Tatyana's dream as a foreshadowing of Onegin's death

Object of the article: Tatyana's dream in the novel in verse by A. S. Pushkin "Eugene Onegin" (EO, V, XI-XXI). Subject of the article: the poetics of Tatyana’s dream. Purpose of research: discovering the role of the dream in the compositional structure of the novel. Results: the author argues that the final scene of Tatyana’s dream, in which Onegin kills Lensky with a knife, is, in fact, a covert foreshadowing of the symbolic death of Onegin himself at the end of the novel (EO, 8, XLVIII, 1-10). The motif of the protagonist's death is concealed in the letter-sound pattern of the text that contains an anagram of the word knife (nozh). Tense repetition of sounds н-ж-ш (n-zh-sh) throughout the novel creates a connection between the erotic motif in the stanzas devoted to praising women's "legs" (nozhki) and the motif of death from a "knife" (nozh) strike. An echo of the motif of women's "legs" (nozhki) in Tatyana's prenuptial dream ("To v hrupkom snege s nozhki miloj / Uvjaznet mokryj bashmachok") acoustically foreshadows the appearance of a long "knife" (nozh), which has a double meaning: as a murder weapon and a phallic symbol. In the final scene of the novel, the motif of legs [noshki] and the motif of the knife [nosh] are unexpectedly combined in a sound pun “no shpor nezapnyj zvon razdalsja” (8, XLVIII) in which the knife [nosh] is phonetically connected with the spur [no-shpor] that is a metonymic replacement of the foot. Field of application: literary criticism, Pushkin studies, teaching Russian literature of the 19th century. Conclusion: Tatyana's dream contains not only an obvious foreshadowing of the real death of Lensky in a duel, which has been repeatedly mentioned in Pushkin studies, but also a covert foreshadowing of Onegin's symbolic death. The possibility of this alternative semantic interpretation of the dream is based on the sound pattern of the text (repetitions, anagram).