Description

Stanislav Belsky

Translated by olga mikolaivna, Tatiana Retivov, and Anna Shershnyova

There Won’t Be a Culmination

ISBN: 9781956921571 (pbk.)

(February 1, 2026) (Preorder available) 

Stanislav Belsky’s poems are haunting, reminiscent of stepping into someone else’s nightmare—there is not an escape route. Unlike many Ukrainian poets post Russia’s invasion, Stanislav Belsky continues to write in Russian as a form of resistance against nationalistic sentiments, insisting on a multilingual Ukraine; Russian, after all, is his mother tongue. These poems are absurd and surrealist, ghostly even, born out of a cross-cultural milieu of the Soviet Union, Ukraine’s sovereignty, and capitalism’s sudden, but also expected appearance in the Eastern Bloc. This collection brings together his wartime and pre-war poems. Although his pre-war poems do not candidly name a war, nor the “small war”of 2014, the atmosphere of his poems is prescient and is aware of the state of things, while his wartime work incises a stuckness and the human experience of being in place, in a place, and of place during these illogical, suspended and isolated times.

In his poems both before and since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Stanislav Belsky is a master of minimalism, his short forms registering and bearing witness to the everyday. His poetry is “an insidiously expanding/conspiracy against the eternal,” a space for soberly encountering reality and “enumerating a list of the dead/like a rusted bathtub.” Tatiana Retivov, Anna Shershnyova, and olga mikolaivna carefully guide the Anglophone reader through the ever-present siren wailing and the “grinding of discourse,” re-presenting these texts in their stark precision.

—Venya Gushchin

In this collection, Stanislav Belsky has written poems that reflects the polyphonic day-to-day of wartime Kyiv. The language of air-alarm apps merge with neighborhood chats, news reports, and conversations on the street. olga mikolaivna has rendered them into stunning works in English, which capture Belsky’s unique poetic style and document the experience of war for English-language readers.

—Amelia Glaser

What happens to the calm observer in the face of ceaseless rocket fire? Stanislav Belsky has spent years writing poems that constitute “arguments with opponents of silence.” This book sees him facing opponents of a different order; the experiences of wartime test his commitments to solitude and unhurried contemplation. And still, even as these poems admit (and absorb) the cacophony of war, they continue to steadfastly slow time, compel concentration: the bombs fall, but “I stay put on the bench with books and glasses.” The crystalline, careful translations by Tatiana Retivov and Anna Shershnyova, and olga mikolaivna hew closely to Belsky’s precise and minimalist compositions.

—Ainsley Morse