The curtain rises on John Cranko’s Onegin to reveal a scrim with the initials " E.O. " (those of our hero) surrounded by a laurel wreath and the motto " Quand je n’ai pas honneur, il n’existe plus d’honneur " ( " I will have no honor only when honor no longer exists " ). At Boston Ballet there’s honor all around in what follows. With its party/salon scenes, its yearning soliloquies, and its duel at dawn, Aleksandr Pushkin’s novel-in-verse, Yevgeny Onegin, is perfect ballet material, and Cranko (who died in 1973, just 45, in a plane that was returning from an American tour) turned it into a work that can keep company with The Sleeping Beauty and Swan Lake. He even found a way to

choreograph what’s perhaps the most famous letter in all of literature, the one Tatyana Larina writes to the title character. Cranko created Onegin for his Stuttgart Ballet in 1965 (he revised it in 1967); Boston Ballet gave the work its American premiere in 1994, but we haven’t seen it here since 1997. I could watch it every year.

Pushkin’s novel tightropes between irony and innocence as its Pushkin stand-in narrator tries to gauge the distance (if any) between himself and his bored-aristocrat hero. Called to the country by his uncle’s illness, Onegin leaves his weary social rounds in St. Petersburg, arriving to find the uncle dead. He strikes up a friendship with the poet Vladimir Lensky; Lensky introduces Onegin to his fiancée, Olga Larina, and Olga’s bookworm older sister, Tatyana, promptly falls for the dashing newcomer. Tatyana writes her letter; Onegin gently but firmly returns it. Dragged by Lensky to Tatyana’s name-day celebration, an annoyed Onegin amuses himself by flirting with Olga; a jealous Lensky leaves the party, sends a challenge, and is shot dead in the ensuing duel. Onegin departs from the district; some years later, when he returns to St. Petersburg, he finds his friend Prince N. married . . . to Tatyana. Now it’s his turn to fall madly in love — but does she still love him?

Cranko dispensed with the Pushkin doppelgänger — he could hardly have done otherwise — and streamlined the action into six scenes: Onegin’s introduction to the Larin family; Tatyana’s letter and a dream in which she dances with Onegin; the Larin party where Onegin rejects Tatyana, dances with Olga, and enrages Lensky; the duel; Onegin’s return to St. Petersburg and reacquaintance with Tatyana; Onegin’s final visit to her house. Cranko’s first thought was to use music from Tchaikovsky’s opera Yevgeny Onegin, but Covent Garden and the Stuttgart Ballet both recoiled at the thought of turning an opera into a ballet. So his associate Karl-Heinz Stolze wove a score out of " minor " Tchaikovsky. The act-one folk number is set to the " Russian Dance " from the opera Vakula the Blacksmith (a/k/a The Slippers and The Caprices of Oksana); the party pieces of acts two and three — three waltzes (including a 5/8 number!), three polkas, a mazurka, and a polonaise — are drawn mostly from little-known piano works. The third-act pas de deux for Tatyana and her husband (here called Prince Gremin) is a pleasant bit of salon writing that improves in Stolze’s arrangement. The concluding pas de deux for Tatyana and Onegin is slyly drawn from Francesca da Rimini, Tchaikovsky’s tone poem celebrating the lady from Canto V of Dante’s Inferno who did betray her husband.

Tatyana is made of sterner stuff, as the scrim motto attests — those may be his initials ( " Yevgeny " begins with an " E " in Cyrillic), but it’s her honor that’s at stake in the final scene. Everywhere Onegin’s big ideas are reflected in little details. The Larin house, with its weatherbeaten brown shingles and its gray mansard roof, conveys (endearingly) the drabness of country life that Tatyana seeks to escape through books; it’s surrounded —and counterpointed — by birch trees (a traditional symbol of fidelity). Olga’s high-waisted pale-walnut dress echoes the house; the pale pink of Tatyana’s links her with the distant cherry orchard. Tatyana’s ballroom-sized bedroom (it dwarfs her curtained bed and eight-foot-tall pier glass) reflects the size of her dreams, but apart from the gorgeous lace hangings, it’s empty space — who could fill such hopes? The Larin drawing room is a faded crimson, with French provincial chairs and sofas, cameos on the walls, and hanging baskets of flowers; Prince Gremin’s Petersburg palace has chandeliers instead of flower baskets, and the chairs are magnificently appointed in Mariinsky blue and gold and white, but it’s a colder ambiance. In the duel scene (an eerie premonition of Pushkin’s own death, in 1837, after he challenged a man who had flirted with his wife), the birches become wintry, and the confrontation itself takes place at a nightmarish distance — we experience it through the horrified Olga and Tatyana.

The solos and pas de deux are equally telling. Onegin’s act-one soliloquy before Tatyana is a closed circle, his explanation that he’s wrapped up in himself. Lensky in his act-two soliloquy, just before the duel, is more of the world as he weighs what is against what might have been (and the trees behind him look frozen in eternal youth), but he’s still dancing alone and not with Olga. Their act-one pas de deux is all horizontal, but it bounds thoughtlessly outward; the pas de deux Tatyana and Onegin dance in her dream (after he’s stepped " through " the mirror into her bedroom, a touch that reflects her narcissism as well as his) is mostly vertical, as he flings her to the heights of heavenly passion; it climaxes in a candlestick lift that makes her look like the St. Petersburg Admiralty spire that Pushkin immortalized in The Bronze Horseman. The act-three pas de deux for Tatyana and Gremin bespeaks a mature, caring relationship, but without ecstasy, whereas the pas de deux for Tatyana and Onegin that follows is nothing but ecstasy. These are chilling choices: cynical isolation, naive idealism, dream love, affection without passion, passion without honor.

