Strange borders, double vision : Oxota as a work of trans-iteration

Where does Oxota: A Short Russian Novel begin? Toward the end of 1984, Lyn Hejinian received a copy of A Hunter's Sketches by post from Leningrad. It was the year before Mikhael Gorbachev's election as General Secretary of the Soviet Union Communist Party in March 1985, to be followed soon after by the Russian government's twin advocacy of glasnost and perestroika. It was one year before the first Superpowers Summit in Moscow, at which Mikhael Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan met to discuss international military and economic issues including the nuclear arms 'race,' the ongoing conflict in Afghanistan, and the technical and rhetorical dismantling of the Cold War. It was two years after Lyn Hejinian and poet Barrett Watten published the first edition of Poetics Journal in hand-printed foolscap format, stapled rather than bound; and a year after Hejinian's first trip to Leningrad in May 1983. "Improvisation begins at the moment when something has just happened," writes Hejinian, "which is to say, it doesn't begin at the beginning. Nonetheless, it is always involved with the process of beginning"”that is, of setting things in motion."