Grey Bees, Andrey Kurkov
(2018, Moscow; 2020, English translation, Boris Dralyuk, MacLehose Press)
Sergey Sergeyich lives in a deserted village with one other resident in the no-mans-land between Ukrainian forces and the Russians in the Donbas. The year is 2016 or thereabouts. He has refused to leave the village because of his bees, but artillery exchanges between the opposing forces have been increasing, so as spring comes he decides to take his bees south for the season to a place where they can make their honey in peace. Crossing internal borders controlled by Ukrainian or Russian authorities,
he camps at first near a village where the widowed shopkeeper woos him to move in with her for life. However, when he is attacked by a crazed one-eyed veteran of the Donbas war, he continues on to the Crimea, planning to install his hives beside those of a Tatar beekeeper he once met at a workshop. But this Tatar friend has been abducted by the Russians, leaving his wife and two teen-aged children with the faintest of hopes that he’s still alive. When the son. too, is arrested, the wife begs Sergey to take her daughter away from the Crimea.
The novel is a richly detailed description of life for ordinary people in the “grey zone” of the Donbas during the years before the outright Russian invasion of Ukraine, a life of shortages and danger now common in most of that unfortunate country. It is also a distant version of the Odyssey, though Sergey is an ordinary villager, a thinking person but not a leader of men. The pace of the novel is slow, like Sergey’s life. He thinks of his ex-wife and daughter in a far city; he worries about an unburied corpse near the Ukrainian lines; he deals with the only other resident of his village, a Russian sympathizer and wily exploiter he has disliked since childhood; he worries about his bees in the cold winter.
And later he relishes the warmth and beauty of the south, and wonders whether to remain with his Circe.
A reader with patience for such a narrative will gain considerable insight into the conflicting currents of Ukrainian life. The Ukrainians are not an undifferentiated mass, nor are the Russians. Tensions between those who feel Russian and those who identify with a separate Ukraine, between Christians and Tatar Muslims, northerners and southerners, whites and people of color, city folk and villagers, permeate everyday life. A profoundly decent man, Sergey finds himself an alien anywhere outside of his own village and its nearest neighbor.
The narrator’s voice is calm, expressive of a rural mentality that is neither naive nor cynical. None of the novel’s themes—including Russian deceit and oppression— is preached to us by this voice or stated by it in the abstract. Any ideas are engrossingly embodied in Sergey’s life as he sees it, day by day. I found Grey Bees a haunting and illuminating experience.