Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin was born in Moscow in 1799. After traveling through the Caucasus and the Crimea, he was sent to Bessarabia, where he wrote The Captive of the Caucasus and The Fountain at Bakhchisaray, and began Eugene Onegin. His work took an increasingly serious turn during the last year of his southern exile, in Odessa. In 1824 he was transferred in north-west Russia, where he wrote his historical drama Boris Godunov, continued Eugene Onegin and finished The Gipsies. He was mortally wounded and died in January 1837.

Stanley Mitchell was born in 1932 in London. He read Modern Languages (French, German and Russian) at Oxford. He taught at various universities - Birmingham, Essex, Sussex, San Diego California, McGill, Montreal, Dar es Salaam Tanzania, Derby, University College London and Camberwell School of Art. Subjects included Russian literature and art, comparative literature, art history and cultural studies. He is currently Emeritus Professor of Aesthetics at the University of Derby and Honorary Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Art History at University College, London. He has translated Georg Lukacs and Walter Benjamin, written a variety of articles and reviews, and given numerous lectures and talks.

Tired of the glitter and glamour of St Petersburg society, aristocratic dandy Eugene Onegin retreats to the country estate he has recently inherited. With the arrival of the idealistic young poet Vladimir Lensky he begins an unlikely friendship, as the poet welcomes this urbane addition to his small social circle - and is happy to introduce Onegin to his fiancée, Olga, and her family. But when Olga's sister Tatiana becomes infatuated with Onegin, his cold rejection of her love brings about a tragedy that engulfs them all. Unfolding with dreamlike inevitability and dazzling energy, Pushkin's tragic poem is one of the great works of Russian literature.

In this new translation, Stanley Mitchell captures the cadences and lightness of the original poem, and discusses in his introduction Pushkin's life, writings and politics, as well as previous translations of the work. This edition also contains a chronology and suggested further reading.