Andrei Kurkov (Budozhishch, Russia, 1961) is the main Ukrainian writer today. Translated into more than thirty languages, his Muerte con pingüino (1996) revealed him as a humorist capable of dissecting the absurdities and concerns after the fall of the Soviet Union. She is one of the main stars of the official program of the European Union, guest of honor this year at the FIL in Guadalajara (Mexico) and who has integrated Ukraine as another country. The author talks to this newspaper about Samsón y Nadiezhda (Alfaguara), a novel published this year in Spanish about the Russian invasion of Ukraine... but one hundred years ago, towards the end of the First World War.
Things start strong: at the beginning of the play, Cossacks on horseback cut off the ear of the protagonist, Samson, with a saber, while he watches his father being killed. The lack of an ear will give a superpower (we won't say which one) to this kind of Dickensian orphan with similarities to other protagonists of Kurkov's novels, that is to say, "people lost in reality - he clarifies -. When reality changes, people are not able to adapt to it, they do not understand what is happening. In 1991, the Soviet Union disappeared, but the people stayed. There were no pensions, no social structures, writers had no publishers... And people became criminals, because surviving as an honest person was much more difficult. Samson sees seven different armies fighting in Kyiv and feels no sympathy for any of them. He is flexible, he joins a winning force, he becomes a policeman by accident, but he is ready to leave it if it becomes a loser”.
Kurkov's situation as a Russian-language Ukrainian author is complex. "I write my non-fiction texts about the war in Ukrainian - those collected in Diario de una invasión, of which I am finalizing the second volume - but I always write my fiction in Russian. And, as booksellers in my country refuse to sell books in Russian, which is the language of the invader, what circulates there are Ukrainian translations. I don't have many reviews for the same reason...".
How has the war affected his trademark sense of humor? "I totally lost my sense of humor for the second time, in February 2022 with the Russian invasion. The first was in 2014, during the Euromaidan, the protests in which there were 100 deaths. Humor is coming back to me now but in a distorted way, I don't make jokes anymore, it's more irony".
Before the war, he published two novels starring Samsón, the one that has now been translated into Spanish, and the second part, El cor de Kíiv, still unpublished among us. "I was writing the third one when the invasion began, I had written seventy plans, and I blocked myself, I was not able to write a funny fiction, I was eighteen months without being able to write it. In August, I got thirty more planes." Each installment of Samsón "is more police than the previous one: the first situates the era and the character, and the second tackles the illegal trade in meat because live animals belonged to the people but, once dead, the meat became the property of the State".
Straddling Kafka, the picaresque and the English humorists, he argues that "it is the real situation that is Kafkaian, not me. For example, when the Bolsheviks arrived, they didn't have intellectuals or trained people, so they appointed uneducated people to run the Department of Education. Nobody wanted to work for the police either, and they didn't trust the old ones, so they forced the soldiers – and people on the street – to become police, and many of them thought that, with a gun in their hand, they could do whatever they want For the criminals it was a party, because they were facing a completely amateur police". Samsón's job is to recover stolen objects to return them to their owners.
Regarding the similarities between the time of the novel and the present, he states that, "in 1919, Kyiv, like the entire Russian empire, was strongly divided into classes, rich and poor. Russia experienced a civil war after 1917, and in Ukraine it was the same war between reds and whites, but also a war for independence - there were three different Ukrainian armies fighting - which was proclaimed in 1918 and which counted with the support of the German army. The Germans stayed until 1919. Today is different, the population is very united because the enemy is one, not five or six”.
Various artisanal trades, such as shoemakers or tailors, parade through the narrative. "I wanted to recreate society as it was. Nobody remembers now that Kyiv was very cosmopolitan. For example, most of the shoemakers were Syrian. The Bolsheviks passed laws to control the artisans, and it was impossible to buy shoes, because it was established that all leather belonged to the State, so the shoemakers could only make boots for the soldiers.”
The work can also be seen as an atypical love story, "comparable to Muerte con pingüino: in difficult times it is better to survive in a family than alone. Here, Samson's neighboring widow is worried because he is alone; therefore, he arranges a meeting with Nadiezhda. At first it seems like a matter of convenience, because that way she moves to live in his flat and also, since she is a Soviet worker, they will no longer be able to requisition more rooms for soldiers from him... but they fall in love".
Kurkov currently teaches at Columbia University, in New York, and is receiving invitations from around the world. However, he decided to return to live in Ukraine at the beginning of January, "because there are my children, my brother, my cousins, my papers... mine. I need to be there, understand what's going on, feel with my people. I will never leave Kyiv, at least in war".
