A verse novel composed of 14-line stanzas inspired by Pushkin's Evgeny Onegin. Between 1983 and 1991 author Lyn Hejinian visited the USSR seven times, often staying with her friends the poet Arkadii Dragomoshchenko and his wife Zina in Leningrad. She decided to write a novel reflecting her experiences of literary and lived life in Leningrad and Moscow, and cognizant of a general sense that the Russian novel is stereotypically "long, " she determined that hers would be "short." The result is an experimental novel whose structure (271 chapters, each 14 lines long) pays homage to Alexander Pushkin's Eugene Onegin (generally regarded to be the first Russian novel: a verse novel composed in 14-line stanzas). Oxota (which means variously "huntress, " "hunt, " and "desire" in Russian) is a novel in which contexts, rather than contents, are kept in the foreground" --Back cover.