Grey Bees

February 7, 2022
In Kurkov’s heartwarming and bittersweet latest (after The Bickford Fuse), a beekeeper determines to take care of his bees during wartime. Sergey Sergeyich, 49, and his lifelong frenemy Pashka Khmelenko are the only residents remaining in Little Starhorodivka, a village inside eastern Ukraine’s 450-kilometer “grey zone,” the no-man’s land between Ukrainian troops and pro-Russian separatists backed by Moscow. In the winter of 2017, Sergey befriends a Ukrainian soldier and Pashka does occasional favors for the Russians, but the men’s complicated friendship endures. In March, Sergey heads south with his six hives seeking more peaceful fields for his bees to forage. In Vesele, he takes up with a widowed shopkeeper, but hits the road after being attacked following the funeral of a local soldier killed in a skirmish at Donbas. Sergey tracks down the family of a Crimean Tatar beekeeper whom he’d met at a convention years before, but realizes the Russian annexation of Crimea has done little to bring peace or stability to the region. The old-fashioned, ambulatory story slows to a crawl by the end, but Kurkov’s well-crafted characters make it all worthwhile. It adds up to a wistful elegy for a nation being slowly torn apart.

April 1, 2022
A Ukrainian beekeeper strives in the face of hardship to make the most of his simple life. Until it was thrust into the headlines by Russia's invasion in February 2022, Ukraine was far from the minds of most Western readers. Through the story of Sergey Sergeyich, a divorced, disabled Ukrainian mine safety inspector and passionate beekeeper, Kurkov transforms the abstractions of geopolitics into an intensely human account of compassion and persistence. Along with Pashka, his lifelong frenemy, Sergeyich is one of the two remaining inhabitants of Little Starhorodivka, a village in Ukraine's "Grey Zone"--the front line between the nation's troops and pro-Russian separatists in the Donbas region. The village, so small it has only two main streets whose names Sergeyich decides to reverse in a moment of whimsy, has been without electricity for three years. Through a harsh winter, as the sounds of distant shelling periodically shatter the silence, Sergeyich survives on a diet of buckwheat, millet, and the occasional egg, heating his home with a coal-fired potbelly stove and lighting it with candles scavenged from the ruins of the village's bombed-out church. Pashka has secured for himself a marginally more comfortable lifestyle due to his friendship with the separatist forces. With the onset of warmer weather, Sergeyich impulsively decamps with his six beehives on an odyssey across a war-ravaged landscape that will eventually bring him to the Crimean home of Akhtem, a Tatar beekeeper he met at a convention years earlier. But when he arrives, he finds himself more connected to Akhtem's family than he ever anticipated, in the process discovering a common humanity that transcends borders and faiths. Kurkov's prose is as unassuming as his characters. In his portrayal, Sergeyich is an Everyman embroiled against his will in "a war in which he [has] taken no part." The humble pleasure he derives from tending to his bees and his determination simply to endure another difficult day make for a subtly inspirational tale. A gentle story of survival in a war-scarred land.

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Starred review from June 3, 2022

Written in 2018, this recently translated work from Kurkov (Death and the Penguin), one of Ukraine's great writers, illuminates a world tragedy today. Sergey Sergeyich, a divorced disabled mine safety inspector and devoted beekeeper, lives in a small village in the grey zone, an area in the Donbas region that separates larger Ukraine from Russian-backed separatists. With no electricity, mail, or food, Sergey survives on rations from neighboring towns, candles from the destroyed church, and sheer resourcefulness. Visits from Pashka, a childhood frenemy, and Ukrainian soldier Petro relieve the boredom. Increased shelling and the approach of better weather motivate Sergey to find a more peaceful place for his bees to pollinate. He travels first to a Ukrainian village, but when townsfolk become suspicious and violent, he moves on to Russian-controlled Crimea. There he calls upon the Tartar beekeeper, Akhtem, only to find that he disappeared, and endures confrontations and interrogations from both Ukrainian and Russian authorities even as he befriends Akhtem's family. VERDICT Kurkov successfully portrays the tensions of living in a war zone in a story featuring a naive Everyman intent on surviving, while giving readers keen insight into Ukraine today.--Jacqueline Snider

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