About Evgeniya Onegina
Evgeniya Vladimirovna Onegina was born in Bryansk and that is her legal surname — a Pushkin tail, not a gag that she is “Tatyana.” She is not Tchaikovsky’s opera, not the male chanson act Yevgeny Onegin, not Evgenia Pasternak. At five her parents brought a piano home; she said yes, stood on a second-floor windowsill and pictured a crowd below. Music school meant two hours every day — the only days off were when her grandmother died. At six, at a recital, she spent five minutes shifting the stool under a piece called Instant that lasted under a minute; the hall laughed, and her mother said she had prepared longer than she played. At thirteen she went over to rock; her parents bought a guitar, a young teacher fed her Korol i Shut and Mumiy Troll; they would not let Mumiy Troll onto the exam, so she skipped it. At fifteen she started writing songs and loved picking apart DDT. Her mother thought a pianist was growing; at the lyceum she dropped music. First poem: ninth grade, Christmas Rain.
Then escapism by diploma: full-time philosophy at Herzen University in Petersburg, “five years of reading about being,” no conservatoire. Her parents pushed a PhD; she wanted adult Moscow, where there was a love — hence Flight Moscow–Petersburg. Out of the “terrible delusion” that music cannot pay, she sat in an office for ten years; the late single ofis comes from that. From 2011 a VK poetry page (the viral line: never fall in love with capital poets); from 2014 Moscow clubs as a poet. She was afraid to sing until years of guitar and voice caught up. First release under the fused evgeniyaonegina: February 2018, piano as-is. She never hires writers: a song arrives as one block. Motto: I have loved few, but strongly.
The hits travelled on their own: Song About Owls (2021), the 2023 EP Piter v tvoikh volosakh on Pravda Muzyka with the flight and a tango on Nevsky, po dokumentam, Curie — love as Marie Skłodowska’s radiation sickness, we will burn this summer. Kotomaniya and onstage cat stories; Like Renata with Zemfira, the grey-eyed king, Tsvetaeva, Margarita, Lyubovnitsa, Skeletons from 2017. To the uninitiated it is rock between Nochnye Snaipery and Gorod 312; to her people, sharp network poetry about choosing a path. A live band since 2022; acoustics with violinist Olga Gosteva. On Channel One’s Mechtalion she was so nervous she still will not rewatch it. Metro and parks: singing in the street is harder than on TV.
She lives in Moscow and takes the Sapsan to Petersburg; strangers still assume she is a Petersburger without hearing a note. In 2024 her mother greeted guests at a Bryansk Harat’s show — ages seven to eighty. The 2026 album Magiya lands at 16 Tons on 28 September and Douglas on 7 October; beside it Invitation to a Beheading, March, Mother’s Heart, See Paris, poshyol on na, a night bike through Moscow. A dream that is not about budget: to play for horses, cows or elephants. No husband or children in the file — an office she crawled out of, cats, and men in jackets who know the owl lyrics. Russian indie songwriting holds there: Bryansk on the papers, Petersburg in the hair, philosophy instead of a conservatoire.
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