Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, as is well known, is not a poem but a novel in verse. Tchaikovsky, too, gave his Onegin an unusual genre definition: not an “opera” but “lyrical scenes”. From an “encyclopaedia of Russian life” the composer selected the principal line of the plot, the one that was closest to himself as a lyrical artist. Though naming only one character in the title, Tchaikovsky subsequently went on to reveal the souls of three people to the audience: Tatiana (Act I), Lensky (Act II) and Onegin (Act III). In all three characters Tchaikovsky saw something of a reflection of his own self, and even Tatiana’s famous letter scene rhymes with an episode lifted from the life of the composer, who wrote the scene plan of the emergent opera in one night.