Kurkov

Andrey Kurkov’s latest novel to be translated into English, The Silver Bone, has begins in dramatic fashion. Its hero, Samson Kolechko, is walking in the streets of revolutionary Kyiv. It is the spring of 1919. Suddenly, two Russian Cossacks appear. They chop off his ear with a sabre before riding off. “Hot blood poured down his cheek and seeped under his collar,” Kurkov writes. Samson’s unfortunate father is cut down and killed.The severed right ear – recovered and placed in a tin – plays a central role in Kurkov’s…

The Ukrainian novelist Andrey Kurkov was having dinner with friends at his home in Kyiv on the evening of 24 February 2022 when Russia launched its full-scale invasion. Within hours he was advised that his name probably featured on a Russian list targeting prominent Ukrainian figures for arrest, or worse, and he should leave the city. As Kurkov and his wife joined the thousands of Ukrainians who grabbed what possessions they could and headed to the west of the country, he began a stream of articles, speeches, interviews,…

The Ukrainian writer Victoria Amelina did not leave the huge literary legacy that she might have done, had she been given more time. When a Russian rocket exploded in Kramatorsk on 27 June, the poet and novelist was just 37 years old. The rocket caused injuries from which she would not recover.Yet in her short life, Amelina still managed to achieve a great deal. She emigrated to Canada with her family at the age of 14, but decided to return to Ukraine, to her native city of Lviv, soon after. She graduated from the Lviv…

Strange things are happening in Lviv, a cosmopolitan metropolis in western Ukraine, in Andrey Kurkov’s Jimi Hendrix Live in Lviv. In the novel that made it to the International Booker prize longlist this year, seagulls are circling and the air smells salty even though Lviv is a considerable distance from the sea. PREMIUM The city of Lviv in Ukraine (Konstantin Brizhnichenko / Wikimedia Commons) The narrative begins at a cemetery, where a group of elderly hippies gather to pay tribute to Jimi Hendrix and, more…

Andrey Kurkov – Ukraine’s most celebrated living author – has stopped writing fiction. Since Russia’s full-blown invasion last year, he has become a roving ambassador for his country and its embattled people and culture. Kurkov’s reports on the war have appeared in newspapers and magazines across Europe and the US, including in the Guardian and the New Yorker. Radio 4 has broadcast his work as Letter from Ukraine.Last autumn, Kurkov published his Diary of Invasion. It is a vivid personal journal and a portrait of a nation…

It was a sad day in 2019 when scientists finally scotched the urban myth that London’s many wild parakeets are descended from a pair of pet birds released by Jimi Hendrix in his Carnaby Street days. Luckily, in his newly translated novel, the Ukrainian writer Andrey Kurkov rides to the rescue with some Hendrix lore of his own invention. According to the book, which has been longlisted for the International Booker prize, the guitar hero’s right hand was smuggled into the USSR with the connivance of the KGB and buried in a…

As a young man, Andrey Kurkov travelled round the USSR – on trains, riverboats and in lorries he’d hitched a lift on – interviewing former Soviet bureaucrats. He’d read a copy of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s prohibited The Gulag Archipelago and wanted to know more about the gulag itself. One judge he met owned up to signing 3,000 death warrants for people sentenced without trial. The experience was a lesson to Kurkov about the suppression of memory and truth: members of his own family had suffered forced deportations, famine…

What’s your perspective on everything happening around you? I don’t read the world press, but Ukraine is ready to fight till it’s dead or free. The defiance, the resistance is there. People are highly motivated. Every time Russia tried to attack, Ukraine became more and more consolidated against the common enemy. Now it’s like the climax, the whole nation is against Russia. A lot of people are appreciating the country’s independence, which they earlier took for granted. There are always traitors, who are happy that…