The Museum "Lopasnya-Zachatievskoye Estate" s Historical Lounge has finished its work. All meetings in this cycle were dedicated to the 200th anniversary of the beginning of the writing of the novel "Eugene Onegin".

It is hard to find a Russian person who has not heard of this work. It is thoroughly studied at school, passages are learnt by heart and quoted. The novel has been screened many times, operas have been based on it, and plays have been staged.

Pushkin defined his novel as "A collection of colourful chapters", a novel without beginning and end. The preface to the separate edition of the first chapter (1825) was the words:  "Here is the beginning of a great poem, which probably will not be finished...".

At the same time, each chapter of the novel can be regarded as an independent and integral work. That is how it was published - chapter by chapter. The publication of each chapter became a whole event:  "Everyone interprets them in his own way: some praise them, others scold them, and everyone reads them," wrote Pushkin's contemporary, the poet Baratynsky.

The creation of the individual chapters corresponded to certain periods of the author's life, and each of them can serve both as a stand-alone work and as a part of the whole novel. The long years of writing took place between 1823 and 1830, and the book was published as parts were written, the complete novel seeing the light of day as early as 1837. From this work you can, as a reliable source, learn virtually everything about that era, down to what people ate and how they dressed. It reflects the life and life of the Russian people, the atmosphere of that time.

Together with E.Y. Emelyanova, Senior Researcher of the State Historical Museum, the listeners immersed themselves in the atmosphere of Pushkin's beautiful creation, closely and in detail examined "the collection of colourful chapters, half-mocking, half-sad, common people, ideal".

We hope that the meetings in the Historical Drawing Room were very useful to our young listeners, schoolchildren and students of the city, in the study of the immortal novel.