Viacheslav Poliakov’s Lviv–God’s Will takes its title from a bus route running from the main gate of an old Lviv cemetery to Bozha Volya, a small village deep in the forests near Ukraine’s border with the European Union. The route’s name carries a double meaning: in Ukrainian, “Bozha Volya” means “God’s will”, while its linguistic relation to “bozhevillia” evokes madness. That tension gives the book its governing premise—an account of a place and a state of mind shaped by departure, aspiration and absurdity.

Poliakov photographs scenes and structures as they are found, without altering them, but isolates them from their surroundings against vivid, coloured backgrounds. The resulting images occupy an unstable space between document, catalogue and staged apparition. Makeshift constructions, public objects and eccentric details become specimens in a visual taxonomy: recognisable products of everyday life, yet detached enough to acquire a strange, almost theatrical autonomy. The book’s peculiar aesthetics are not an end in themselves. Beneath them lies a sustained commentary on the sociopolitical conditions of daily life in Ukraine.

Published by Overlapse, the 128-page English-language paperback was issued in 2018. The book records life before the war with Russia, but its importance is not reducible to hindsight. Its attention to ordinary environments, and its refusal to impose a single explanatory narrative, preserve a more complicated image of contemporary Ukraine—one in which humour, invention, neglect and longing coexist. For collectors, Lviv–God’s Will is especially compelling as a fully realised photobook proposition: its subject, visual method and underlying social observation are inseparable, and the sequence rewards sustained attention rather than quick consumption. It remains a distinctive document of Poliakov’s photographic inquiry and of the cultural atmosphere it observes.