ANDREI KOURKOF, Gray Bees, translated by Dimitris Triantafyllidis, Kastaniotis publications, p. 426
The book was written in 2018, translated into German in 2019, once again making Andrei Kurkov the most translated Russian-speaking Ukrainian author in the West.
In Greece, the novel was slow to be translated: it was published in March 2022, as soon as the so-called Special Military Operation of Russia on the territory of Ukraine began. The non-specialist reader can easily pass the events of the book for recent, although the story unfolds in 2017, in the third year of the civil war in Donbas, with the official Ukrainian state and the so-called separatists of the breakaway People’s Republic of Ukraine at war. of Donetsk.
Donbas is Ukraine’s most populous region with 4 million inhabitants and has always spoken Russian, as do 40% of Ukraine’s population. In September 2017, the Ukrainian Parliament passed a new amendment to the Law “On Education”, which provided for the gradual ban on the use of the Russian language and other languages of the ethnic groups of Ukraine in the education system. Thus, not only Pushkin, Chekhov, Tolstoy, but also the Ukrainian Gogol and the Ukrainian-born Bulgakov were thrown out of the school curriculum.
However, the novel Gray Bees is written in Russian, like the rest of Andrey Kurkov’s books, it is freely distributed in the Ukrainian market, and he states that he uses the Ukrainian language only in his official appearances in the country.
A lot has happened and changed in the four years that separate the Gray Bees from the war. So have the statements of the author, who prophesies the end of the novel in general, because “reality is more terrible and dramatic than any fictional story”, and the end of Russian civilization in particular, since his once native country has returned to barbarism. …
“Today only the truth must be written… Only nonfiction literature has a say. Those who can write and witnessed one of the most heinous crimes of the 21st century, have a duty to record and preserve the evidence of the crime that was committed…”, the author said in May 2022 at the lecture he gave at the Skirball Center in New York.
The novel Gray Bees, therefore, should be understood as a “last novel”. At least, for Kurkov himself: since then he has written only one children’s book, The Hedgehog and the Gift Mess (2020).
My goal is not to analyze the causes and outcome of the Russia-Ukraine war. But let me point out the responsibilities of every writer – especially a popular writer – towards the readers. These responsibilities have always weighed on writers in Russia.
Gray Bees has the same raison d’être as Galeotti’s Brief History: to target Russia and draw the bloody line from Stalin to Putin. Although – I remember – the book was not written today, but six years ago.
Kurkov deals with a truly shocking subject: life in the gray area, in a deserted village on the front line, where only two men remained, a life on the border of reality and absurdity. The motif of the simple, insignificant man, crushed in the gears of the monster state, is a classic of Russian literature, especially of Gogol and Bulgakov, of whom Kurkov professes to be an admirer. Kurkov also wanted to create this simple man who experiences tragic situations, but he succeeded only in terms of color: a gray hero in the gray, laughable reality, who speaks and thinks gray. So when you finish reading, you feel a numbness, a bewilderment: what did the author finally want to say through the 426 pages? The reader is, of course, also confused by the mistakes and mistakes in the translation, where the “sincere question” is rendered as “indignation”, the “wicked countenance” as “particularly treacherous”, the “soldiers of the Russian International” as “Russian internationalist soldiers “. But it is the least that should concern us. An otherwise gray text, no amount of translation will either improve or spoil it.
Kurkov’s hero, Sergei, is a beekeeper, his only concern is his bees, how to protect them from war. His life has changed little since 2014: he broke up with his wife before the events, he never had friends, and the war only deprived him of electricity and some food. Lonely he was, lonely he remained. His attitude towards everything that happens is indeterminate, the minimal comments are extremely banal and irrelevant. The war, far more tragic precisely because it is civil, is absent from the book, and when it appears, fragmentarily and spasmodically, it is more like a hide and seek. And when the author proceeds with reasoning (through the mouth of his hero), we encounter absolute clichés and wonder if such a hero has a place in literature: “Fear is something invisible, subtle and different. Something like a virus or a bacterium.” “Even the crows were silent, though who can forbid them to crow?” On the photo with his wife: “We look so satisfied and happy, as if we ate borscht. We smile, we look at the photographer as if we want to eat him.”
Gray bees abound in such reflections. One even, at the end of the book, encloses all his wisdom: “People are worse than bees… That is, there are people worse than bees, they exist like bees. But people better than bees probably don’t exist”.
Otherwise, life on both sides of the front flows without tension, with plenty of honey, plenty of vodka and strange dreams of the hero…
*Evgenia Kritsevskaya is a classical philologist
