n Eugene Onegin, Pushkin often uses similar themes and refers to the same romantic descriptions and national folklore that Zhukovsky portrays in his numerous writings and especially in Svetlana. Furthermore, since Zhukovsky was the first to give intimate, romantic poetry a philosophical, deep sense, Pushkin valued him as an eminent and a remarkable poet. In Eugene Onegin, Pushkin makes many direct allusions to Zhukovsky’s ballad Svetlana to exhibit the significance of the ballad. In epigraph to Chapter V he writes, “Know not those fearsome dreams, / O my Svetlana!” The allusion was intended to acknowledge Zhukovsky's “varied and powerful”(Semenko, [3]) style that Pushkin inherited from his predecessor and was able to diffuse into many of his own poems. At the time when Zhukovsky was a tutor to future Tsar Alexander II, Pushkin wrote "The captivating sweetness of his verse / The centuries' enviable distance will traverse" (Lindstrom, 87), thus, showing deep respect for Zhukovsky's talents.The ballad Svetlana was Zhukovsky’s third free adaptation of Lenore, writing of a German poet Burger. Zhukovsky attempted to bring poetry closer to Russian tradition by centering the ballad Svetlana on the essential parts of Russian folklore, such as dreams and fortune telling. Svetlana soon seized the popularity of the Russian people due to Zhukovsky's vivid imagination and the thorough description of the traditional Russian themes. Zhukovsky "…was attracted chiefly by poems of melancholic mood and universal sorrow, so dear to the hearts of … Romanticists of Germany" (Slonim, 56). Svetlana was not an exception and Pushkin followed Zhukovsky's steps in creating Eugene Onegin. Svetlana takes place on the Eve of Epiphany, when girls traditionally get involved in fortune telling. She is expecting her beloved to return home when a woman persuades her to take part in the rites. She dreams of seeing...
