Dust Pa

Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, Russia's leading founder of Language poetry, in his new collection of essays fuses seemingly disparate elements of poetry, philosophy, journalism, and prose in an attempt to capture the workings of memory. At stake is not what he writes about--whether memory, Gertrude Stein, immortality, or a walk on Nevsky Prospect--but how he writes it. Formally, Dragomoshchenko never tires of digression, creating playful games of patience and anticipation for his reader. In so doing, he pushes story and closure into the background--arriving, finally, but not to a destination. Ultimately, Dragomoshchenko "carefully seeks out the dust of traces from the period of oblivion," which evidently lead to the oblivion of minds.

Arkadii Dragomoshchenko is a poet, prose writer, and translator. He was born in 1946 and studied philology and the theory of theatre in different universities. He has been a recipient of numerous Russian and international literary awards, including the Andrey Bely award for prose writing in 1978 and the Postmodern Culture electronic journal award in 1995. Several of his books of poetry (such as Description and Xenia) and prose (Phosphor and Under Suspicion) have been translated into various languages, including English. He himself is a noted