Andrey Kurkov is widely regarded as the most internationally visible Ukrainian writer of his generation, bridging Ukrainian, Russian-language and Western literary worlds without losing cultural specificity. He challenges Western assumptions and humanises a country that is usually framed through headlines and news bulletins. He has sustained a blend of storytelling mastery, ethical integrity and acute journalistic observation over three decades.
In his novels he explores political oppression, moral ambiguity and the more bizarre aspects of post-Soviet life with wry humour and a fable-like surrealism. His clear, humane narrative voice has immense appeal, and his style is deceptively straightforward.
His diaries are a literary eyewitness testimony documenting events, people going about ordinary life the best they can in extraordinary circumstances, coping (or not) with fear and daily mood swings, and the endurance of an entire society under the shock of invasion. In Three Years on Fire, his third volume of diaries, he chronicles another year marked by grinding exhaustion, both personal and national. It documents how communities adapt and how culture persists in the face of existential threat – “We are tired of thinking about danger in general.”
“The war is a game of Russian roulette”
Ukraine’s drone production has surged massively, and online gambling has experienced a similar boom. Alcohol sales have gone up, and book sales down. In Belgorod just over the border, about 25 miles north of Kharkiv, children wear hooded bulletproof vests to school each costing about $400. The owner of a tropical fruit farm has developed a miniature banana palm allowing Ukrainians to grow bananas at home. Members of the State Travelling Circus are exempt from conscription, causing a wave of antagonism, yet professional clowns and acrobats go to war and get killed. “Is a circus necessary in wartime? Certainly it is! Children are growing up, they need to relax, to see something that makes them feel happy,” states Mykola Bilenky
“The Year of Getting Real”
Ukrainians who fled from annexed Crimea and areas of Donbas risk losing their property if they do not get a Russian passport. Many streets of Kyiv are lined with petrol powered generators replacing mains electricity. Parked cars belonging to military personnel are set on fire by teenagers who are paid by the Russian special services to do so. Soldiers write haiku about life at the front and the state of the soul. The mother of a young soldier, killed in battle, uses his compensation money to create a rehabilitation centre for veterans. The lack of demobilisation rules and procedures, and the rise in desertion, is causing “heated debate and frustration”. Sorcerers, astrologers, tarot readers and healers are banned by law from advertising their “magic services”. Roses bloom across the country in quiet tribute to a florist and soldier killed in Eastern Ukraine, remembered by those who once bought his flowers. In Pokrovsk, 7,500 residents refuse to leave a city that no longer exists – their homes obliterated but their will unbroken. Two second-row seats in a sold-out theatre stay empty, the ticket holders killed the night before in a drone attack. The diary of the murdered poet, Volodymyr Vakulenko, is dug up from under the cherry tree in his parents’ garden by his wife who gets it published. She is killed by a Russian missile.
“There was a full moon last night,” Larisa said. “Vampires always attack on a full moon.” She wasn’t’ kidding. She really thinks Putin is a vampire – Putin and all of Russia.
One of Kurkov’s many gifts is to humanise without sentimentalising. His dry humour is almost British, with a sense of absurdity like a Slavic Orwell, Amis, or Waugh. His humour is not just a part of his signature style, it is a cultural pressure gauge, capturing a society wrestling with instability, corruption and a traumatic history of invasion – underpinned by a fierce instinct for survival.
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