Recommendations from the Kyiv Independent: "Grey Bees" by Andrey Kurkov (Patreon)

Dear readers,

This is Anya Belokur from the social media team with a review of Andrey Kurkov’s Grey Bees, a novel about the ambiguous zones of both military conflicts and human nature.

The first thing that strikes you when you open this book is that it was published in 2018, right in between Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and invasion of eastern Ukraine and the 2022 full-scale invasion. The author wrote an introduction for the first English translation of the book, where he says “I do not know when I will next return to eastern Ukraine, or when the conflict will end. But I sincerely hope the war leaves the residents of the grey zone alone – that it goes away, and that the honey made by the bees of Donbas loses its bitter aftertaste of gunpowder.”

My copy also included a 2022 author’s note acknowledging the start of the full-scale invasion, which felt fitting, but depressing in contrast to the hope of several years prior.

The novel’s story begins in the grey zone, the area of eastern Ukraine rendered unlivable due to Russian occupation and active military conflict – except for those who choose to continue living there. The grey zone is an area of contradiction, where small semblances of civilian life carry on in parallel to active fighting mere kilometers away. Many who identify as Ukrainian citizens carry Russian passports. The novel’s main character speaks Russian but considers himself Ukrainian (a trait shared with the author himself). All of these contradictions and more exist in the grey zone, both bureaucratically and metaphorically.

The plot is devoid of military action or graphic descriptions of war; rather, it’s driven by human interactions, with the war as a constant backdrop. The protagonist journeys from rural Donetsk to Russian-occupied Crimea, witnessing the ways in which the circumstances of living creatures are dictated by the larger forces of war and governance. As far as books about Russia’s invasion go, this one is pleasantly upbeat and not too focused on inundating the reader with facts; it’s a novel that reads like a novel.

Although the story takes place in the years between the annexation of Crimea and the start of the full-scale invasion, its plot and characterizations are not tethered to a specific moment of the war. It could be set in 2024 with some relatively small changes to detail. I read this book in the weeks following Russia’s capture of Avdiivka in the protagonist’s native Donetsk, and often thought of the real people currently living within the surrealism of the grey zone. Unfortunately, the author’s wish has yet to come true, and his book remains extremely relevant six years after publication.