That first edition of Death and the Penguin exists in a very different reality from 2024. Its cover introduces the then-unknown Kurkov as an author, journalist and playwright from Kiev. The spelling of the Ukrainian capital here—the Russified Kiev, rather than the Ukrainian Kyiv, is not one that you would find now. In fact, when the novel was first marketed by its publishers Harvill, and later Penguin (a happy Misha-related coincidence!) it was described as a potential “minor classic” that might “get Russian literature going again after the post-Soviet hiatus”. While Kurkov writes in Russian, since Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and our greater knowledge about Ukraine—due in part to Kurkov himself—it is even more necessary to make clear that "Russian literature" here refers to literature in the Russian language rather than of Russia.
Kurkov’s advocacy for Ukraine is expressed through his fiction, and non-fiction, alongside his myriad interviews and essays in the press, radio programmes and public appearances. Kurkov’s published diaries, which juxtapose his concern with the human everydayness of life against seismic political events, and which chart the beginning of the war against Ukraine, play an important role in both educating the West, and recording and celebrating Ukraine’s resilience. In 2014, Kurkov published Ukraine Diaries: Dispatches from Kiev. The diary begins in November 2013 with the Maidan protests in Kyiv that took place on the square just 500 yards from Kurkov’s apartment. The diary goes up to April 2014, to Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the invasion of Donbas. It is continued in Kurkov’s 2022 Diary of an Invasion and his forthcoming Our Daily War, which will be out this summer.
Kurkov’s novels, as his diaries, are wonderfully, quirkily human, and for this, all the more relatable. They are popular with readers around the world. Since the publication in English of Death and the Penguin, Kurkov’s output has been prolific, and almost all of them have been translated—with the fourteenth into English coming out later this year. In all, he has been translated into over forty languages worldwide. This is no small feat in a literary market where an author is lucky to secure even one translation into English. The appeal of Kurkov’s fiction is in part its charm, and in part its political relevance. Kurkov’s novels present not just a glimpse of Ukraine’s political realities, but draw in their readers by focusing on very human characters who struggle, just as we all do, with the (sur)realities in which they find themselves.
This struggle against incomprehensible outside forces is embodied by Kurkov’s plots. They are off-kilter somehow, absurd, and yet accord with the internal logic of each novel. It makes perfect sense for Viktor to adopt a penguin from the struggling local zoo, and to risk his life by inadvertently falling in with the mafia. In Jimi Hendrix Live in Lviv, we are not surprised that Taras makes a living by driving foreigners over bumpy cobbled streets in his old Opel car to help them pass their painful kidney stones. Nor is it so odd that simultaneously an ex-KGB officer and his former target, an old hippy named Alik, launch an investigation to discover why the seaside seems to be appearing in land-locked Lviv. In the Gardener from Ochakov, Igor dons his old Soviet police uniform and is transported to the 1950s. In Kurkov’s most recently translated novel, The Silver Bone, Samson relies on the ability to hear from his long-since severed ear to solve a mystery in 1919 Kyiv.
Sometimes Kurkov’s novels deal with politics directly. The President’s Last Love is even prescient in predicting a Ukrainian president’s poisoning, and Putin’s return to the Russian presidency. Kurkov’s 2018 novel, Grey Bees, addresses contemporary politics even more directly. It tells the story of Sergey, who inhabits the no man’s land, or “grey zone” of Donbas. Almost entirely alone in his largely abandoned village, Sergey wants nothing more than for the war to end so that plants can grow again, and his beloved bees will have somewhere to forage. Sparklingly clear in Boris Dralyuk’s translation, the novel paints a poignant picture of an “internally displaced person” who undertakes a perilous journey from Donbas to Crimea to protect his livelihood and identity. The minutiae of Sergey’s life, the beauty of Crimea and kindness of the Crimean Tatars he meets there are set in stark contrast to the ongoing nonsensical and illegal war that uproots him.
Andrey Kurkov’s novels and diaries have been translated into English by George Bird, Andrew Bromfield, Boris Dralyuk, Amanda Love Darragh, Sam Taylor and Reuben Woolley. Kurkov was kind enough to take part in this interview via email from Kyiv. I asked him about the role of literature and authors in Ukraine during the war, and his forthcoming books, The Silver Bone and Our Daily War.
—Sarah Gear, Assistant Interview Editor
While many readers will have encountered your fiction before 2022, it is fair to say that you have become particularly well known in the West since Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine through your many interviews, social media statements and newspaper articles about the war. These include your non-fiction Ukraine Diaries: Dispatches from Kyiv (2014, translated by Sam Taylor) and Diary of an Invasion (2022). In May 2022, you gave a Freedom to Write lecture at the PEN World Voices Festival, where you stated that during war you could not write fiction but would act as a witness and record what was happening in Ukraine. To what extent is this still the case? And how do you regard the contemporary Ukrainian author’s role today?
