Andrey Kurkov decided that he was going to fight this war with his best weapons. He “exiled” himself in a small village in the Carpathians, within his own country, and from there he fires messages against Putin’s invasion to all who want to listen
By
Gustavo Sierra
Andrey Kurkov, the world’s best-known Ukrainian novelist, leaving Kyiv after learning that he was heading a list of intellectuals to be seized by Russian soldiers as soon as they took the Ukrainian capital. (Facebook)
“I’m a pathological optimist,” he says. “For many years, before writing, I listened to depressive classical music, to lower my positive mood.”He remains very optimistic about the future of Ukraine. However, he sees little hope for Russia. “But who knows?” he hesitates. Years ago he wrote a novel in which an angel is perplexed by the absence of Soviets in heaven. “So he goes down to find an honest and suitable person who is the first Soviet”, says Andrey Kurkov. Can you find one? They ask him from the audience. “Yes,” he affirms. “But I really don’t remember if this person gets to Heaven. I have written too much ”, he replies and laughs with a face open and red as a beet.
The scene stars Andrey Kurkov, Ukraine’s foremost living writer, who writes in Russian. It happened last week shortly after he gave his speech at the New York PEN Club, surrounded by writers from all over the world. There he talked about Arthur Miller and how he was perplexed when his work was censored in the Soviet Union after having supported the regime for years. And he clarified that dichotomy of being half his life (30 years) a Soviet citizen and the other half (31 years) Ukrainian. “I write in Russian. I am not a Russian writer ”, she says. “Literature is dead in Russia.” And he reminds his former compatriots that they have to take charge of what they are doing. “The Russians, during the last twenty years, accepted that they were left without any kind of freedom, that they were censored, and it was done voluntarily”, he launches. And he assures that the root of all this can be found in the evident literary fatalism and the differences between the great Russian authors: Dostoyevsky (“People who think life is horrible will read Dostoyevsky”), Tolstoy (“He was not, I would say, a good guy”). Chekhov (“I like it”). “The only one who made people laugh was Gogol, the Ukrainian!”
“Death of a Penguin”, the book that established Kurkov, in some of the editions in the 41 languages into which it was translated.
Just a few hours after the Russian invasion of his country, on February 24, Kurkov received a call on his cell phone. He was an old friend with very good political connections who warned him: “Andrey, you have to leave Kyiv as soon as possible.” He told him that his name was at the top of the list of intellectuals that Russian agents were going to look for as soon as they entered the capital. And that was going to happen in a matter of days. Kurkov has been a harsh critic of Vladimir Putin since he came to power in 2000 and his books are banned in Russia.
At that time he was precisely writing a new a novel about an earlier Russian invasion, when the communists in Moscow crushed the independent republic that Ukrainian nationalists had created between 1917 and 1921. The story revolves around the lives of families who have to adapt to the bizarre demands of the KGB, Stalin’s secret police. Kurkov relies on old police files that contained a Russian tax on underwear, requiring each Ukrainian family to donate three pairs of underpants to the ill-equipped Red Army. The same was true of the furniture tax, which stipulated that Ukrainian households could only have as many chairs as there were members, plus one for guests; the rest were requisitioned.
When he told his wife, Elizabeth Sharp, an Englishwoman who has lived in the Ukraine since they were married in 1988, about the call, she asked him to fill the car with fuel and leave as soon as possible. They packed some small suitcases, put everything they had in the kitchen cupboards in boxes and the computers in a bag. They believed that their little house in Lazarivka, about 100 kilometers west of Kyiv, would be far enough away from the threat. It took almost five hours. The route was full of people escaping.
Ukrainian soldiers walk past destroyed Russian tanks and armored vehicles in Bucha, on the outskirts of Kyiv. Kurkov and his wife fled there shortly before the arrival of the Russian troops. REUTERS/Alkis Konstantinidis
Kurkov says that he felt bad when he was running away. But he that he talked to Elizabeth about it and became convinced that the greatest service he could do to the Homeland was to bear witness to the world about what was happening in Ukraine. “I think everyone should do what they can do best for the country”,Kurkov said in a recent interview with the New York Times magazine. “Snipers should kill the enemy. The singers should sing for the soldiers and the refugees. What I can do is write and count things, and that’s what I’m doing.”
As soon as they arrived in Lazarivka, she received another call from her friend. “You’re crazy. They will arrive there before your house in the center of Kyiv(He lives very close to the historic Maidan square where the pro-European revolution of 2014 took place). You have to go much further ”, he yelled at her indignantly. They got back in the car for another long drive to Lviv, the largest city closest to the Polish border. There they joined their children and accepted the suggestion of another friend: to take refuge in a house in the Carpathian mountains, very close to the border with Slovakia. In his country, far from the bombs and with a quick exit to Europe. And from there is where he writes what his relatives and friends tell him about what is happening in the occupied zones and from where he gives Zoom interviews to the big television networks in the United States and Europe. She speaks perfectly six languages. he Fights with the pen and the word.
