Two chapters from Lyn Heijnians Oxota: A Short Russian Novel

Chapter Five

We are occupied with production, but these are our times of
      mute people
A dim housing block the substance of igloo
A sleep somewhere between crumbling and construction
A thing called sleep
A dream in which Stalin enters it
People are told to renovate the means by which they satisfy
       their material wants and that's not art
All light ruins white
Whom then to love
What
How could one love one's life if it were new
The famous emigre is a bourgeois lyricist
Why not, said Lydia Yakvlevna
To the post office, then the apothecary
If there can be socialist realism than there can surely be
      bourgeois lyricism




Chapter Thirty-Nine

Neither art nor life is opposite
Opposite is a stupid government in power to misunderstand
The grandmother prided herself on her ability to count
        backward as fast and far as forward
Another woman further up the stairs thought perhaps she
       didn't understand something but actually she didn't
        believe in something
She wants, she said, to prepare for a social reality, one that
       politics couldn't predict, that kindness could guarantee
The vehement grandmother was preparing her place in it
But what of the intolerable pathos of the colonol
The washtub slipped
Momentous shift
This was crime in life now substantiated by a crime in art
A nationalist was going by a guise -- the same quivering
The washtub idle lightened sped
Items rise, ripen, and must fall
The washtub overtook the colonel