Boston Ballet Presents Stunning 'Onegin'

“I recollect the ocean rumbling: / O how I envied then the waves— / Those rushing tides in tumult tumbling / To fall about her feet like slaves!” So begins one of the most memorable cantos of Alexander Pushkin’s 1830 novel in verse, “Eugene Onegin,” a work that seems almost destined to become dance. On Thursday night, the Boston Ballet presented a stunning rendition of “Onegin,” choreographer John Cranko’s 1965 adaptation of the story of the partly tragic, partly ironic love affair of the cynical aristocrat Onegin and the young noblewoman Tatiana. With exceptional performances by leads Petra Conti and Lasha Khozashvili, the Boston Ballet’s retelling of the story combined virtuosity and psychological depth.

In Pushkin’s novel, the bored St. Petersburg fop Onegin, visiting his poet friend Lensky in the Russian countryside, meets the latter’s beautiful fiancée, Olga. Olga’s bookish sister, Tatiana, falls desperately in love with Onegin, whom she invests with all the qualities of the heroes in her romantic novels. She writes him a passionate letter, which he coldly returns. Bored again, Onegin begins flirting with Olga at a country dance, a caprice that ends tragically when Lensky challenges Onegin to a duel and Onegin kills his friend. The novel resumes some years later with Onegin’s return to St. Petersburg, where he meets Tatiana, now married and an admired society woman. Instantly in love, Onegin writes Tatiana an anguished letter of appeal. Echoing Onegin’s refusal of her love years before, she returns the letter to him, choosing to remain with her husband despite her own enduring passion for Onegin.

Conti, who danced the role of Tatiana with precision and passion in the ballet’s premiere on Thursday night, established the story’s compelling emotional center, while Khozashvili as Onegin performed with superb athleticism. The couple’s two pas de deux—the first Tatiana’s dream of Onegin in Act One and the second Onegin’s desperate plea for Tatiana’s love in Act Three—were the highlights of the night. Conti seemed almost weightless in a series of breathtakingly graceful lifts in the dream sequence. She vividly portrayed Tatiana’s agonized love for Onegin in the final scene, culminating in a single agitated gesture in which she tenderly stroked his hair, then pointed him out the door. The contrast with Tatiana’s controlled pas de deux with her husband in the previous scene, a study in mannered elegance, made clear her feelings for the two men. Conti’s anguished, fluttering solo in Act Two as she sees Onegin dancing with her sister also provided a moment of poignant inwardness in the midst of the social whirl of the ball scene.

Ashley Ellis as Olga and Patrick Yocum as Lensky provided effective—if less emotionally engaging—performances. Ellis embodied both Olga’s grace and her vapidity. Yocum struck the perfect note as the hopelessly romantic poet, with whom Pushkin sometimes seems to sympathize and at other times seems to mock.

The ballet also reflected one of the central themes of Pushkin’s novel: the way in which art and life come to mirror each other in an endless reciprocal process of representation and construction. In “Onegin,” the dancers were in many scenes impersonating dancers. Moreover, in the Boston Ballet’s staging of the story, Tatiana sees Onegin for the first time as a reflection in her mirror, suggesting that her lover is in many ways a figment of her own imagination, nourished by novels. The ballet perfectly captured the blurring of the boundaries between reality and fiction, life and art, that characterizes Pushkin’s world.

The ballet also effectively described Pushkin’s historical context. Early nineteenth century Russia, still adapting to the Westernizing reforms of Peter the Great, was itself a performative society. Peter required the nobility to adopt Western European manners and dress, to speak French in society, and, in effect, to perform their everyday lives. Cranko’s ballet alludes to this dualism in Russian cultural life: His choreography includes both a traditional Russian folk dance on Tatiana’s family estate in the countryside and a waltz at her palace in St. Petersburg.

In one of the first scenes of Pushkin’s novel, Onegin attends a ballet in St. Petersburg. Pushkin writes of one of the dancers: “She spins and twists and stops to beat / Her rapid, dazzling, dancing feet.” Bored as ever, Onegin leaves the theater early. The Boston Ballet’s production of “Onegin” combined the dazzling athleticism Pushkin describes with an equally compelling emotional intensity. Even Eugene might have stayed to the end.

The Boston Ballet’s “Onegin” runs through March 6 at Boston Opera House.