The Scars of Ukraine’s War, Illuminated in Fiction

In his new novel, “Gray Bees,” Kurkov has hive-minded bugs do the work of explaining the place he thinks humankind has gone awry. The e-book is a few beekeeper named Sergey Sergeyich who lives in Donbas’s “grey zone,” between areas managed by the Ukrainian navy and people within the fingers of Russia-backed separatists. (Apparently, Gogol’s breakthrough work was “Evenings on a Farm Close to Dikanka,” a narrative assortment narrated by a Ukrainian beekeeper.) Firmly impartial, Sergey has no canine on this combat — simply his bees. Certainly one of his most extended issues of latest political realities is what is going to occur to his regional society for beekeepers if Donetsk had been to grow to be unbiased. “Was there a society in Donetsk today?” he wonders. “If there was, it wouldn’t be the area’s, it will be the ‘republic’s,’ and that meant he was now not a member.” Kurkov’s translator, Boris Dralyuk, renders the heat of Sergey’s internal voice from the unique Russian with out letting the earnestness creep into the saccharine.

When elevated shelling begins to disturb the hives, Sergey masses them into his Lada and begins driving from city to city, ultimately making his approach to Crimea. Over the course of the novel, his resolve to remain impartial is shaken, notably when he sees how Russian occupying forces have handled his beekeeper good friend, a Crimean Tatar named Akhtem. There are hints of an awakening. He notices his bees, which he had as soon as heralded as a species that had achieved pure communism, refusing to make room for a newcomer from one other hive. Abruptly their communalism seems to be like little greater than merciless tribalism. Sergey reprimands them: “Why are you appearing like folks?”

In a novel about neutrality and so-called grey zones, the Russian characters in “Gray Bees” come off to me as eerily chilly, virtually monstrous — snipers, cops, Putin apologists — as if the actions of the Russian authorities had been in some methods reflective of a deeper nationwide character. It remembers Kurkov’s professed view of Russian and Ukrainian folks as essentially completely different, every with a novel “mentality.” As Putin tries to justify his occupation on the grounds of a shared historical past, there’s certainly a robust present inside Ukraine’s intelligentsia towards highlighting what makes the cultures and literary traditions distinct. Any suggestion of syncretism or co-influence feels tantamount to treason.

But this divvying up dangers underselling the range of influences on Ukrainian literature, in addition to the indelible imprints that writers from Ukraine have made on Russian letters, from Gogol to Isaac Babel to Vasily Grossman. As Ostashevsky places it: “Russian language and literature had been usually influenced by, or just made in, Ukraine.” As proven in these two books, written in the identical language by one Ukrainian writer and one Russian, grey areas are the place two sides blur into one another. Now, Ukrainians are preventing for the fitting to be many individuals, talking many languages, refusing to be separated.

Jennifer Wilson is a contributing essayist on the E-book Assessment.