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TITLE DEED HOW DID CELEBRATED BOOKS GET THEIR NAMES? Alexander Pushkin's Eugene Onegin

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From: The Sunday Telegraph London
Date: 20051023
Author:GARY DEXTER

ONEGIN IS to Onega as Pechorin is to Pechora. The link is rivers. Alexander Pushkin named his hero after the freezing northern Russian River Onega; in homage to Pushkin, Lermontov, in A Hero of Our Time, named his main character after the even more freezing and even more northerly River Pechora. Both rivers yielded rather odd-sounding surnames, and it is likely that Pushkin was deliberately trying to foster the idea of an outsider, a misfit. In this he was successful: Onegin was the progenitor of the "superfluous man'', who through Lermontov and Turgenev became a mainstay of the Russian ...

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