Species Hospice and Broken Form: Extinction, Romance Tours, and War Ecology in Maria Reva’s Endling

This article reads Maria Reva’s Endling as a formally broken war-ecology novel in which extinction, romance tourism, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine expose the limits of rescue as a moral fantasy. Yeva, a malacologist, funds a mobile snail-conservation lab by joining romance tours for Western bachelors, while Nastia and Sol turn an anti-marriage-agency scheme into comic captivity and political spectacle. When war interrupts the caper, the novel repeatedly restarts, revises, and corrects itself. Rather than making the endangered snail Lefty a simple emblem of Ukraine, Reva keeps his small, uncharismatic life materially present beside occupation, failed evacuation, propaganda, and authorial self-reproach. Through close readings of Yeva’s hospice-like conservation, the bridal economy, the false ending, the repeated Chapter 44s, and Lefty’s mating scene, the article argues that Endling refuses redemptive catastrophe: its broken form preserves attention after rescue fails.