Diary of an Invasion by Andrey Kurkov review – Ukrainian life turned upside down
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Loading... - Ulrich Scholz
- 12 Oct 2022
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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 and decades in the camps, but such traumas weren’t ever discussed. For Kurkov – ethnically Russian and Russian-speaking but long based in Ukraine – truth-telling has been a mission ever since.
He’s best known for novels such as Death and the Penguin and Grey Bees. But after the Maidan protests and the annexation of Crimea in 2014, he put together a set of dispatches in a book called Ukraine Diaries. Now he’s done the same around this year’s Russian invasion, with journal entries that run until mid-July. The epilogue tells us to expect more; he’s still keeping a diary, sometimes in disbelief (“This new Ukrainian reality far outdoes my writer’s imagination”), sometimes in dismay (“Will I ever be able not to write about the war?”) and sometimes with a pleasing samurai aphorism in his head (“If you sit on the riverbank for a very long time, then sooner or later the corpse of your enemy will float past you downstream”).
The diaries begin last December, two months before the war did, and include items that might not seem pertinent: power cuts, Pushkin, Covid, drink-driving, hipster bookshops, school meals and whether Ukrainian is a sexier language than Russian. But underneath is a constant fear of imminent conflict. It’s not as if war isn’t happening already: Kurkov’s 2018 novel Grey Bees, set in the zone between Ukrainian troops and pro-Russian separatists, was a reminder of ongoing hostilities in the east. And he knows what’s coming will be bigger and worse, with “horrors that have no place in contemporary life”. Read More…
