Oxota: A Short Russian Novel

by Lyn Hejinian

Overview

Over 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780819578778
Publisher:	Wesleyan University Press
Publication date:	02/12/2019
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	292
File size:	3 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

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.

Lyn Hejinian (Berkeley, CA) is a feminist avant-garde poet and scholar. She is author of numerous books including, "Allegorical Moments: Call to the Everyday," and the bestseling, "My Life and My Life in the Nineties." She has been co-founder and co-editor of a number of publishing ventures and literary journals including "Nion Editions," "FLOOR," "Atelos," "Tuumba Press," and "Poetics Journal." She has had a long and distinguisged career and is John F. Hotchkiss Professor of English Emerita at the University of California, Berkeley.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"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

Editorial Reviews

★ 02/25/2019

The 12th collection from poet, essayist, and translator Hejinian (The Book of a Thousand Eyes) offers a “short Russian novel” modeled after Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. A nearly 4,000-line epic composed of 271 separate 14-line poems across eight books, Wesleyan’s reissue of Oxota (The Figures, 1991) includes Hejinian’s corrections, reinsertions, and revisions, providing a new opportunity for readers to experience what Marjorie Perloff called one of “the most ambitious long poems of the nineties” and “one of the very best.” The text itself reflects Hejinian’s stays and correspondence with poet Arkadii Dragomoshchenko in Leningrad at the end of the Cold War. Travel, recollected conversation, and scenes of domesticity punctuate a through line of nuclear anxiety: “My language is an X turning with the hands of two clocks on a face over the eye,” she writes. The result is a multifaceted portrait series in verse, one acutely aware of its historical moment, and the distinctions and connections between peoples “occupied with production, but these are our times of mute people.” Oxota shows us a poet whose person and politics waver between two worlds, one informing the other. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

"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

From the Publisher