditary rank is acquired. In the remaining departments, civil or otherwise, personal nobility is only attained with the 9th grade, hereditary with the 4th.]

XXXVI

Thus age approached, the common doom,

And death before the husband wide

Opened the portals of the tomb

And a new diadem supplied.[25 - A play upon the word “venetz,” crown, which also signifies a nimbus or glory, and is the symbol of marriage from the fact of two gilt crowns being held over the heads of the bride and bridegroom during the ceremony.

The literal meaning of the passage is therefore: his earthly marriage was dissolved and a heavenly one was contracted.]

Just before dinner-time he slept,

By neighbouring families bewept,

By children and by faithful wife

With deeper woe than others’ grief.

He was an honest gentleman,

And where at last his bones repose

The epitaph on marble shows:

Demetrius Larine, sinful man,

Servant of God and brigadier,

Enjoyeth peaceful slumber here.

XXXVII

To his Penates now returned,

Vladimir Lenski visited

His neighbour’s lowly tomb and mourned

Above the ashes of the dead.

There long time sad at heart he stayed:

“Poor Yorick,” mournfully he said,

“How often in thine arms I lay;

How with thy medal I would play,

The Medal Otchakoff conferred![26 - The fortress of Otchakoff was taken by storm on the 18th December 1788 by a Russian army under Prince Potemkin.

Thirty thousand Turks are said to have perished during the assault and ensuing massacre.]

To me he would his Olga give,

Would whisper: shall I so long live?” —

And by a genuine sorrow stirred,

Lenski his pencil-case took out

And an elegiac poem wrote.

XXXVIII

Likewise an epitaph with tears

He writes upon his parents’ tomb,

And thus ancestral dust reveres.

Oh! on the fields of life how bloom

Harvests of souls unceasingly

By Providence’s dark decree!

They blossom, ripen and they fall

And others rise ephemeral!

Thus our light race grows up and lives,

A moment effervescing stirs,

Then seeks ancestral sepulchres,

The appointed hour arrives, arrives!

And our successors soon shall drive

Us from the world wherein we live.