'To Live and to Die a Stranger in a Foreign Land': Arkady Dragomoshchenko’s Poetics of Non-Identity

• In Event: Transnational and Translingual Poetics

Abstract

Arkady Dragomoshchenko, arguably the most important poet of his generation, always refused to be circumscribed by a specific national or ethnic context. A Ukrainian who spent most of his adult life in St Petersburg, Russia’s most cosmopolitan city, while writing in Russian, insisted that poetry is fundamentally homeless. He later became a truly global poet as some of his most important work came out of an intense collaboration with the American Language poet Lyn Hejinian and also bore visible traces of a close engagement with both Western critical theory as well as Eastern thought. The paper will examine the theoretical underpinnings of Dragomoshchenko’s transnational poetics while also establishing the place of Ukraine and the Ukrainian language in his work. It will be argued that while context is important, it is also important to read Dragomoshchenko’s work on its own terms, that is first and foremost as a work of language whosever language that may be as language, in his view, is that which can never be appropriated.

Author

• Eric Patton