Onegin, trapped in a thoughtlessly repetitive decadent lifestyle, gradually becomes unbearably wearied of it. There he will sleep until the afternoon, and when he rises it will be to a day already fully planned out with same revels as the night before. When we return to Onegin, we find him making his sleepy way back to his house as the morning dawns and the city awakens. Pushkin then digresses from Onegin's story to express his own ambivalence towards the youthful exuberance of balls and launches into an impassioned encomium to the beautiful feet of a girl he loved. There Onegin rests a moment and scrupulously prepares his toilette before rushing on a carriage to a ball, where the Petersburg elite dance to a mazurka. The dancers and their art Pushkin describes with great admiration, but almost at first glance Onegin yawns, dismisses it all as boring, and thence leaves for home. Pushkin challenges the reader to keep up with Onegin's furious pace as he dashes through the night on a sleigh to a sumptuous dinner and then just as quickly off to the sparkling world of the ballet.

An eloquent conversationalist with a forte for analyzing and interpreting others, Onegin effortlessly succeeds in wooing ladies in the high-class world of St. Pushkin goes on to introduce 'the hero of my current tale' as a young aristocratic man skilled in learning and, more importantly, dexterous in charm (I.2). The novel opens with a complaint from Eugene Onegin, the titular character himself, against the boredom of caring for his dying uncle.

Eugene onegin by alexander pushkin