John Fuller's 1980 'The Illusionists' and Jon Stallworthy's 1987 'The Nutcracker' used this stanza form, and Vikram Seth's 1986 novel The Golden Gate is written wholly in Onegin stanzas. Nevertheless, the Onegin stanza, being easily recognisable, is strongly identified as belonging to its creator, and its use in œuvres of any kind implicitly triggers a reading of the particular text against the backdrop of Pushkin's imagery and worldview. In Russian poetry following Pushkin, the form has been utilized by authors as diverse as Mikhail Lermontov, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Jurgis Baltrušaitis and Valery Pereleshin, in genres ranging from one-stanza lyrical piece to voluminous autobiography. Because the second quatrain (lines 5-8) consists of two independent couplets, the poet may introduce a strong thematic break after line 6, which is not feasible in Petrarchan or Shakespearian sonnets.

Like the Shakespearean sonnet, the Onegin stanza may be divided into three quatrains and a closing couplet (normally without stanza breaks or indentations), and it has a total of seven rhymes, rather than the four or five rhymes of the Petrarchan sonnet.

Pushkin eugene onegin