Opera in three acts on a libretto by Konstantin Shilovsky, inspired by the verse novel Eugene Onegin by Alexander Sergheevici Pushkin Eugene Onegin (1877-1878) is the first of the three operas written by Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky based on texts of Alexander Pushkin, the writer whose work marks the beginning of modern Russian literature and the switch from the Romantic perception of the present to a realistic depiction of ...