Why Ukrainian author Andrey Kurkov is avoiding predictions

The award-winning novelist, whose storylines are known for their prescience, tells Al Majalla how Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has irrevocably changed him

Bertrand GUAY / AFP

Ukrainian writer Andrey Kurkov poses in Paris on November 8, 2022, after he was awarded the Medicis Foreign Literature Prize for his novel Les Abeilles Grises.

Why Ukrainian author Andrey Kurkov is avoiding predictions

Nesrein El-Bakhshawangy

last update on 13 Oct 2024

Andrey Kurkov is a Ukrainian writer known for novels chronicling the country’s politics, society, and culture, with plotlines that have a habit of being mirrored in reality for a few years after publication. He has, for instance, written of a Ukraine-Russia gas crisis and—as in The President’s Last Love—of a Ukrainian presidential candidate being poisoned. Both later played out, the latter involving politician Viktor Yushchenko, who was poisoned with dioxin in September 2004, four months before he became the country’s president.

Born in St Petersburg in 1961, when it was the Soviet city of Leningrad, Kurkov writes his books in Russian, but his poems and prose are in Ukrainian. Many of his books have been translated into English, and in recent years, he has won several awards. A former prison guard, Kurkov is also a journalist and an acclaimed children’s writer who, in 2018, was elected president of PEN Ukraine, a human rights organisation that brings writers together to protect free speech.

He spoke to Al Majalla recently about his work, humour, politics, and why he prefers not to make predictions right now.

Some of your novels directly deal with political issues that later transpire, like presidential candidate poisoning. You also foresaw Vladimir Putin’s return to the Russian presidency. How do you foresee future political events?

I’m not really happy about being able to predict the future. Maybe it happened because I liked playing chess as a child and I learned to see ahead to the next moves. After years watching political developments on TV, I see this as just another game of chess.

I was trying to trace and follow the subjective logic of every story. Strangely enough, it’s difficult to predict positive developments. It’s easier to predict something negative, something tragic. That’s why I’m not trying to predict anything at the moment.

You were a prison guard in the military and began writing children’s books during that time. How do you reconcile writing for children with being responsible for guarding others?

I spent 18 months as an army prison warden, which was quite an interesting time. I was roughly five years older than any other soldier, so my perception of army life and prison life was obviously different. I was writing about what I was seeing happening around me. With the eyes of an author, I was looking for stories and finding a lot. But even taking this into consideration, the general atmosphere of prison was, of course, very depressive.

I needed some kind of psychological relaxation, an escape from reality. I found that in story-writing for children because, when you write for children, you become a child yourself. You need to use their language, images, and easy-to-understand metaphors. So, although my main stories for children were written in Odessa prison, I continued to write them afterwards as well, and even now, I try to write at least once a year.

I think happy endings are very important. I always want to give positive energy to my readers.

Andrey Kurkov, Ukrainian novelist

What inspired you to write Jimi Hendrix Live in Lviv?

In 2010, Lviv's mayor, Andriy Sadovyi, invited me to have coffee. He told me I always write about Kyiv and wondered if I would like to write at least one book about Lviv. He was asking different writers to set their stories in his city.

I know Lviv very well. The first time I visited this wonderful western Ukrainian city was in the 1970s, and I've been there dozens of times since. It is a magical place and a major hippie centre in Soviet times, which is why one of the main stories in the book is about the history of West Ukrainian hippies.

I met at least five of them—now old and retired—when writing this book. We are still friends with one of the main characters of the novel, Alec Olisevich, who became the main chronicler of Ukraine's hippie movement during the Soviet era.

This book has six characters, three of whom are real personalities from Lviv, with their real names and addresses. They are all friends I knew before writing the novel. I got their permission to use them as characters. While working on it, I visited Lviv every month to read the chapters and get their approval.

Of course, Jimi Hendrix was a hippie idol. I listened to his music thanks to my elder brother Misha, who was also a hippie at that time. I'm very happy that foreign readers received the novel well, especially in the US and UK.