“Before I could not imagine a situation in which I decided not to write a novel. But it has happened. Reality is now scarier, more dramatic than any fictional prose. In this context, novels lose their meaning. Now it is necessary to write only the truth, only non-fiction. All those who know how to write are witnesses to one of the worst crimes of the 21st century. The task of witnesses is to record and preserve the evidence of the crime ”, he explained in his PEN Club speech.
Andrey Kurkov in his refuge in the mountains of the Carpathians. From there he denounces the Russian invasion of his country through the world media. (Facebook)
Andrey Yuryevich Kurkov was born in Leningrad(today St. Petersburg) in 1961. Just a year later his father, a test pilot in the Soviet Air Force, was transferred to the Antonov aircraft factory in Kyiv. Together with her mother, a doctor, they settled permanently in the Ukrainian capital. She graduated from the language school of the local university and majored in the translation of Japanese literature . He wanted to capture the KGB to spy in that country. He managed to get away. He ended up doing military service as a guard in an Odessa prison. There, in his long hours of waiting, he began to write. Children’s books first, then novels. He managed to publish independently and went out to sell the books in the squares . He earned his bread as a translator and journalist. He says publishers turned him down “at least 500 times” until 2001’s ‘Death and the Penguin’ came out, giving him instant fame. It was translated into 41 languages.
It was consecrated with “The Bickford Fuse”, from 2009. It was characterized by the famous critic Sam Leith in The Financial Times as “a kind of cross between “Pilgrim’s Progress”, “Catch-22”, “Heart of Darkness” and “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy, with a slight nuance, here and there, by Samuel Beckett : an absurd, insistently dreamlike satire shaped by the vastness of the Russian landmass and the insanity of its Soviet-era ideology. Kurkov says that it is “the most beloved and important of all my works”.
Kurkov’s last novel, “Grey Bees”, which has “elements of both fable and epic”, dramatizes the conflict in his country through the adventures of a beekeeper. It tells the story of Sergey Sergeyich, an unsophisticated ethnic Russian from eastern Ukraine whose life is turned upside down by the war between Moscow-backed separatists and the Ukrainian government that began in 2014. Despite his heritage, Sergeyich becomes finds himself further and further away from Russia as war engulfs his hometown in the Donbas region. At the same time, his Russian identity makes him an object of suspicion for Ukrainians. Though he is different from his creator in many ways, Sergeyich, like Kurkov, is a man caught between two cultures, and the book deeply sympathizes with his plight. Obviously it received devastating criticism from both sides.
Andrey Kurkov is the best-known Ukrainian writer in Europe and the United States. He wrote 19 novels that were published in 19 countries.
“Now, looking back on thirty years of living in the Soviet Union and thirty-one years of living in independent Ukraine, only I can say thanks to Ukraine for helping me make my dream come true. I became a writer and at the same time remained completely independent of any political situation. I realize that in this happy state of mine there is great merit to my country, which immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union abandoned the principles of total control over the thoughts, opinions and creativity of its citizens”, Kurkov commented to his peers.
And he continued: “In our country there has always been a struggle between those who wanted to tell the truth and those who wanted to make it inaccessible. . In the first place, it was not the politicians who participated in this fight, but the journalists. The number of victims among the representatives of honest journalism testifies to the cruelty of this struggle. Over the years of independence, a hundred journalists have died in Ukraine, and in the last two months more than 20 of them have been killed by the Russian military. Journalism remains one of the most dangerous professions, and during war it is even more so. The inscription ‘press’ on a bulletproof vest or helmet is to the Russian military like a red rag to a bull”.
Kurkov discovered his love of literature through the samizdat, the books banned by the regime that circulated clandestinely. One day in the mid-1970s, his older brother brought home an unbound, typewritten samizdat copy of the Solzhenitsyn Gulag Archipelago, which had just begun to circulate among dissidents. She managed to read it in three days, which was the time they had to pass it on to someone else. From that moment on, he knew he was going to be a writer. Not a Soviet one.
Andrey Kurkov back in Ukraine after giving the keynote speech at the annual meeting of the New York PEN Club (Facebook)
“When the new, bloodier phase began on February 24 of this year, After the Russian aggression, when the shock of the first days of the new war had passed, I found myself wanting to look back and say “thank you” to everyone who had been with me in my life before February 24 and that they had helped make my life interesting, useful, fulfilling, and meaningful. The first name that came to mind was my country, my Ukraine,” he told his colleagues in New York. “Ukraine is a country of individualists. Every Ukrainian has his own personal Ukraine. Every Ukrainian appreciates something special from his or her homeland, something that is important to him or her. It may be the incredible and diverse nature of the country, it may be the fertile black soil that produces 10% of the world’s wheat. For me, Ukraine is, first of all, the space of my personal freedom. It is a country that since 1991 has given me more than thirty years of life and work without censorship, without political control, without pressure”.
This was emphasized before come the applause, the countless requests for interviews, the long drive back to the lost Kosice airport in Slovenia and the trip in his Mitsubishi car across the mountains to his new refuge from where he fights for Ukraine with the determination of the soldiers who resisted for three months in the steel mill of the devastated city of Mariupol.