Open Access

Alexandra Popovičová

• Der vorliegende Aufsatz versteht sich als Versuch, den Lexikon-Roman von Okopenko vorzustellen und auf die innovatorischen Züge hinsichtlich seiner Form hinzuweisen.
• The article introduces the novel "Lexikon-Roman" by the Ukrainian-Austrian avant-garde writer Andreas Okopenko (1930–2010). With his lexicon novel, Andreas Okopenko presented a literary experiment almost 50 years ago that remains unique to this day. The main storyline follows the chemical merchant J. on his Danube ship trip to an exporter meeting, with the narrative concentrating only peripherally on the happenings during the trip. Instead, the protagonist's thoughts are being externalized. Both the stations on the ship's route and in the mental world of the protagonist serve as nodes that refer to further entries in the lexicon. This creates countless opportunities for the reader to follow different paths or even to skip the main storyline entirely and immerse only in the metanarration. The interweaving of the text, organized by individual references, is typical of the digital hypertext developed two decades later, which is why Okopenko is recognized as the "pioneer of hypertext" to the present day.