Andrey Kurkov and I were supposed to meet for coffee. That’s how I imagined it. Me, an aspiring novelist and the granddaughter of a Ukrainian war refugee, enjoying a latte with Kurkov at a café in Kyiv during my first-ever trip to the country earlier this year. Never mind the air sirens; we would talk about art. But our schedules just missed each other, so I focused on the real purpose of my trip: reporting on Russian war crimes. In early April, when we were both taking a break from the road, we met on Zoom instead.

I first discovered Kurkov while Googling Soviet literature, as I had a sense that its staple sense of humor—dark, wry, arguably slow—might be my biggest asset in the years ahead. A boon to survival. I cracked open Kurkov’s satirical crime thriller Death and the Penguin many years ago as a result, and was charmed, like many, by Misha the penguin, the narrator’s sidekick.

“Odd times to be a child in,” Kurkov writes in the book. “An odd country, an odd life which he had no desire to make sense of. To endure, full stop, that was all he wanted.”

I returned to Kurkov’s work ahead of my travels. His most recent novel, Grey Bees, is set in the area of Ukraine known as the “grey zone”— a no-man’s-land between each side of the conflict. Sergey Sergeich leaves home to care for his bees in the midst of war. While on the road, he learns an old friend has been disappeared by the state. Grey Bees won a National Book Critics Circle Award and was made into a film (which Kurkov has yet to see) that won Best Picture at the Odessa International Film Festival last year.

“It was the bees that worried Sergeyich, because without them, the meaning of his life, the sense in his departure from Little Starhorodivka would be lost,” Kurkov writes in Grey Bees. “The meaning would evaporate, abandoning him to a meaningless state.”

Altogether, Kurkov has 19 novels to his name, including Jimi Hendrix Live in Lviv, which was longlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2023. My interview with Kurkov follows a pattern I grew familiar with while visiting Ukraine: no matter where the conversation starts, it will end with a discussion of U.S. politics, and no one will be laughing.

—Alyssa Oursler for Guernica

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Alyssa Oursler: I hear people talk often about the importance of novels for society or for humanity, especially in times of conflict and strife. But I’m curious, on a more personal level, what purpose writing serves for you? Why are novels important to you, especially during challenging times?

Andrey Kurkov: Actually, three years ago, when the full-scale invasion started, I stopped writing fiction. I sort of switched into essays, nonfiction diaries, and articles. I’m writing about the war every day. In the first two and a half years that I couldn’t write fiction, I tried several times to get back to the novel that I didn’t finish before the beginning of the war. I failed several times, and I was very angry with myself. Thanks to this anger, in the end, I forced myself to finish the novel in November of last year. And obviously, there is a slight difference in intonation between the beginning of the novel, written before 24th of February and the end of the novel that was written on the 18th of November.

I’m still doing the same. I’m dreaming about starting a new novel and I feel almost ready for this. But generally, the time of the war is not good—neither to write, nor to read novels because you have [a] very short span of attention. You are checking the news from the front lines, from cities that were just bombed. An hour ago, another drone hit. You cannot detach yourself from reality. You cannot immerse yourself in the novel because you are halfway. You are more on the surface to be able to listen to other sources of information.

It is probably easier to read and write in the States now because it’s a different kind of turmoil. But it’s interesting because in the last two and three years, I have been noticing that people are writing more and more about two authors: George Orwell and Franz Kafka. I loved Kafka. I read Orwell when he was banned in the Soviet Union, but I didn’t fall in love. But many Americans are writing now about Orwell’s novels, and mention Kafka. And the same here. But of course, here, when people think about George, they think about Russia. I think the Americans, when they talk about George, they refer to the situation in the States.

Alyssa Oursler: Kurt Vonnegut gets mentioned a lot as well, and I’ve heard you be called the “Ukrainian Kurt Vonnegut” many times. Do you have any thoughts on that comparison?

Kurkov: I loved Kurt. And Ray Bradbury. But I don’t think about them often. Actually Franz Kafka somehow [gets] into my head more regularly. But not quite Vonnegut.

Alyssa Oursler: I could see that though, because I feel like Vonnegut, compared to your work, is a bit more satirical, a bit more outlandish. And I feel like Kafka is a bit more about the absurdity of mundane things.

Kurkov: I would agree with you. But Vonnegut, at the same time that he’s satirical, he is very sweet.

Alyssa Oursler: He is.

Kurkov: Easygoing with characters who suffer through hell.

Alyssa Oursler: How would you say the process of writing a novel has changed over the course of your career? Obviously, the full-scale invasion is one factor, but what else has changed?

