This lecture will present an overview of ruin philosophy from Burke and Diderot to Simmel and Benjamin, with particular emphasis on the way the trope of ruin contemplation stages a confrontation between the self and what transcends it (death, history, nature, etc.). This philosophical landscape will then serve as a heuristic tool to consider the poetry of Aleksandr Kushner, a Russian/Soviet poet who productively deployed the trope of ruin to explore the legitimacy of poetic speech after the collapse of all meta-narratives. See the attachment for two of his poems to be used as examples, in the Russian original and English word-for-word translation.