In Mala Starogradivka, a tiny village wedged in the “grey zone” which separates Ukraine from Donbass occupied by pro-Russian separatists, there is no longer a living soul. The war that has been raging there since 2014 has scared everyone away. Everyone, except for two “childhood enemies” who have been watching each other like earthenware dogs for three years.
Both are almost 50 years old. On the one hand, there is Pashka, a precocious and solitary retiree who believes that after the war everything will be beautiful again. Like before. On the other, Sergeyitch, whose wife and daughter took over the management of the city a few years ago.
A former miner suffering from silicosis, Sergeyitch, the terribly endearing protagonist of Andrei Kurkov’s new novel, The gray bees, is a no-nonsense beekeeper who lives by clinging to his bottles of ratafia and his hives: that’s all he has left. He in whom the war had given rise to “a certain incomprehension as well as a sudden indifference to everything around him”.
Through slow adventures, with blows of solidarity and small glasses of vodka, immobility and mutual mistrust will give way to the beginnings of complicity in the two men, fueled by resourcefulness and a common feeling of helplessness in the face of events.
But also fueled by fear. “Fear is something invisible, tenuous, multifaceted. Like a virus or bacteria. The fear that floats in the water they drink and in the air they breathe. The fear fed at a fixed time by the Russian and Ukrainian camps which send rockets over the heads of these two irreducible across this soft border changed into a front line.
Andreï Kurkov, born in 1961 in Leningrad, in the Soviet Union, is undoubtedly the best known of Ukrainian writers. If he has lived since his early childhood in kyiv, Ukraine, he writes in Russian and proudly claims, and for a long time, his “political” belonging to Ukrainian culture.
In The Penguin (Liana Levi, 2000), her first novel, an unemployed journalist lived with a penguin after the bankruptcy of the kyiv zoo. With his biased humor and his poetry, he painted an uncompromising picture of the former Soviet Union, delivered to corruption and organized crime. A fertile furrow that he will end up digging in several of his novels.
Her new novel, The bees gray, of course echoes the present. But, true to form, the novelist casts his ironic gaze on all things. Everything is gray here, a little blurry, devoid of black and white as well as colors. Even Kurkov’s black humor takes on a somewhat sad languor. His theater of the absurd thus takes on darkly realistic airs.
Wanting to take his bees to peace, far from the sound of bombs, the beekeeper begins a road tripinvoluntarily, zigzagging behind the wheel of his old Lada “Jiguli”, and will take us from the gray expanses of his Donetsk to sunny Tatar Crimea, occupied – and corrupted – by the forces Russians. Once again, Kurkov deploys his beautiful humanity and distributes mocking winks.
Like when in this shop in Crimea, a woman tells Sergeyitch that we are in “holy Russian land”. With lip service, the beekeeper expresses doubt, suggests that things in history can have happened in a thousand ways, but is blindly answered: “Things happened as Putin said […]. Putin is not lying to me. »