Your acclaimed novel Death and the Penguin has a darkly comic tone. How do you balance humour with the more serious aspects of the story?

I wrote Death and the Penguin in 1995. The period from the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 to the late 1990s was quite gloomy and dangerous. Many thought about leaving the country and emigrating to Germany, Canada, and the US. The novels being written at that time were 'blackish prose'. The writers didn't like the country they described or the characters, and the stories never had happy endings.

I started writing prose by creating political and non-political jokes. So, my love for humour, especially black humour, comes from this Soviet—and, at the same time, anti-Soviet—tradition of joke-telling. Of course, since I'm a born optimist, I love my characters and my stories. I think happy endings are very important in every book because they give the reader energy. If the ending is bad or tragic, this takes energy away. I have always wanted to give positive energy to my readers.

In your latest novel, The Silver Bone, a mysterious silver bone plays a significant role. What does it represent? How does it drive the plot forward?

I have published more than 20 novels in Ukraine, and many have medical elements in their plots. My mother and grandmother were doctors, so I grew up in a house with a big medical library. As a child, I even preferred books about medicine to books for children.

I am definitely a different person now than I was on 24 February 2022. I will never be able to return to my previous state of mind and soul.

Andrey Kurkov, Ukrainian novelist

So, this is one of the reasons why a silver bone plays a major role in my historical crime novel, but mainly this book is about Kyiv in 1919, when it was controlled by the Bolsheviks and the Red Army for the second time. This is a novel about the survival of Kyivites over a four-year period in which six armies fought for control of the city.

In your novels, you blend elements of crime mystery and magical realism. How do you maintain a cohesive narrative while balancing these genres?

I don't use any measurements to check the balance when I write. This is my perception of the world. I grew up laughing at Soviet absurdities. Now, I can find absurdities in any country and system. Actually, it's not always absurdities. Sometimes, it is just differences in normalities.

It's partially my habit, my love for stories set on the borderland between realism and surrealism, between something very serious, dramatic, and funny.

Your writing is celebrated for its detailed and atmospheric descriptions of settings, particularly the cities and landscapes of Ukraine. Do you believe that literature has a role in preserving the memory of cities?

I do believe that. There is another map of the world where you have cities instead of countries, and these cities are the main characters in major novels from past and modern literature. Think of Dickens' London, for example. I spent most of my writing life creating a literary portrait of Kyiv.

In a way, I think I already did what I could. Now, I write about Kyiv during the war from 1918 to 1921. For this, I am collecting real memories—from memoirs, notes, and archives—to preserve the real thoughts, feelings, and agitations of people who lived in Kyiv long before I was born.

You recently wrote that your sleep 'is different now... unstable, anxious, and intermittent,' as if listening to the silence. How has this war changed you as a person and as a writer? Is political partisanship in war logical?

I am definitely a different person now than I was on 24 February 2022. I will never be able to return to my previous state of mind and soul. I couldn't write fiction for over two years (after the invasion). I wrote only about the war and about life in times of war. Now, I write both, but there is less humour and more bitterness. I can't change anything about today's situation; I can only describe it for future readers.

I'm less interested in pure politics now. I don't follow parliament meetings; I follow developments on the frontlines and the trajectories of ballistic missiles. Our world is slowly going crazy. It started with one crazy country, and this provoked a chain reaction, the end of which we have not yet seen.

How has your background in journalism influenced your fiction writing?

I have several backgrounds, including journalism. I worked as a film scriptwriter for many years and taught scriptwriting for theatre and cinema at the University of Kyiv. I think this influenced my fiction more than journalism, because when you write a script you imagine what is happening visually. I write my novels in this way. I imagine everything, I see the faces of all my characters.

Finally, who are your biggest literary influences, and how have they shaped your writing?

Some of my favourite writers since adolescence are Franz Kafka, Knut Hamsun, Albert Camus, Nikolai Gogol, and Michael Bulgakov. More recently, I would add Philippe Sands and Martin Pollock to that list. They are two great nonfiction authors of our times.

+ / -