Kurkov:  Well, lots of things changed because, I mean, I wrote five novels before my first book was published. I was writing novels for illegal distribution in the times when you were not allowed to publish because of the censorship. It was fun. There were no obligations, no deadlines, no book sales, no book sign-ins. Just illegal readings and travels funded by people who wanted to listen, reading extracts of your prose in the kitchen or somewhere in the garden, in remote places.

I had my first book published several weeks before the collapse of the Soviet Union. Then, it was a different situation because the bookshops [and] publishing houses closed down. There was a social crisis, criminalized society, no functioning services, et cetera. The main idea was to survive—financially and from the point of view of safety. I started writing film scripts because it was easy money, but I was dreaming of getting back to literature.

In the end, I signed a contract with my first publisher who became my agent. Then, of course, there was a new rhythm in my life because of the publication, first in German and then in French, et cetera. I started traveling as a writer. And I learned how to write during the travels. I wrote lots of chapters of different novels on the planes, on the trains, in the hotels, in the cafés, in Berlin, in Singapore, in Hong Kong, in Japan, et cetera.

There was a lot of adrenaline in this. I felt like, “this is the proper life of a writer.” [Though] a couple of times actually, I was losing interest. If I’m surprised myself by what I write, I keep writing. If I lose interest, I stop. There was a novel that I started three times from the very beginning, from zero. There are two or three texts that remain unfinished. My last proper novel is Grey Bees.

After that, I started writing this series of historical crime novels set in 1919, and I realized that actually I am hiding in this historical series. It was easy to justify because the situation in 1919 was similar to today’s. It was a so-called civil war; Russia was fighting against Ukrainian independence, trying to occupy all of Russia and transfer it into the Soviet Republic, which they did in 1921. This is my asylum city now, this series of novels. I can imagine writing five or seven of them.

Alyssa Oursler: I loved Grey Bees. It’s such a striking portrait of the quieter effects of war. In both Grey Bees and Death and the Penguin, the main character’s relationship to animals is central to the story. I’m curious: what do animals symbolize to you? It feels a bit paradoxical to say they almost represent humanity, but it doesn’t feel necessarily untrue.

Kurkov: Oh, I think you are completely right. I mean, most of the animals are much more human than the humans because [they] are programmed by nature. You know what to expect from them. You cannot imagine a friendly wolf and an unfriendly wolf. They’re just [wolves]. In this sense, Misha is just a penguin. But because he behaves in this natural way, not reflecting or reacting to social events in the novel, he creates this paradoxical situation in that he becomes a symbol of stability. With bees, it is a bit different because bees are collective. It’s like a society programmed by nature.

Alyssa Oursler Was that a purposeful choice that the narrator would have these animals that were operating collectively while he was so isolated and alone?

Kurkov: The choice of bees and choice of his occupation as a beekeeper was purposely selected because the people in Donbas, they retained the collective mentality of the Soviet people. That’s why the older generation was so nostalgic about the Soviet Union. And this is why actually they were instrumental, manipulated by Putin.

Alyssa Oursler: You write in Russian, correct?

Kurkov: I write fiction in Russian and nonfiction in Russian, Ukrainian, and English. And books for children now in Ukrainian. But Russian is my mother tongue. I feel much more confident in Russian. I can experiment with the language, the vocabulary, create new words, new structures, et cetera, which I cannot afford to do in the languages I learned.

Alyssa Oursler: Right.

Kurkov: I learned Ukrainian in the Soviet times. I worked as an editor. I was editing the translations from foreign novels into Ukrainian in the Soviet Publishing house in the 1980s. Uh, for example, I edited the Ukrainian version of Hemingway’s novel Across the River and into the Trees. 

Alyssa Oursler: Interesting. What’s it like writing in Russian while being not just Ukrainian, but being such a prominent spokesperson and symbol of Ukraine?

Kurkov: It’s very dramatic. In fact, I was canceled 15 or 16 months ago. My books were removed from the bookshops. Even my books in Ukrainian. Of course, you cannot buy my books in Russian in the bookshops. The books in Ukrainian are back, but sometimes they’re hidden on the shelves. You cannot see them unless you ask for them simply because …

Alyssa Oursler: Russian is your mother tongue.

Kurkov: I mean, Russian language writers were marginalized before. They were not considered by critics as part of Ukrainian literature. But after the beginning of the war, when the Russian language became the language of the enemy, of course, for many people it became, I would say, unacceptable to see books in Russian on sale. I was several times verbally attacked by some of my colleagues saying that I have no right to present myself as a Ukrainian writer. It happens, but it’s okay.

