The novelist, openly opposed to Vladimir Putin, has traveled the world since the start of the war to “explain to Western audiences what they do not know and do not understand about Ukraine”.
The brutality of reality prevents successful Ukrainian novelist Andrei Kurkov from writing fiction. So instead he tells the world the story of the Russian invasion of his country. The 61-year-old Russian speaker, famous for his satirical novel The Penguinhas become something of a traveling cultural spokesperson for Ukraine’s efforts at war.
His smile belies the fatigue of having criss-crossed European and American literary festivals to discuss his latest work of non-fiction, Diary of an Invasion. “It is my contribution, it is in fact my duty”he told AFP during an interview at the literary festival Crossing border in the Dutch city of The Hague. “I am on the western front, not on the eastern front. The western front is less dangerous, but I think it’s just as important.”.
Table of life in Ukraine
As Ukrainian troops advance east and south, the writer’s job, he says, is “to explain to Western audiences what they don’t know and don’t understand about Ukraine.” Exempted from the current travel ban for Ukrainian men aged 18 to 60, Andrei Kurkov had a travel program “exhausting” to promote the book.
His vivid and heartbreaking diary paints a picture of life in Ukraine from December – as war threatened – until July. From his family’s flight from kyiv to stories of survival under siege and grandmothers carrying their roosters on trains, the writer uncovers often surreal details.
This same absurd look is at the origin of his novels translated into more than 30 languages. Among them, The Penguin, a post-Soviet classic about a writer and his pet penguin running into trouble with the mafia. More recent, his novel The gray bees tells the story of the last two men living in a village on the front lines of the conflict that has been raging since 2014 in eastern Ukraine.
But the third in a series of detective stories set in kyiv in 1919 has been stuck on page 71 since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24. “I can’t write fiction now because I only think about what’s happening in Ukraine”he says.
While on the road, the writer remains close to his country through friends and family: his British-born wife and two of his three adult children stayed there. Life got there to a certain extent “normalized” since the invasion with the reopening of cafes and restaurants.
An existential struggle
While the recent Russian missile attacks on the capital have again soured the mood, Ukrainians, if they are angry, “don’t give in”says Andrei Kurkov.
The novelist also says he wants to show Ukraine as a historical and independent country, and not just as part of the former Soviet Union. “The Ukrainians have never had a tsar, they are very opinionated. Russians prefer stability to freedom and the symbol of stability is the Tsar – and now they have Tsar Putin.”
In his diary, he portrays the war as an existential struggle, saying that “Ukraine will either be free, independent or European, or it will not exist at all”.
Vladimir Putin deemed ‘a little crazy’
The war could also have a personal cost for Andrei Kurkov. Born in the Leningrad region of the Soviet Union, he fears being part of a generation “executed perpetrators” as in the 1930s in the event of a Russian victory. “Any Ukrainian intellectual who is active is in danger”says the one who has meanwhile decided not to publish his books in Russian before the end of the war.
The writer is not shy about expressing his opinions on the larger political situation. Western support is “became a bit banal, trivial”, he believes that Ukrainian flags are becoming rare in European cities. Vladimir Putin is “a bit crazy”, judges the Ukrainian, according to whom the probability that he will use nuclear weapons is “10 to 15%”.
Billionaire Elon Musk, who notably proposed the recognition of Russian sovereignty over Crimea, is described by the writer as a“extraterrestrial”.