June Reading Group Selection: Grey Bees by Andrey Kurkov

The Book Beat reading group selection for June is Grey Bees by Andrey Kurkov, translated from the Russian by Boris Dralyuk. This will be a virtual Zoom meeting held on Wednesday, June 29th at 7 pm. Books are available now and are discounted 15%. A limited number of signed copies are available.  If you would like to attend, please RSVP to us with your name, phone number and email and we will add you to our virtual reading group list. Reminders and login links are sent on the morning or day of the meeting. Please try and login 10 minutes before the meeting so we can begin on time.

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?”

“Andrey Kurkov has spent his life writing about realities so absurd they defy satire. It was perfect preparation for this moment… Ukraine’s greatest novelist.” – Giles Harvey, The New York Times

“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 draws us with deceptive ease into a dense complex world full of wonderful characters.” – Sir Michael Palin

“In spare prose, Ukraine’s most famous novelist unsparingly examines the inhuman confusions of our modern times and the longing of the warm-hearted everyman that is Sergeyich for the rationality of the natural world.” – John Thornhill, Financial Times

Read a selection from Grey Bees at: Lit Hub

Purchase a signed copy of Grey Bees at the Book Beat gallery.

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Kurkov, who was invited to give the Arthur Miller lecture at this year’s PEN World Voices Festival, was recently profiled in The New Yorker by Zach Helfland, excerpt below:

Andrey Kurkov Is Banned in Russia but a Hit at PEN

When the Soviet Union collapsed, Andrey Kurkov was thirty, with manuscripts for a novel, then called “The World of Mr. Bickford,” and a children’s book, “The Adventures of Baby Vacuum Cleaner Gosha.” (For years, the English-language press, mishearing Kurkov’s pronunciation of “Bickford,” has been under the impression that he also wrote a different novel, “The World of Mr. Big Forehead.”) “We had complete chaos in Ukraine,” he said the other day. “No laws, no rules.” A good time to be a writer. He borrowed money from friends, paid a printer, and found six tons of paper in Kazakhstan. “I was able to transport this paper, free of charge, by Ukrainian Railways. There was a respect there for writers.” He discovered that some of the paper was meant for wrapping food. The printing technicians were drunk. He managed a run of seventy-five thousand copies. “Then I was in trouble,” he said.

He was living in a studio flat. Piles of books reached the ceiling. “My wife and I had a passage from the sofa to the kitchen to the toilet,” he said. “I made myself a cardboard with a description, ‘i am the author,’ and, every free moment, I would go with two bags of books to the street and try to sell them.” Kyiv was dangerous. A gangster offered free protection. “Even criminals had respect for writers!” Kurkov said.

Kurkov was in town to deliver the Arthur Miller lecture at the pen World Voices Festival. Past lecturers: Rushdie, Hitchens, Sotomayor, Hillary Clinton. “The topic I was given: Freedom to Write,” he said. He wore a yellow shirt and had a short, whitish beard. Countenance: impish. He was sitting down to dinner at Ukrainian National Home. The one on Second Avenue that’s not Veselka.

“I write in Russian. I am not a Russian writer,” he said. “Literature is dead in Russia.” This would be part of the speech. “Russians, during the past twenty years, agreed to be left without any kind of freedom, to be censored, and it was done voluntarily,” he went on. He blamed a fatalism evident in the literary canon—Dostoyevsky (“People who believe that life is horrible, they will read Dostoyevsky”), Tolstoy (“He was not, I would say, a nice guy”). “Chekhov, I like,” Kurkov said. “The only one who was making people laugh was Gogol—Ukrainian!”

Andrey Kurkov (1961-) was born near Leningrad. 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 than 75,000 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.