Alyssa Oursler: Maybe it’s inevitable for cultural politics to be weaponized during times of war. There are undoubtedly many global examples. For instance, President Trump is targeting American universities and cutting funding for a wide variety of things. Harvard’s Ukrainian Research Institute’s publishing program was one of the institutions that funding was frozen for. What are your thoughts on why [the program] is in his crosshairs?

Kurkov: This was the only program dealing with Ukrainian literature in the US—the only program thanks to which new books and classical literature could be published in the States. Probably, from Trump’s point of view, this program is not based on the market economy. It’s a promotion, right? Probably he would say that if proper publishing houses don’t want to publish Ukrainian books without funding from the state, it means this literature is not worth appearing on the American market. [But] Russia was always subsidizing translations of Russian authors. And Ukraine never had money for that. Also, Trump doesn’t want Americans to find out more about Ukraine. To become friendly with Ukrainian culture, to understand Ukrainian history, [because that] will win Ukrainians more sympathy in America.

Alyssa Oursler What recommendations do you have for books to read or places to start if people are interested in reading more Ukrainian literature?

Kurkov: If we talk about Ukrainian authors who are translated, probably Markiyan Kamysh. [Stalking the Atomic City] … is about the subculture of young people from Belarus, Russia and Ukraine who were entering regularly the closed Chernobyl zone. If we talk about the new experience, the war experience, it’s Stanislav Aseyev’s book [The Torture Camp on Paradise Street] about his two years in the concentration camp in Donetsk run by Russians and Donbas Separatists. There is a wonderful small book by Taras Prokhaskt. I don’t remember the English title but if we just do word-for-word translation, it’s “not the simple ones.” [The UnSimple].

Then, Volodymyr Rafeyenko, who is now in Pittsburgh, at some point he was the most known Russian language novelist in Donetsk, in Donbas. Until 2013, he received two major Russian literary prizes and then he became a refugee. And he’s writing something very similar to Bulgakov. There is a Ukrainian tradition of humor and magic, unlike the Russian tradition of political satire. And of course, many people know Nikolai Gogol, but many people don’t know that he’s actually a Ukrainian author. He introduced hundreds of Ukrainian words into Russian literature. He wrote in Russian, but he wrote mostly about Ukraine and sometimes about St. Petersburg. His magical realism has influenced many Russian writers.

Alyssa Oursler Why do you think Ukraine has this history of magic and humor in its literature?

Kurkov: The culture of humor is connected with the resistance, with the difficulties Ukrainians had to go through in order to survive. Forced optimism [and] humor as a kind of medicine, something that keeps you going ahead, fighting.

I don’t think anybody analyzed it, but it was very obvious in the beginning of the full-scale invasion for six months, the Ukrainian soldiers were posting from the front lines, funny videos and jokes in order to keep up the morale of the civilian population behind them. And then they got tight. And the whole culture of soldiers’ jokes disappeared.

Alyssa Oursler: Humor is so powerful. In Kyiv, I interviewed a priest who was a prisoner of war and he was the funniest person I spoke to. He’d been through some terrible things. Sometimes I do struggle with what it’s okay to joke about, though. That kind of segues into my next question: when you write, do you feel like you’re holding a mirror to the world, or do you feel like you’re leaving it and trying to enter a different reality altogether?

Kurkov: I never think that I’m trying to enter a different reality. I’m just adapting reality in a way to be more funny, to be easier to understand. I mean, lots of strange things, they’re hidden. They are camouflaged in the real life. So, you take them as normality. You don’t see sometimes where the sane normality ends, and insane abnormality starts. The foreign readers who don’t know Ukraine reality, they think that everything is made up. Everything that is funny is made up and absurd. And I explain always that no, the border between real and surreal, in Ukraine, lies somewhere else than in the European society. Not everything that you find funny in the books is made up by me. It’s made up by my society, by my country, by my people, by the politicians, et cetera.

Alyssa Oursler: You have a nonfiction book called Our Daily War coming out in June, and you previously published another war chronicle called Diary of an Invasion. What do you think will happen in the months ahead with regard to the war in Ukraine?

Kurkov: Well, I think slowly Trump will understand that he cannot do any peace [deal], that he is not an authority for Putin. Knowing his character and his attitude … he will need to announce who is guilty, who prevented him from ending the war. Then, he will be distant from the Ukrainian situation … and will be more involved in Gaza or attack Iran. He will want to keep his image of a tough guy—a super man from a super country. He [wants] to show that he is capable of something incredible. He is not capable of something incredible in the Ukrainian situation. For this, some other country will be punished.