Arkadii Dragomoshchenko

Arkadii Dragomoshchenko (1946–2012) was a poet, essayist, and translator who was born in Potsdam, Germany in 1946 and grew up in Vinnitsa, Ukraine. He lived and worked in St. Petersburg (formerly Leningrad), Russia since 1969. His writing earned him a reputation as the representative figure of Language poetry in Russia.

Dragomoshchenko’s poetry was first introduced to American audiences in the volumes Description and Xenia, translated by Lyn Hejinian and published by Sun & Moon Press in the 1990s. He also authored Chinese Sun, published in 2005 by Ugly Duckling Presse, and the prose collection Dust (Dalkey Archive Press, 2005).

C.D. Wright has said of his work, “This is poetry. Immodest. Magisterial. More or less impenetrable. The relation of language is potential but not improvisational.” About Dust, Lyn Hejinian wrote, “Full of vitality as well as profundity, and resonating with something I can only term friendship, these meditations/memoirs belong to the great tradition of metaphysical prose, alongside the works of Nietzsche, Shklovsky, Kierkegaard, and Toufic.”