The Scars of Ukraine’s War, Illuminated in Fiction

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/29/books/review/belorusets-kurkov-lucky-breaks-grey-bees.html

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LUCKY BREAKS by Yevgenia Belorusets | Translated by Eugene Ostashevsky

GREY BEES by Andrey Kurkov | Translated by Boris Dralyuk

In 2019, I read about a condition called uterine prolapse; it occurs when weakened pelvic muscles cause the uterus to detach, drop down into the vagina, and in some cases, even slip out. I learned that more cases than usual were being reported in a city in the Donbas region of Ukraine, where skirmishes between Russian-backed separatists and the Ukrainian Army had left the area war-ravaged long before the full-scale invasion currently strangling the country. A gynecologist in Avdiivka, a suburb of Donetsk, told The New York Times that the uptick in cases was most likely due to a combination of stress and heavy lifting; damage to pipes and other infrastructure forced residents to carry pails of water up flights of stairs. One woman with the condition, Liudmila, said she now had to decide between an expensive medical procedure and repairing her roof, which had been destroyed by shelling. “The winter is coming,” she said, “and I am going to stay either without a roof over my head or with my uterus falling out.”

In “Lucky Breaks,” a newly translated short-story collection by the Ukrainian writer and photographer Yevgenia Belorusets, battle scars are more often psychological than physical. Her characters, much like Liudmila, have not been afforded the time or space to attend to the shocks of war; life, or something like it, must go on for these women. Many are internal refugees who fled the brutal fighting that first broke out in east Ukraine in 2014, and have resettled in a Kyiv that regards them with apathy or suspicion. Rarely do we get the details of what happened to these women in the Donbas; Belorusets smartly conveys the invisibility of their trauma by making it likewise invisible to readers. In the Kyiv metro, we meet a jovial woman named Xenia who appears enthusiastic about her new career selling stationery on the subway. Advertising double-sided markers, she yells to the passengers, “They highlight the main idea!” When someone shoots her a dirty look, her veneer of happiness rapidly disintegrates, and she collapses. The narrator makes vague reference to “all the other sorrows that had vexed her over the last two years,” without explaining what they are, because, after all, no one has bothered to ask.

Given the timing of “Lucky Breaks,” it might be tempting to describe these stories as urgent. The irony is that at the time of writing (the book was first published in 2018), Belorusets was in fact turning her attention to an overlooked population — poor women in Ukraine’s industrial east — within an overlooked conflict. Before Russia’s invasion in February, over 14,000 people had already died in clashes in the Donbas, and a million and a half had been displaced. Today, amid blanket media coverage of the war, the sense of forgottenness that permeates the emotional landscape of “Lucky Breaks” is jarring. A beloved manicurist goes missing, but no one notices at first; another woman disappears into a forest.

At other times, “Lucky Breaks” feels almost uncannily in dialogue with the present. Recently, Prince William said it was “alien” to see a war in Europe, despite his own family’s involvement in many of them. One can imagine a character in “Lucky Breaks” addressing him when, during a nightmare in which she’s drinking the blood of the dead, she says: “At that very moment I felt that I was turning into a completely different person — a European, an inhabitant of a great and ancient land.”

Some of Belorusets’s characters still live in the disputed territories, working as hairdressers or florists, eking out a life against the backdrop of active warfare or its devastating aftermath. Belorusets emphasizes the surrealness of such an existence through magical realism. In one story, “The Stars,” horoscopes in the local paper advise when it is safe to walk around outside based on readers’ zodiac signs: “It turned out that Pisces could be sure of their well-being and safety from 3 to 5 p.m. that day.” The conversational rhythms of the prose are attentively preserved by the translator and poet Eugene Ostashevsky. The main text was written in Russian, but Belorusets’s publisher requested she write the first of two prefaces in Ukrainian, Ostashevsky explains in an afterword. This duality, at a time when language has been weaponized by both Ukrainian and Russian nationalists, is an enriching subtext that by default is lost in translation.

