Poetics of War

In a Library Chat conversation in Paris while Mitrov was on leave from the front, Ukrainian writer and journalist and Harriman Fellow Nikita Grigorov, and the Ukrainian poet Ihor Mitrov discuss how war has changed their writing styles.

Born in Donetsk in 1994, Nikita Grigorov moved to Kyiv in 2014. He majored in Eastern European Studies at Taras Shevchenko National University in Kyiv and attended Charles University in Prague. His work as a journalist has appeared in Ukrainian and foreign media as well as in literary anthologies. He is also the author of scripts for independent films and short plays. Together with Veniamin Belyavsky, he contributed to, translated, and edited an anthology of Ukrainian writers from Donbas, Порода (“Breed”).

Ihor Mitrov is a Ukrainian poet, archaeologist, literary critic, and a soldier in the 95th separate air assault brigade. He has written two collections of poems, which have won the Smoloskyp and Hranoslov poetry prizes. Mitrov’s poems are characterized by a dense combination of the tragic and the comic, of intertextuality and erudition, and of ironic distance. Ihor’s works have been translated into several European languages.