Eugene Ostashevsky
Eugene Ostashevsky is the author of, most recently, The Feeling Sonnets, a poetry collection about the effects of a non-native language on emotions, parenting, and identity.
Ravel Unravel
By Eugene OstashevskyEugene Ostashevsky is a poet and translator. He wrote Ravel Unravel for the Italian composer Lucia Ronchetti. The piece premiered on April 11, 2013 in Ancona, Italy, and has since been performed in Rome, Florence, Modena, and Torino by cellist Francesco Dillon and pianist Emanuele Torquati.
Facts of Winter
By Eugene OstashevskyEugene Ostashevsky is the author of, most recently, The Feeling Sonnets, a poetry collection about the effects of a non-native language on emotions, parenting, and identity.
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By Maik Yohansen, trans. Eugene OstashevskyMaik Yohansen (1895-1937), or else Mike Johansen, was a Ukrainian modernist poet and fiction writer from Kharkiv. Although his high school friends became Russian-language Ukrainian Futurists, he deliberately turned to Ukrainian for his working language. His carefully chiseled poetry displays a mastery of phonetic organization and paronomasia. His erudite and ironic novel, Dr. Leonardo’s Journey to Sloboda Switzerland with His Future Lover, the Beautiful Alcesta (1928), is a playful metaliterary deconstruction of narrative conventions. Translator of Edgar Allen Po and Shakespeare’s Othello, he collaborated with the avant-garde theater of Les Kurbas and co-wrote Oleksander Dovzhenko’s silent film Zvenyhora. Yohansen was arrested and shot in 1937, four days after Semenko, in a mass purge of Ukrainian-language writers.
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By Mykhail Semenko trans. Eugene OstashevskyMykhail Semenko (1892-1937) was the founder and main poet of Ukrainian-language Futurism. He issued two formally daring chapbooks shortly before World War I, and an iconoclastic manifesto threatening to burn the sacrosanct classic of nineteenth-century Ukrainian poetry, the Kobzar of Taras Shevchenko. After Ukraine was joined to Soviet Russia, he reinvented himself as a politically engaged, communist “Panfuturist,” running a sequence of avantgarde associations and journals throughout the 1920s until the forced demise of the avantgarde in the USSR. A deputy at the Soviet Writers Congress of 1934, he confessed to Isaac Babel of his “simply maniacal urge to take a piece of sh[it]… and throw it at the Congress presidium,” or at least so their conversation appears in a secret police report (see p. 169 here). Semenko was arrested and shot during the Great Purge with many other Ukrainian-language writers, whose great contributions to Ukrainian literature led to that generation being called the “Executed Renaissance.”
