Like much literature from Kurkov’s part of the world, his novels have a brooding, lugubrious quality, reflecting the absurdities of Communist life and the broken dreams that have followed it. There are surreal plotlines set in the post-Soviet rust belt, featuring armoured trains and ships full of dynamite. His latest book, Grey Bees, is about a retired safety inspector turned beekeeper who shuttles back and forth across the Grey Zone, the no-man’s land between Ukraine and its pro-Kremlin breakaway republics.
Kurkov’s work, though, does reflect a Ukraine that is shedding its “Penguin” mindset, no matter how fitfully. No writer in Russia has developed in a similar fashion, partly because of Putin’s repression. A land once famed for its dissident literary tradition has no domestic equivalent now of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Kurkov laments.
“I think the dissident tradition has been strangled under Putin,” he says. “Many writers actually write on order for Putin, and are taken, at state expense, to book fairs around the world. Publishers in Europe have been looking round in recent weeks to find Russian writers with things to say, and have struggled.”
So why, then, have Ukraine and Russia gone such separate ways, the former seeking EU membership while the latter slips back into totalitarianism? “The history is different,” Kurkov explains. “Russians always had monarchy – they might fall out with one tsar and kill them, but they would then adore the next one.”
Ukrainians, he points out, never had a tsar, and also had a history – albeit a limited one – of voting. As such, its people are now far more democratically minded – electing (and sometimes overthrowing) six different presidents in the past 20 years. In that time, Russia has just had Putin.
“Putin is getting old now, and just wants to be talked about in the history books as the man who restored the Russian empire,” Kurkov adds. “He doesn’t care about the deaths of Russian soldiers, or the ruined economy.
“About 80 per cent of Russians still support him, because they don’t have alternative information. But his position is getting weaker every day. I’d say it’s about 50-50 now whether he stays in power.”
If he is toppled, the war will stop. “But that doesn’t mean Russia will be friendly to Ukraine and to the West,” says Kurkov. “What will happen next is not clear.”
Andrey Kurkov’s latest novel, ‘Grey Bees’ (Hachette, £8.99), is out now
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