Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (1825–1832) is a whole novel written in one repeated 14-line stanza — the Onegin stanza, or Pushkin sonnet, invented for it. Its rhyme is a fixed program: AbAbCCddEffEgg, capitals feminine, lowercase masculine, every line iambic tetrameter. This panel is runnable: it validates a 14-symbol scheme against that exact law, counts the 6 feminine / 8 masculine rhymes, and lays out the meter. THE NOVEL as a computable form.
source A. S. Pushkin, Eugene Onegin (1825–1832), a novel in verse — the Onegin stanza built for it. Room: THE NOVEL. It complements the-markov-property (the same Onegin — its statistics beside its form). Rendered, not quoted.
Aleksandr Pushkin composed Eugene Onegin over 1823–1831 (published serially 1825–1832, complete in 1833) not as prose but as verse — a full novel carried in a single repeated stanza he designed for the task. Nearly the entire book (a few passages aside) is built from it.
The form is now called the Onegin stanza or the Pushkin sonnet: 14 lines, like a sonnet, but wired to its own fixed rhyme program rather than the Shakespearean or Petrarchan one. The stanza is the engine; the novel is what runs on it.
Fourteen symbols, five blocks, one order. Capitals = feminine rhyme (stress on the next-to-last syllable), lowercase = masculine (stress on the last).
| block | symbols | shape |
|---|
Read as AbAb (cross-rhymed quatrain) · CC (couplet) · dd (couplet) · EffE (enclosed quatrain) · gg (closing couplet). Change one letter and it is no longer the Onegin stanza.
Count the case of the 14 symbols. Feminine (uppercase, penultimate stress): A A C C E E = 6. Masculine (lowercase, final stress): b b d d f f g g = 8. Sum 6 + 8 = 14.
The pattern always opens on a feminine rhyme and closes on a masculine couplet — a built-in rise-and-snap that the meter reinforces below.
Every line runs iambic tetrameter: four iambs, so 8 positions, each a weak–STRONG pair.
weak → STRONG, four times: da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM. A feminine rhyme hangs one unstressed syllable past the 8th position; a masculine rhyme ends exactly on it.
The stanza outlived its novel. Vladimir Nabokov wrote The University Poem (1927) in a reversed Onegin stanza and later translated Eugene Onegin with a vast commentary that kept the form in view. Vikram Seth wrote an entire novel, The Golden Gate (1986), entirely in Onegin stanzas — 590 of them.
Others followed (Jon Stallworthy, Diana Burgin’s Onegin-form verse). A single fixed 14-line program, portable across languages and centuries — the mark of a real form, not a one-off.
Feed a rhyme scheme as letters (uppercase = feminine, lowercase = masculine). The engine checks it against the Onegin law case-sensitively, block by block, and counts the genders.
Type freely — the validator responds live. Only AbAbCCddEffEgg exactly is the Onegin stanza.
Symbol-by-symbol against the law — a red cell is where the input diverges from AbAbCCddEffEgg:
| i | your scheme | Onegin law | match |
|---|
Gender count: feminine — · masculine — · length —
Meter check: iambic tetrameter has — positions, pattern —.
| candidate | form | engine | should be | ok |
|---|
The witness re-runs five known forms every render. Onegin accepts; the two other sonnets, the limerick, and the scrambled scheme are all rejected — and each rejection is checked against what it should be.
The line count coincides; the program does not. Same length is not same form — the validator to the left rejects every look-alike.
"A sonnet is a sonnet — call it Shakespearean." Cut. Shakespearean is ABABCDCDEFEFGG; Onegin is AbAbCCddEffEgg. Different couplet placement, different rhyme order.
"The stanza is just three quatrains and a couplet." Cut. It is a cross quatrain, two couplets, an enclosed quatrain, then a couplet — AbAb / CC / dd / EffE / gg.
"Case does not matter, only the letters." Cut. Capitals mark feminine rhymes and lowercase masculine; the count is fixed at 6 vs 8. Same letters in the wrong case or wrong order is a different stanza.
The red move: strip the exact-pattern rule from the validator so it accepts any 14-symbol scheme — length only. Non-Onegin stanzas (Shakespearean, Petrarchan, the scrambled scheme) start passing.
Drop the pattern check and the witness (in DATA OUT) re-tests the known wrong schemes: the 14-symbol impostors now wrongly accept, the witness disagrees with what they should be, and it turns red. The attack is real and it is caught.