I sincerely wish that interest in Ukraine had been sparked by other things, but it is true that Russia’s aggression has encouraged readers almost everywhere to pay more attention to Ukrainian authors and their works. My Grey Bees, written in 2017, about the grey zone created during the early stages of the conflict, gave readers some understanding of the background to the situation today. Judging by questions I get at literary events, even my two historical fiction novels about Kyiv in 1919, written between 2017 and 2022, are read with one eye on current events. But the third novel in this series remains unfinished. I cannot concentrate on it, partly because I do need to describe what is happening in Ukraine right now and partly because these current events overfill my mind and my heart. I think it is probably true that representatives of Ukrainian culture, who are not actually fighting at the front line, should be using their skills to spread the word about what is happening and encouraging people to ask the right questions.
Can you tell us about the effect of the war on the domestic Ukrainian literary scene? How has the growth of interest in Ukrainian literature in the West since the 2022 full-scale invasion affected the Ukrainian literary market? How are Ukrainian authors responding?
First of all we should remember that more than thirty Ukrainian writers, poets, publishers and translators have died in the war either from shelling, or were killed while fighting or were executed, for example, Volodymyr Vakulenko, an author of books for children. More than thirty others are still fighting as soldiers. So a large number of literary figures are not engaged even in writing about the war. At the same time, in 2023 more than ten new bookshops opened in Kyiv! People seem to read more now but they are reading not what they read before the war. Now it’s mostly non-fiction and popular books about Ukrainian history. Also the books by Ukrainian writers from 1920 to 1930s are popular, but this is also due to the interest in Ukrainian history. These authors were almost all killed by Stalin’s regime in 1937–1938 and their books were banned and forgotten until 1991. Now some of these authors are becoming popular. Of course, there are new books about the war by young authors who are actually also soldiers—Markyian Kamysh, Artem Chapeye. New books for children—also about this war—are gaining popularity too.
What practical ways are Ukrainian authors finding to support one another?
At the beginning of the all-out invasion, many Ukrainian writers got the possibility to go abroad to spend time in writers’ residences—these grants were promoted and shared by PEN Ukraine. Later for those who could not, or did not want to travel abroad, there were online residences organized with regular financial help. There were several hundred grants for young writers/beginners which were also funded by different organizations—Ukrainian and foreign—and administered by PEN Ukraine. Writers from the west of the country were inviting writers from the more endangered regions to come and stay with them. Volodymyr Rafeenko, a Russian-language writer from Donetsk, after 2014 lived with his wife for eight years in the countryside house of another writer/poet, Andriy Bondar.
You mentioned in your interview for the International Booker Prize in 2023 that your book Jimi Hendrix Live in Lviv (2012, translated by Reuben Woolley into English in 2023) being part of the shortlist would bring more literary attention to Ukraine, and to Lviv. Likewise, in the foreword to your 2018 novel Grey Bees (translated into English by Boris Dralyuk in 2020) you provide political context for Western readers by explaining the war that began in 2014 when Russia annexed Crimea and part of Donbas. Is educating foreign readers about Ukraine among your aims when your novels are translated into other languages? Do you consider the role your book might play in countries other than Ukraine as you write? And has this changed since 2014?
Before the war, I did not think so much about “educating” the reader. Rather, I think I write to better understand something myself. My early novels The Bickford Fuse and The Geography of a Single Gunshot describe the development of Soviet mentality. These novels are not so easy to understand for people born outside the Soviet world, but I think I was writing those novels for Soviet-born people—including myself—so that we could understand where we came from.
Today I think it is sometimes as hard for young Ukrainians to understand what is going on in Ukraine as it is for readers from other countries. But Ukrainians are now very interested in understanding their own history. Even soldiers at the front ask for books about it.
Your description of The Bickford Fuse and The Geography of a Single Gunshot is that they are too Soviet to appeal to the Western reader, and yet The Bickford Fuse was a success in translation. Are there any plans to publish The Geography of a Single Gunshot in English? And can you tell us a little about the novel?
The Geography was written as a trilogy that covers the history of the evolution of Soviet mentality from 1918 till 1974. It’s a mix of Soviet history and fairy tale and it took me seven years to write and two years to edit. It was translated into German and Italian and I hope that one day it will be published in English. It is full of black humour and magic, for example one of the characters is an angel that escaped from Paradise to the USSR since he was perplexed why there were no Soviets in Paradise. He decided to find a Soviet person worthy of Paradise and to accompany this person to Heaven’s gate when she or he dies.
