But Manon has all those showy pas de deux, I hear you cry – can Onegin match those? It has its pas de deux but they compare in neither number nor showiness, I'll admit – and that's the point. Manon ...

The two have many similarities, from their basis in novels that became operas (though Prévost's Manon Lescaut antedates Pushkin's verse Eugene Onegin by a century), through their patched-together ...