Andrey Kurkov on bringing ordinary stories out of Ukraine’s ‘grey zone’

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Andrey Kurkov, Ukraine’s most famous and successful living writer, has published 25 novels, as well as several works of non-fiction and children’s books. His books have been translated into more than 30 languages and he has travelled to numerous writers’ festivals and publishing events around the world. The only country to which he will never go again is Russia.

The first of his novels translated into English was Death and the Penguin, a darkly humorous story set in post-Soviet times. It is a world defined by unexplained deaths, political corruption, the absurd wealth of the superrich and the daily humiliations of the rest.

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The Globe and Mail spoke to Kurkov by phone while he was in Spain, on his way to Italy for the publication of the Italian edition of Grey Bees.

You were born near Leningrad but moved to Kyiv as a child. Can you talk to me about that?

I am ethnic Russian but all my childhood memories are of Kyiv. My parents brought my brother and me to Kyiv when I was only a year and a half. My grandparents were both ideological Stalinists but they died when I was very young. I was already 30 years old when the Soviet Union collapsed and I experienced all the changes that followed. I watched the government change five times since 1991, when Ukraine became an independent state, and the Euromaidan.

You have written about the large number of political parties in Ukraine; how does that impact the country?

There are at least 400, unlike Russia, which allows only one. But we have made it too easy for anyone to start a new political party. Unlike in Russia, Ukraine has not had a czar. It’s a country of individualists, not rule followers. Ukrainians like to discuss and disagree, mostly very politely.

Even now?

With the ongoing war, the shelling, the destruction, the uncertainty, people are traumatized. They sleep badly. They realize the war is not going to be over soon and the intellectuals are becoming paranoid, looking for enemies within their own circles. My daughter helps journalists, as a fixer, to connect them with Ukrainians. My oldest son helped critically ill patients reach hospitals and helped children in Irpin where so many were slaughtered by the Russians. My youngest son delivers food to old people who can’t go out. In Kyiv, people are still trying to live normal lives, going to cafés, buying groceries, but it’s not easy to distract yourself from the reality of the war.

In your most recent book, Diary of an Invasion, you write about how delighted you were when you were invited to a school to give a talk about crime fiction in different countries, because it was outside your overwhelming preoccupation with the war.

For some time, I could not write fiction or poetry. Grey Bees is the last novel I finished.

Grey Bees is set in the grey zone between the Russian army and the Ukrainians. The two main characters, trapped in a land with no human comforts, still manage to retain their humanity. How did you come to write this book?

I didn’t mean to write this novel, I had already decided I wouldn’t write fiction till the war was over. But I kept seeing and hearing all the “resettlers” from the east, at first just the rich who could afford to buy properties in Kyiv and Lviv, and Kharkiv, then the poorer people. In 2017, I met a young entrepreneur who started his own business in Kyiv. He talked about the abandoned villages in “the grey zone,” where there are no shops, no electricity, no food, no comforts, nothing. Sometimes this zone is 430 kilometres long and sometimes very wide. In the first months of the war, there were more than 200 books written by soldiers and volunteers about the zone, but these books were all about the soldiers, their lives. I wanted to write about the ordinary people, those very few who stayed behind. There is shelling and daily destruction but they try to carry on with their lives.

Are there still people in the “grey zone”?

I don’t think so. Most of them, like so many of my friends, have become refugees.

Your books are now banned in Russia?

The last shipment my publisher sent was returned. I am on a list of “extremist literature.” In Luhansk, they were ordered to be removed from shops and libraries.

Until last November, you were president of PEN Ukraine. How have Ukrainian writers managed?

Many of them have now returned home, even to Kharkiv, which had been so indiscriminately shelled during the early months of last year. It’s difficult for writers to live outside their language.

Poet Iya Kiva wrote about feeling like a “homeless dog” in Poland, where she didn’t know the language.

She is probably home now – despite the risks. Victoria Amelina, a young Ukrainian novelist with a great future, was killed last July in Kramatorsk. We had been together at the Hay Festival Cartagena earlier this year. She had taken a group of Colombians to the Donbas region. They were having dinner when the missile hit the restaurant, killing 13 people.

In Diary of an Invasion, you write about the ruling party in Ukraine now, the Servant of the People party, and you are not altogether flattering about their openness to telling the truth from the front. You mention a journalist, Yurii Butusov, who questioned the parliamentarians about this and they tried to shut him up.

Unlike the members of the party, Butusov is on the front lines and he is worth hearing. The Servant of the People party has very little ideological base. Anyone who wanted to get in, could do it easily. There are former Russophiles, adventurers, business people and, yes, some idealists. I didn’t see the television series, Servant of the People, the series that made Volodymyr Zelensky a star, but I know he holds the party together.

In Diary, you write that “in the West Zelensky has the image of a James Bond hero.” Do you think that image is useful for Ukraine?

Already at the beginning of the war, there was this old Soviet Russian, Vladimir Putin, accusing Ukrainians of Nazism, pretending he was going to save us. And we have a young Jewish President who is fighting back. He presents the case for Ukraine around the world and, as we grow more concerned that the West is getting tired of the war, he is gaining support. I think Ukrainians are now building a psychological wall between our country and Russia that is higher and sturdier than the old wall between the Soviets and the West.

With the war continuing, will you be able to return to the new novel you abandoned?

I tried several times but it wasn’t until August that I managed to come back to it. I wrote four to five chapters and I hope I can keep going when I am home in Kyiv.

Andrey Kurkov will be speaking at the third annual Graeme Gibson Talk at TIFA. The series was founded in 2021 in honour of author and writers’ advocate Graeme Gibson. The Toronto International Festival of Authors runs until Oct. 1.

Anna Porter is the award-winning author of 12 books. Gull Island, a psychological thriller, is her sixth novel.