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Eugene Ostashevsky

ostashevsky_by-dirk-skiba-2-fb (© Dirk Skiba) © Dirk Skiba

Author

born in 1968 in Leningrad, is a Russian-American poet who emigrated to the United States with his family in 1979. Growing up bilingual, he studied Comparative Literature at Stanford University. In 2005, he published his first poetry collection, Iterature, followed by The Life and Opinions of DJ Spinoza in 2008, as well as his main publications “The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi” and “The Feeling Sonnets”. In 2006, he edited and released OBERIU: An Anthology of Russian Absurdism, the first English-language anthology dedicated to these authors.

Ostashevsky translates from Russian—including works by Maria Stepanova, Yevgenia Belorusets, Daniil Kharms, Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, Alexander Vvedensky, and Dmitry Golynko—as well from Ukrainian, such as the works of Mykhail Semenko. In 2014, he was a fellow of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program. Alongside his own creative work, Eugene Ostashevsky teaches literature at New York University and, in 2016, served as the first Russian-American Siegfried Unseld Visiting Professor at Humboldt University in Berlin.

Work

  • Iterature. Ugly Duckling Presse, New York 2005.
  • The Life and Opinions of DJ Spinoza. Ugly Duckling Presse, New York 2008.
  • Enter Morris Imposternak, Pursued by Ironies (Auf tritt Morris Imposternak, verfolgt von Ironien). Translated by Uljana Wolf. SuKuLTuR, Berlin 2010.
  • The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi. New York Review of Books, New York 2017.
  • Der Pirat, der von Pi den Wert nicht kennt. Translated into German by Uljana Wolf and Monika Rinck. KookBooks, Berlin 2017.
  • The Feeling Sonnets. Carcanet, Manchester, 2022. New York Review of Books, New York, 2022.
  • Alphabet Soup: The Translingual Sayings of Emma and Eva, as Recorded by their Father. Tamizdat Project, New York, 2026. Rab-Rab Press, Helsinki, 2026.

As Editor and Translator:

  • OBERIU: An Anthology of Russian Absurdism. Northwestern UP, Evanston 2006.
  • Alexander Vvedensky: An Invitation for Me to Think. New York Review of Books, New York 2013.
  • The Fire Horse: Children’s Poems by Vladimir Mayakovsky, Osip Mandelstam, and Daniil Kharms. New York Review of Books, New York 2017.

Prizes

  • In 2019, his poetry collection “The Pirate Who Doesn’t Know the Value of Pi”, translated by Monika Rinck and Uljana Wolf, was awarded the City of Münster Prize for International Poetry.
  • 2020 Work Grant for Non-German-Language Literature
  • Dorothea von Schlegel Artist-in-Residence with EXC 2020 Temporal Communities

Events

Ostashevsky & Rasuleva: ALPHABET LOSTLINGUAL
Sat, 11. Jul // 18:00, Maschinenhaus (Kulturbrauerei) entrance: Knaackstraße 97, 10435 Berlin