Grey Bees describes the internal displacement of Sergey as he leaves his home in the Grey Zone of Donbas, and searches for a safe haven for his beloved bees. Since the novel’s publication, you yourself have been forced to leave your home. How has this affected your writing process?
I have been “on-the-go” for many years, so I cannot say that I need to have a special place to write or a special environment. Ten or fifteen years ago, I remember thinking that I wrote best on planes. That is no longer the case. I count the cost of flying on the environment and I am older. I try to be more careful on both those counts, but I think I am blessed with some flexibility about where and when I write. Yes, I was an IDP (internally displaced person) for four months at the beginning of the war, and I was an official refugee in France before returning to Kyiv again. I have this experience and I better understand how it is to be a refugee or IDP. But the only effect it had on my writing is that I write only about the war and living in war time. Which means also that what I’ve written in the last two years is 100% realistic—which is not something I am used to. Never before was I attached so much to realism.
A line in The Silver Bone really struck me as relevant to the present day. You wrote that “every person one day finds themselves witness to an act of some sort of crime . . . in the end, everyone pays for this either by becoming a victim or by being named an accomplice.” Is this something that applies to the situation in Ukraine today?
Not really unless we’re talking about the fact that every Ukrainian is taking part in this war, either as a direct victim of Russian aggression, or as somebody who does fundraising for the army. Others “pay” for this war by changing their life plans and even destiny, escaping illegally from Ukraine to other countries, preparing for an immigrant life. Yes, there are accomplices, there are traitors and there are criminals trying to use the war situation. But still it is not like in 1919, when society was atomized and split and everyone lived in fear of their life.
As with The Silver Bone, many of your books involve crime, or mysteries to be solved (also Death and the Penguin, The Bickford Fuse, Jimi Hendrix Live in Lviv). Why do you gravitate towards these themes? And what inspires your writing process?
I am interested in people, more particularly in the individual and how he or she is influenced by and reacts to different situations. Crime is a convenient context for “people watching” but it is also a central part of the world I have experienced—Soviet crimes against entire nations and the crimes of people who took power (and the Soviet wealth) after the collapse of the USSR.
Can I ask you about the role of animals and nature in your novels? I noted that The Silver Bone opened with a Babel-like reference to the sun, and that the seasons and weather play an important role in the novel—as they certainly do in Jimi Hendrix Live in Lviv. Likewise, Death and the Penguin and of course Grey Bees are centred on animals in the form of Victor’s faithful companion, and Sergey’s precious hives. Animals also seem significant in your other novels—the seagulls in Jimi Hendrix, the recurring crows in The Silver Bone. Could you tell us why the natural world is so central in your work?
Animals are part of nature, they are predictable and therefore are easy metaphors. Also they are innocent even if they are aggressive. In a way animals are very helpful in constructing human characters because the connection between a human and an animal can help us to understand the human and can lead us to easily visible comparisons with animals. Like the Penguin Misha in The Death and the Penguin—it is the alter ego of the main character Victor: penguins are collective animals living in groups and do everything inside the framework of the collective life of that group. And Victor is a post-Soviet young man who was used to collective Soviet life and is now learning to survive on his own. So solitude and being independent are a challenge for both of them. Only Misha, as an animal, reacts with depression to his unnatural and lonely habitat, and Victor is trying to learn how to become an individual, apart from a collective.
Could you tell us about your upcoming book, Our Daily War? Will this be available in Ukraine also, or is it written with an Anglophone audience in mind?
This book is already published in Ukraine in Ukrainian. First I thought it would be more interesting for foreign audiences but I was wrong. I got feedback from some of Kyiv’s readers and they are very happy, saying that there is a lot of unknown and interesting material there about the war and life during the war.
As you have noted in previous interviews, it is impossible to know what will happen in the future, but as far as the near future is concerned, what do you see yourself working on next? And how can we keep the war in Ukraine at the forefront of people’s minds? What should we be reading? Or perhaps more importantly, what should people in the West be doing?
I will continue to write articles about what is happening in Ukraine and I will continue to tell people to read about Ukrainian history and works by Ukrainian and international authors. I would suggest that readers pay more attention to Serhii Plokhy, author of Gates of Europe, to Philippe Sands, author of East-West Street, to Timothy Snyder, Anne Applebaum and many others who write about Ukrainian history. We should not forget that this war is over 300 years old and to understand it better we need to read more.
I should also get back to the third book in the Samson series. I very much look forward to long days at my desk in our village house near Kyiv.