Most of the dancing that Boston Ballet put on stage last weekend rose to the challenge of Pushkin’s genius. (The program booklet, however, did not: its omission of the synopsis sent scores of audience members to the information table for help.) Larissa Ponomarenko’s Tatyana is actually more complex, more layered, more detailed than the character Pushkin created. If you’re sitting up close (and $82 to see this dancer up close is not too much), you can read an entire performance in her face, in the conflicts it registers. If you’re farther back, it’s written in her body language: the way her awkward adolescent blooms for her dream Onegin; the way she carries on for the guests in her act-two solo after Onegin has torn up her letter; the way she compresses the story of her marriage to Gremin into their pas de deux, respect and duty growing into a kind of love. She never indulges in speed at the expense of clarity: you can appreciate every step. If Pushkin could have seen this performance, he would have written an even better poem.

Sabine Chaland’s meltingly shy, aristocratic Tatyana conjures a Disney heroine — Snow White? — or perhaps Geraldine Chaplin in Doctor Zhivago. She’s more narrowly focused than Ponomarenko and not quite as limpid in her steps; in her act-two party solo, she’s thinking only of Onegin, and in her two duets with him, she throws herself into his arms with less reserve. Adriana Suárez was the most bookwormish of the opening-weekend Tatyanas but also the most grounded when she met her Onegin. Her dream pas deux is about giving love as well as receiving it; her act two solo is a visible stream of conflicted emotions, and her feelings for Gremin and Onegin in act three move intriguingly close to each other. This Tatyana is worth seeing a second time — and a third.

Ponomarenko’s Onegin, Gaël Lambiotte, is part David Bowie, part Jean-Pierre Léaud of Truffaut fame, part Anthony Andrews of Brideshead Revisited, an unusual concept — little boy who can’t quite grow up — that he carries out impeccably. Chaland’s, Yury Yanowsky, comes out like Laurence Olivier as Heathcliff, and a dark anger transpires at the act-two party (where Lambiotte is palpably bored stiff, Yanowsky seems frustrated that nobody’s fussing over him), but he needs to develop a clearer identity in the first scene, where he looks awkwardly smitten with Tatyana. Simon Ball is the most open of the three Onegins, a kind of Fitzwilliam Darcy to Suárez’s Elizabeth Bennet, but his solo suggests he can’t break out of being one of the boys. At Tatyana’s party, this Onegin’s jealousy focuses on Lensky: he’s miffed that his friend has a girl, yet when he dances with Olga, it’s a kind of coming out — he’s enjoying himself. In the third act he conjures Omar Sharif in Doctor Zhivago. One problem with these three Onegins: they dissolve melodramatically after the duel, and in act three they’re all generic adolescent passion — as if they’d been coached in stereotype rather than encouraged to be distinctive.

The Olga-Lensky pairings last weekend were more problematic. Paul Thrussell and Pollyana Ribeiro danced together in ’94 and ’97 and were scheduled to do so opening night, but for no announced reason (he’s not injured) Thrussell was withdrawn in favor of new company soloist Alexander Ritter. The always radiant Ribeiro looked blind-date uncomfortable (sunlight returned when she got to dance with Lambiotte in act two), and Ritter, apart from the partnering problems, was too callow by half. Friday he looked better with Sarah Lamb (think of a blond Claudette Colbert): her flightier and more temptable Olga gave his jealousy credence, and when he slapped Yanowsky and threw down his glove, Yanowsky incinerated. On Saturday Romi Beppu and Jared Redick made an effective couple but lacked the detail that experience makes possible. Redick as well as Ritter seems the victim of generic coaching; balletgoers who remember the distinctive Lenskys of Thrussell, Yanowsky, Patrick Armand, and Rob Wallace will want more.

Indeed, when it was announced opening night that Thrussell would not be dancing, an audible sigh of disappointment rose from the audience. Casting in a ballet company is always a complex matter, and a company does need to blood its young dancers. On the other hand, to have artistry on the order of Thrussell and Jennifer Gelfand (whose Cowgirl in Rodeo was one of the company’s two or three most devastating performances last season) sitting on the sidelines seems a criminal waste of resources. (If instead of proposing to give hundreds of millions to the Red Sox the mayor’s office could see its way to subsizing a month of Onegins by Boston’s international-class ballet company, everybody could dance and the city would be immeasurably enriched.)

Viktor Plotnikov seemed a little stranded as Gremin on opening night; he’ll be better by the time you see him. (That was, by the way, Plotnikov on the cover of last week’s " 8 Days " section and not Gaël Lambiotte, as some idiot — me, actually — wrote.) Rob Moore and Michael Johnson both look less like an aristocrat who’s bought a trophy wife and more like a real rival to Onegin. In the role of Madame Larina, former company principal Dierdre Miles Burger is a girlish treat (check the nostalgic, wistful way she holds up that party dress); in the role of the Nurse, former Phoenix dance critic Janine Parker is as lucid an actor as she was a writer. The corps, as always, is particular, not generic, and those two diagonal runs (with the ladies doing split jetés) climax in a way that’s sexual as well as emotional. Under Jonathan McPhee, the Boston Ballet Orchestra outdoes the Stuttgart Staatsorchester in its recording of Onegin; some organization (the FleetBoston Celebrity Series’s " Boston Marquee " ?) could do us a huge favor by sponsoring a Tchaikovsky concert by this orchestra.