Eugene Ostashevsky Biography

Eugene Ostashevsky, born in 1968 in Leningrad, USSR, immigrated with his family to New York in 1979. Lives in New York but makes long sojourns in Europe. Writes in American English destabilized by puns, sound play, and macaronicism. His second book of poetry, The Life and Opinions of DJ Spinoza, published by Ugly Duckling Presse in Brooklyn, examines the defects of natural and artificial languages; the critic Marjorie Perloff describes it as “zany, profound, hilarious, imaginative, and technically brilliant.” In Germany, his chapbook Enter Morris Imposternak, Pursued by Ironies was translated by Uljana Wolf as Auf tritt Morris Imposternak, verfolgt von Ironien for SuKuLTuR. As translator and scholar, Ostashevsky specializes in OBERIU, the 1920s-30s Leningrad avant-garde group led by Alexander Vvedensky and Daniil Kharms. He teaches in the Liberal Studies Program of New York University but was a DAAD Artists-in-Berlin fellow in 2013, when these poems were recorded.