How old was Tatiana during the main events of "Eugene Onegin"?

Question

Eugene Onegin is a novel in verse, by the great Russian poet Alexander Pushkin. The main characters are Eugene Onegin, a young and bored man, and Tatiana, an even younger girl who falls in love with Onegin.

Onegin is said to be in his twenties during the main events of the novel, but I don't actually remember how old Tatiana was.

Do we know Tatiana's age, either from the novel or other sources?

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This question was prompted by a guy on the Internet, who claimed that Onegin was 21, and Tatiana was 13, at the time she writes the letter. This is, of course, absurd.

Answer 1

Some parts of the text suggest she was thirteen ...

I found this article, which summarises an analysis by Russian sexologist A. Kotrovsky and columnist E. Tchernych and concludes that Tatiana was probably only thirteen:

Pushkin uses the word otrokovitsa. This hard-to-pronounce Russian word is usually translated as maiden but in Pushkin’s time otrok (male) and otrokovitsa (female) referred to children from 7 to 15 years old.

In Chapter Three of Eugene Onegin Tatiana asks her nyanya (nanny) if she was in love in her age, and gets the answer:

“What nonsense, Tanya! In those other

ages we’d never heard of love:

why, at the thought, my husband’s mother

had chased me to the world above.”

”How did you come to marry, nyanya?”

“I reckon, by God’s will. My Vanya

was younger still, but at that stage

I was just THIRTEEN YEARS OF AGE.”

Then, in famous Chapter Four, Pushkin says:

To listen to the same tedious objections,

Do battle with rooted convictions,

Such as never were and never have been

Even in a young girl WHO’S JUST THIRTEEN!

... but Pushkin said she was seventeen.

In a letter of 29 November 1824 to his fellow poet Pyotr Vyazemsky, Pushkin wrote:

the sense is not quite precise, there is more truth in the letter - the letter of a woman - and, on top of that, a seventeen-year-old one - and on top of that a woman in love.

_{(quote found on pp. 85-86 of Pushkin's Tatiana by Olga Peters Hasty)}

Answer 2

It was Tatyana's nanya, who said that she was forced to marry at 13 and her husband was even younger. Nanya was a serf.
Vladimir, Tatiana, and Olga grew up playing together, and Lenskiy constantly refers to that happy time in his life. All three have to be about the same age. There is little difference in age between Tatyana and Olga, so all three are between 17 and 19. There is no mention of a specific age for any of them. Still, this is 19th Century Russia and not 16th Century Verona - they are of proper marriageable age. If Lensky were any younger, his friendship with Onegin would be more of a teacher and protege, which is not likely to result in a duel.

Onegin was about 23 at the start of the poem and 26 at the end of it:

Onegin (once more I rehearse
His story) having killed his friend,
Without an aim on which to fix,
Reaching the age of twenty-six,

Prince Gremin and Tatyana have been married for about two years, as he said to Onegin at the ball:

"Wait, I'll introduce you.-
"Who is she? - My wife.-
"So you're married! I didn't know the wound!
How long had it been?" - About two years.-"

From the text we know that Tatyana was taken to Moscow to find a husband, about one year after the duel, and that's where she met Prince Gremin.