The article explores the structure and semantic history of the lexical complex ‘khandra’ [ennui] in the works by Aleksandr Pushkin. In particular, the author engages in an in-depth analysis of the famous fragment from Eugene Onegin [Evgeny Onegin], which evokes the memory of the word amongst a very broad readership. The author refers to Vladimir Nabokov’s commentary and points out the incompletion and inaccuracies in his interpretation of the fragment. The main question that the article sets out to answer is this: why would Pushkin introduce a strange new term ‘khandra’ while his readers would be happier with more familiar ‘toska’ [melancholy] and ‘skuka’ [boredom], which seem to be perfectly synonymous with the term describing Onegin’s state of mind. Moreover, they were used by Pushkin in numerous contemporaneous texts. In search of a good answer the author considers all instances of Pushkin using the ‘khandra’ vocabulary, and discovers that ‘skuka’, for example, has an additional meaning of enlightened universalism, untypical for ‘khandra’, and ‘toska’ may connote artistic anxiety, whereas ‘khandra’ denotes complete exhaustion of creativity.