Oxota: A Short Russian Novel

Product Description A verse novel composed of 14-line stanzas inspired by Pushkin's Evgeny OneginOver the course of nearly a decade (1983–1991), author Lyn Hejinian visited the USSR seven times, staying frequently with her friends the poet Arkadii Dragomoshchenko and his wife Zina in Leningrad. During this period, she embarked on translating into English several volumes of Dragomoshcheko's poetry, and the two poets began an extensive correspondence, exchanging hundreds of letters until Dragomoshchenko's death in 2012. During her fifth visit, in conversation with Dragomoshchenko and other poets, she decided to write a novel reflecting her experiences of literary and lived life in Leningrad and Moscow. Cognizant of a general sense that the Russian novel is stereotypically "long," she determined that hers would be "short." What resulted is an experimental novel whose structure (284 chapters, each 14 lines long) pays homage to Alexander Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, which is generally regarded to be the first Russian novel: a verse novel composed in 14-line stanzas. From time to time, various members of Dragomoshchenko's circle of friends offered suggestions for the novel, as readers will note. There's abundant narrative content, but anecdotes and events are presented in non-linear form, since they unfolded over extended periods of time and thus came to Hejinian's attention piecemeal. Oxota (which means variously "huntress," "hunt," and "desire" in Russian) is a novel in which contexts, rather than contents, are kept in the foreground. Allen Ginsberg, who himself visited the USSR, did not like Oxota. He said that it wasn't realistic; Hejinian thinks that it is. Review "Lyn Hejinian's spectral Leningrad recalls the opening of a world in the Cold War's wake―a world of artists and writers hunting for the intersection of words, lives, and things. Reading Oxota today, we find a rare, urgent instance of language able to span identities and ideologies, Russia and America."―Steven Lee, Associate Professor at the University of California Berkeley"It is a deep pleasure to reopen this book, a book of estrangement, of fragmentation, of scattered light and scattered speech, of bridges of sense cast over waters of foreignness. Oxota records a trusting encounter between two poetries across cultural difference unimaginable today."―Eugene Ostashevsky, editor of Arkadii Dragomoshchenko's Endarkenment About the Author LYN HEJINIAN is a poet, essayist, teacher, and translator. She is John F. Hotchkis Professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley.