Andrey Kurkov's latest novel translated into English, Grey Bees, gives us a character of immediate interest and appeal: Sergey Sergeyich. Sergey lives in the Donbas of eastern Ukraine, in the "grey zone," a ribbon of territory separating the “Ukes” (Ukrainians) from the "separatists.” Though set before 2022’s Russian invasion, we read the novel as a continuation, really, of the decade-long military conflict.
Sergey lives in a depopulated village, Starhorodivka. Only he and his "frenemy," Pashka, decide to wait out the war. Absolute stoics, they try to ignore shelling in the distance and survive with scant resources. Although Sergey guesses Pashka might get food from his separatist buddies, Sergey’s pension checks stopped years ago, and he has one source of income: his beehives.
Sergey’s love for his bees knows no bounds. He trades honey in nearby villages for food. Some lard, an egg or two, and noodles fried up on his potbelly stove make for a feast.
Bees are not only his livelihood, but also an anchor of sanity in his world that's imploded. After a while, and after an extended stay in another Donbas village, Sergey decides his bees would be happier foraging for pollen in another part of the Ukraine: Crimea, where he knows a Tartar beekeeper he met at a convention in years gone by. He has an address and off he goes with his six beehives strapped to a trailer he pulls with his indefatigable Lada sedan.
Except Crimea is now in the hands of the Russian Federation. He learns Akhtem, his erstwhile Tartar beekeeper companion, has disappeared, so he pitches a tent by his beehives on Akhtem’s family land. The interlude in Crimea is not without lyric beauty, but also interrupted by scenes of control-freak Russian bureaucracy.
Certainly, Grey Bees is an odyssey, but it’s about something greater than Sergey--the sacred duty he has to his bees. Why "grey bees"? What Kurkov means has ambiguity. But in one sense, in the novel's foreword, Kurkov wants for Sergey's bees a world in which the pollen they collect is free of the taste of gunpowder.
Read Grey Bees for another of Kurkov's enduring, dark humor fictions and the character of Sergey Sergeyich. The beekeeper’s devotion in a world gone mad with war is moving. How can one not see the humanity of one who watches over his charges, somnolent in their hives, and will sleep by them in his tent, but first he abides with the lit candle in front of an icon: his cardboard Saint Nicholas the Wonderworker. Truly, Sergey is a wonderworker too!
Grey Bees by Andrey Kurkov, translated from the Russian by Boris Dralyuk, Maclehose Press, London, 2020, ebook ISBN 978-0-85705-9369.
Image credit: cwmars.overdrive.com
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