Andrey Kurkov, one of Ukraine’s most renowned authors, will speak at Grosse Pointe Unitarian Church on Wednesday, May 11th at 7pm. The church is located at 17150 Maumee, Grosse Pointe City. This event is sponsored by the Grosse Pointe library. Please register to attend here, where more information is available.
Kurkov’s most recent novel, Grey Bees, translated by Boris Dralyuk, was released on March 29th. Book Beat will have copies of Grey Bees and his bestselling first book: Death and the Penguin in English translation for sale at the event. Call (248) 968-1190 to reserve books.
Little Starhorodivka, a village of three streets, lies in Ukraine’s Grey Zone, the no-man’s-land between loyalist and separatist forces. Thanks to the lukewarm war of sporadic violence and constant propaganda that has been dragging on for years, only two residents remain: retired safety inspector turned beekeeper Sergey Sergeyich and Pashka, a rival from his schooldays. With little food and no electricity, under constant threat of bombardment, Sergeyich’s one remaining pleasure is his bees. As spring approaches, he knows he must take them far from the Grey Zone so they can collect their pollen in peace. This simple mission on their behalf introduces him to combatants and civilians on both sides of the battle lines: loyalists, separatists, Russian occupiers and Crimean Tatars. Wherever he goes, Sergeyich’s childlike simplicity and strong moral compass disarm everyone he meets. But could these qualities be manipulated to serve an unworthy cause, spelling disaster for him, his bees and his country?”
“A latter-day Bulgakov . . . A Ukrainian Murakami.” – Phoebe Taplin, The Guardian
“…as timely as the author’s Ukraine Diaries were in 2014, but treats the unfolding crisis in a more imaginative way, with a pinch of Kurkov’s signature humour. Who better than Ukraine’s most famous novelist to illuminate and present a balanced portrait of this most bewildering of modern conflicts.” – Dublin Literary Prize Award Statement
Kurkov was recently profiled in The New York Times. Here is an excerpt:
You’re at home in Kyiv. What is life like for you?
Well, earlier we were looking for shelter because the neighbors started shouting that an air raid was coming, and instead of shelter, we went to the Radisson Hotel and stayed there for half an hour.
Then we went to my friend who has a shelter in his house. But it was very shabby and not nice. There were more explosions, but then there was some quiet so we returned home.
Some readers will turn to “Grey Bees” to try and learn about the background to this conflict. Why did you decide to write about the earlier war in the east of Ukraine?
Well, I wasn’t planning to write this book, but in 2014 we had an influx of refugees from Donbas in Kyiv, and I met a young businessmen from Donetsk who was driving every month to a village not far from the front line, where seven families remained: without shops, without electricity, with nothing. So he was bringing them medicines and whatever else they asked for, and they were saying thanks by giving him jars of preserved vegetables and pickles.
I had this idea that there were thousands of people stuck between the Russian Army and Ukrainian Army, with nowhere to go, and wanted to give a voice to those people.
In the book, your two main characters are just dealing with daily life; they don’t seem to care about politics or war.
People just want to survive. And people adapt to war, if it’s not destroying them personally. I went there three times, and I noticed that even the children could tell what rocket or mine caused an explosion, just by its sound. War became something banal, part of life.
Given you saw the conflict up close, did you ever expect this invasion?
No, until several weeks ago, I didn’t think it was realistic. And then I noticed that Putin became very old, very quickly, and started talking like Stalin before his death. Putin has a dream of recreating the Soviet Union, and he considers everybody who doesn’t love Russia, but understands the Russian language, as traitors. And he loves to kill traitors.
They are trying to destroy Ukrainian history.They are trying to destroy Ukrainian identity. More than five hundred schools are in ruins.
W-DET’s Stephen Henderson interviews Andrey Kurkov for DETROIT TODAY.
Andrey Kurkov was born near Leningrad in 1961. He worked as a journalist, prison warder, cameraman and screenplay-writer before he became well known as a novelist. He received “hundreds of rejections” and was a pioneer of self-publishing, selling more than75,000 copies of his books in a single year. His novel Death and the Penguin, his first in English translation, became an international bestseller, translated into more than thirty languages. Kurkov, who has long been a respected commentator on Ukraine for the international media, notably in Europe and the United States, has written assorted articles for various publications worldwide. His books are full of black humour, post-Soviet reality and elements of surrealism. He lives in Kiev with his British wife and their three children.