Readers looking for clarity about the political factions and internal divisions that led to the conflict will find instead hazy dream sequences, witchcraft, a woman who loses the ability to walk in Maidan Square and jokes, “I am a living monument.” Such profound narrative absurdities readily evoke the Ukrainian-born Nikolai Gogol’s (despite my ardent desire to resist national typecasting). We learn that a florist has joined a partisan unit, but which side she is fighting for no one can say. “She must be fighting on the side of the hyacinths,” an old customer jokes. At times, this disorientation recreates the sensorium of misinformation that has defined this conflict. In “The Stars,” some believe they’re being bombed by Canada; apparently, Trudeau is after their coal. In these spellbinding stories, Belorusets is more interested in effect than cause. What’s the use of finding out how we got here when we know we’ll be back again?

The novelist Andrey Kurkov has said that while he is ethnically Russian, he considers himself “politically Ukrainian.” Kurkov was born in 1961 in St. Petersburg (then Leningrad), but moved to Kyiv as a child. Russians, he told Agence France-Presse in February, subscribe to the “collective mentality.” For Kurkov, the czars, the Bolsheviks and now Putin have been trying to impose this worldview onto Ukrainians, but “Ukrainians are individuals,” he says. It’s unsurprising then that displaced collective animals are a favored motif in Kurkov’s humorous novels about political life in post-Soviet Ukraine. He is best known for “Death and the Penguin” (1996), a satirical crime thriller about an obituary writer named Viktor living in 1990s Kyiv whose sole companion is his pet penguin. Like the post-Soviet man, the penguin has been cut off from his collective (back home in Antarctica) and is adrift in a free world. It shouldn’t work, but it does.

In his new novel, “Grey Bees,” Kurkov has hive-minded insects do the work of explaining where he thinks humankind has gone awry. The book is about a beekeeper named Sergey Sergeyich who lives in Donbas’s “gray zone,” between areas controlled by the Ukrainian military and those in the hands of Russia-backed separatists. (Interestingly, Gogol’s breakthrough work was “Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka,” a story collection narrated by a Ukrainian beekeeper.) Firmly neutral, Sergey has no dog in this fight — just his bees. One of his most prolonged considerations of new political realities is what will happen to his regional society for beekeepers if Donetsk were to become independent. “Was there a society in Donetsk these days?” he wonders. “If there was, it wouldn’t be the region’s, it would be the ‘republic’s,’ and that meant he was no longer a member.” Kurkov’s translator, Boris Dralyuk, renders the warmth of Sergey’s inner voice from the original Russian without letting the earnestness creep into the saccharine.

When increased shelling starts to disturb the hives, Sergey loads them into his Lada and starts driving from town to town, eventually making his way to Crimea. Over the course of the novel, his resolve to stay neutral is shaken, particularly when he sees how Russian occupying forces have treated his beekeeper friend, a Crimean Tatar named Akhtem. There are hints of an awakening. He notices his bees, which he had once heralded as a species that had achieved pure communism, refusing to make room for a newcomer from another hive. Suddenly their communalism looks like little more than cruel tribalism. Sergey reprimands them: “Why are you acting like people?”

In a novel about neutrality and so-called gray zones, the Russian characters in “Grey Bees” come off to me as eerily cold, almost monstrous — snipers, cops, Putin apologists — as if the actions of the Russian government were in some ways reflective of a deeper national character. It recalls Kurkov’s professed view of Russian and Ukrainian people as fundamentally different, each with a unique “mentality.” As Putin tries to justify his occupation on the grounds of a shared history, there is indeed a strong current within Ukraine’s intelligentsia toward highlighting what makes the cultures and literary traditions distinct. Any suggestion of syncretism or co-influence feels tantamount to treason.

Yet this divvying up risks underselling the diversity of influences on Ukrainian literature, as well as the indelible imprints that writers from Ukraine have made on Russian letters, from Gogol to Isaac Babel to Vasily Grossman. As Ostashevsky puts it: “Russian language and literature were often influenced by, or simply made in, Ukraine.” As shown in these two books, written in the same language by one Ukrainian author and one Russian, gray areas are where two sides blur into each other. Now, Ukrainians are fighting for the right to be many people, speaking many languages, refusing to be separated.

Jennifer Wilson is a contributing essayist at the Book Review.

LUCKY BREAKSBy Yevgenia BelorusetsTranslated by Eugene Ostashevsky186 pp. New Directions. Paper, $14.95.

GREY BEESBy Andrey KurkovTranslated by Boris Dralyuk318 pp. Deep Vellum Publishing. Paper, $15.95.