Andrei Kurkov (Budogoshch, Russia, 1961) is the leading Ukrainian writer today. Translated into more than 30 languages, his ‘Death with a Penguin’ (1996) revealed him as a humorist capable of dissecting the absurdities and concerns after the fall of the Soviet Union. Together with the French Pascal Quignard, the Danish Janne Teller and the Irish Colm Tóibín, she is the star of the official program of the European Union, guest of honor this year at the FIL in Guadalajara (Mexico) and who has integrated Ukraine as a country further. The author talks with this newspaper about ‘Samson and Nadiezhda’ (Alfaguara), a novel published this year in Spanish about the Russian invasion of Ukraine… one hundred years ago, towards the end of the First World War.
Things start strong: at the beginning of the play, some Cossacks on horseback cut off the ear of the protagonist, Samson, with a saber, while he watches his father being killed. The lack of an ear will give a superpower (we won’t say which one) to this kind of Dickensian orphan with similarities to other protagonists of Kurkov’s novels, that is, “people lost in reality,” he clarifies. “When reality changes, people is not able to adapt because he does not understand what is happening. In 1991, the Soviet Union disappeared, but the people stayed. There were no pensions, no social structures, writers did not have publishing houses… And the people who wanted to adapt quickly He became a criminal, because surviving as an honest person was much more difficult, without social structure, you couldn’t earn money. Samson sees seven different armies fighting in Kyiv and has no sympathy for any of them. He is flexible, he joins a force winner, but is prepared to abandon it if it becomes a loser.
Kurkov’s situation as a Ukrainian author in the Russian language is complex. “I write my non-fiction texts about the war in Ukrainian – those collected in ‘Diary of an Invasion’, of which I am already finishing the second volume – but my fiction, my novels, I write in Russian, it is my literary language. And, since booksellers in my country refuse to sell books in Russian, which is the language of the invader, what circulates there are translations into Ukrainian. I don’t have many reviews for that same reason… although I do have readers.” “I don’t have problems,” he admits, “but it’s unfortunate because there are nationalists who, if you speak Russian, dismiss you as Ukrainian, they don’t accept reality.”
How has the war affected your trademark sense of humor? “I completely lost, and for the second time, my sense of humor in February 2022 with the Russian invasion. The first had been in 2014, during the Euromaidan, the protests that left 100 dead. Humor has returned to me now, but in a distorted way, I no longer make jokes, it’s more irony, no longer that wild humor that I had.”
Before the war, he published two novels starring Samson, the one that has now been translated into Spanish, ‘Samson and Nadiezhda’, and the second part, ‘The Heart of Kyiv’. “I was writing the third when the invasion began, I had 70 pages in, and I was blocked, I was not able to write a fun fiction, I was not able to do it for 18 months. Now, last August, I managed 30 more pages but with enormous concentration difficulties “because of the war. I have imposed on myself the discipline of advancing two pages a week, or every two weeks, but it is difficult, I hope to finish it before next summer, it is about the disappearance of 28 Red Army soldiers in a sauna.” Each installment of Samsón “is more detective than the previous one, the first sets the period and the character. The second addresses the illegal trafficking of meat because the live animals belonged to the people but, once dead, the meat was property of the State” .
Halfway between Kafka, the picaresque and the English comedians, he argues that “it is the real situation that is Kafkaesque, not me. For example, when the Bolsheviks arrived, they did not have intellectuals or trained people, so they appointed, for example, to run the Education Department for uneducated people. Nobody wanted to work in the police either, so they forced soldiers to become police officers and, of course, many of them did not have any kind of moral qualities and thought that if “They had a gun, they could do whatever they wanted.”
The work that Samsón does as a newly recruited police officer – recovering stolen objects to return them to their owners – gives meaning to his life and also really existed. “There was a high rate of crime, although the Russian secret police were not involved in it and recruited, to fight crimes, proletarians, people from the street, since they distrusted the professional agents who worked for the previous police. Result? A paradise for criminals, faced by amateurs without any preparation.” Samson is “representative of the middle class, he becomes a policeman by accident and is at the same time a victim of the absence of law.”
Regarding the similarities between the time of his novel and the current one, he states that, “in 1919, Kyiv, like the entire Russian Empire, was strongly divided into classes, rich and poor. People basically wanted to survive and, to do so, They were hiding. The war was very complicated in Ukraine because there were seven armies fighting each other. So no one knew who would win in the end. Russia experienced a civil war after 1917 and, in Ukraine, it was that civil war between reds and whites, but at the same time a war for independence – there were three different Ukrainian armies fighting – which was proclaimed in 1918. The head of the government was Pavlo Skoropadsky, who had the support of the German army. The Germans stayed in Kyiv until 1919. Today It is very different, the population of Kyiv and the entire Ukraine is united because the enemy is one, not five or six. But the interesting thing is that the Russian Red Army attacked Kyiv in 1918 from the same northeastern part as it does now in 2022. And on October 10 of that year Kyiv was bombarded with missiles, which fell right on the same streets that were first attacked by the Red Army in 1918, including the old Parliament building.”
Among the curiosities, the considerable number of Chinese in the Soviet army. “The thousands who came to Kyiv were not professional soldiers or revolutionaries. They were people sent by China to northern Russia to build the railway from Petersburg to Murmansk. And there they were forgotten, at the beginning of the war, so, to survive, they “They enlisted in the Red Army because they were given food and clothing there.”
Various artisanal trades, such as shoemakers or tailors, parade through the narrative. “I wanted to recreate society as it was. No one remembers now that Kyiv was very cosmopolitan. For example, the majority of shoemakers were Syrian. The Bolsheviks issued new laws to control all craftsmen. Thus, it was decreed that all leather belonged to the State, so shoemakers could only make boots for soldiers, and for no one else.”
The play can also be seen as an atypical love story, “comparable to ‘Death with a Penguin’: in difficult times you survive better with your family than alone. Here, Samson’s widowed neighbor is worried because he is alone, so she organizes a meeting with Nadiezhda. And at first it seems like a meeting of convenience because then she will move to live in his apartment and, furthermore, since she is a Soviet worker, they will no longer be able to requisition more rooms for soldiers from him… but they fall in love. A love that is also slightly ideological”.
Kurkov is “happy that the European Union has included us as another European country in its FIL programming. For us, it is important to see that they accept us as part of European culture.”
Kurkov is currently teaching classes at Columbia University in New York, and invitations are flooding in from around the world. However, he has decided to return to Ukraine at the beginning of January, “because there are my children, my brother, my cousins, my papers, mine. I need to be there, understand what is happening, feel with all my people. I will never I will leave Kyiv if the war continues.” Regarding the conflict, he says that “I am an optimist by nature but I find it difficult when I look at reality, I think that politicians are not doing their job.”
After the decisive role of animals in his previous novels (penguins, bees…), we point out that this is perhaps his most human novel. “Yes,” he smiles, “but that’s because humans are treated like animals.”
