While each of Vikram Seth's books is a one-off creation so to speak, The Golden Gate (1986) is uniquely so. Its rise to fame and the subsequent reputation rests largely on the fact that it is written entirely in sonnets. The novel is made up of a sequence of nearly six hundred sonnets in iambic tetrameter over thirteen chapters, with the Acknowledgements, Dedication and a charming Contents list, all in perfect octosyllabic sonnets. A few aspects of the novel's genesis and reception need to be discussed before moving on to an analysis of the work.

Literary Antecedents

The Golden Gate was inspired, as is common knowledge, by Charles Johnston's English translation of the Russian masterpiece Eugene Onegin written in the early 19th century by Pushkin. Pushkin was influenced by Byron and Goethe, and 18th century satirical verse. He attempted to create in this verse novel of eight books a sonnet form that could carry, in the spoken Russian idiom, an ironic comment on contemporary Russian aristocratic society. Eugene Onegin, a feckless fop, is the hero of Pushkin's novel that narrates with pungent and caustic wit the vicissitudes of his career in life and love, satirizing at the same time the aristocratic Russian milieu of the period. Seth was so entranced with two different translations of the novel (that he had picked up, incidentally, intending to study the differences between the translations, wondering if the voice of the poet would sound similar in both) that he found himself devouring stanza after stanza, transported into the world of the novel (Leslie 1986: 5).