Max Rosochinsky (L&G Artistic Fellowship, Mar – Jul ‘26) will present his project on:

The Poetics of Ruins: Fragmentation and Decomposition in Ukrainian War Poetry

09 July 2026 (Thursday), 16:30 h.

Moderated by: Lyudmila Klasanova

Abstract: This presentation examines urban ruination in contemporary Ukrainian war poetry, where destroyed spaces and the lost ways of life they signify remain freshly present, but not merely as objects of memory. Such poems, I argue, do not record ruined cities the way a photograph does, as evidence of destruction that has already taken place. They rework that destruction in the material of poetic language: proper names decompose syllable by syllable, the letters of the Ukrainian alphabet are imagined as bodies maimed by war, and poetic form undergoes its own temporary decomposition. The poem witnesses by enacting. Its ruin is real but bounded: the reader enters it, undergoes it, and leaves it. Ukrainian war poetry belongs to a recurring history of catastrophe pressing upon language, while resisting the grammar that cools an invasion into an occurrence and lets a city be destroyed with no one destroying it.