In Conversation with: Andrey Kurkov

Sam Ruddock: First up, can you tell us a bit about The Good Angel of Death?
Andrey Kurkov: I wrote this novel as reply to Ukrainian nationalists who were attacking me for not writing in Ukrainian language. In fact two recognizable figures in the novel are Petro and Galia who have real prototypes and who in a novel written in Russian speak Ukrainian. In spite of political issues touched upon in this novel it’s still an adventure novel as well as a portrait of post-Soviet society.

SR: You actually wrote The Good Angel of Death in the late 1990s but it has only recently been translated into English. What is it like to return to a book after such a long time?
AK: The book has a life of its own and was less than two years ago translated into Ukrainian. When the book first appeared in Russian in 1997 there was a request to ban it from the National Academy of Ukrainian Language and Literature. Some old soviet-turned-Ukrainian academicians accused me of making fun of ideas of Ukrainian identity and of Taras Shevchenko – national poet, who also was considered national Ukrainian poet in the Soviet Era in spite of his anti-Semitism, anti-Polish and anti-Russian feelings.

SR: Has your appraisal of the book changed over these intervening years?
AK: If changed then not a lot. The book is still being discussed and there still enough people who would like to see it banned. But at the same time this year I was first time invited to be a guest-speaker at the Taras Shevchenko traditional Anniversary gathering.

SR: Tell us a little about Taras Shevchenko, whose legacy is at the heart of events here.
AK: He was brought up as a peasant-slave, early started painting and writing poetry and somehow got noticed buy famous Russian Artist from St Petersburg Illya Repin, who collected enough money to buy him out from his owner. Rumours have it that all people involved in this process were Russian masons. Then he was taken to St Peterbourg to study in Fine Art Academy. There at this time was fashion for everything Ukrainian, everybody was crazy about Gogol who also moved to St Petersbourg and wrote surreal novels with lots of Ukrainian words and myths and magic. Taras Shevchenko continued writing poetry and this poetry was quite anti-Russian and anti-tsar. At some point Russian secret police caught up with him and as a punishment he was enrolled in the Russian Army for 25 years. He was sent to Kazakhstan where the officers tried their best to make his life and service as comfortable as possible. He was taken with military-topographic expedition to Aral Sea where he had to draw the maps. He left behind excellent drawings about Kazakh life and continued secretly to write poetry and prose. All his prose and half of his poetry he wrote in Russian.

SR: You were born in St Petersburg but grew up and live in Kiev. Were these different national identities present in you before the end of the Soviet Union, or did they only become significant when you could no-longer think of yourself as Soviet?
AK: In the Soviet time the identity was not important unless you were a Jew. For Russians living in West Ukraine it could have being a problem since that region was always anti-Russian and anti-Polish, otherwise everybody was just a Soviet person. It’s only after 1991 the identity started playing major role in people’s destinies.

SR: Throughout the novel Kolya has two dreams: one of being a Russian Hero and one of being a Ukrainian ragamuffin. Is this a dichotomy you feel about your own dual identity?
AK: Possibly such things turn up in the text and the author might not notice sometimes that he writes about himself.

SR: Kolya also conducts pretty earnest meditations on how songs, or Snickers bars, can contribute to international understanding in hostile terrain. Do you share such lofty beliefs?
AK: Well, probably not, but I met many people who think this way. And there are even theories in Ukraine, that Ukrainian people’s songs and fairy-tales are friendly and romantic whereas Russian ones are aggressive and emotionless.

SR: All but two of your novels have animals in them and here it is a chameleon that becomes Kolya’s spirit guide through the journey. What is it about animals that so appeals to you?
AK: One thing – they are predictable unlike people and it’s easy to make them behave naturally in the novels. I do like animals and I don’t like zoos

SR: You started out by self-publishing your early novels. Is it true that you received more than 500 rejections from publishers before you took this decision?
AK: In fact my first book was published by Soviet publishing house a couple of months before the collapse of the USSR, second was pirates’ edition of my children’s book in St-Petersburg with a print-run of 100 000 copies! And 3 and 4th I published myself in Kiev in 1993 with total print-run of 75 000 which I all sold within one year, but had no time to write until this story was over. Yes, I got hundreds of rejections and still keep a lot of them in my archive.

SR: I recently read an interview in which you talked about how you went about self publishing your early novels and the story you told about buying paper in Kazakhstan and organising a train journey to transport the paper to Kiev, reminded me rather a lot of the plot of The Good Angel of Death. How close is the fictional journey to your real journey?
AK: Part of the journey from Azerbajdjan via Dagestan and Russia to Kiev I did make myself. As to Kazakhstan – it was my older brother who knew Kazakhstan very well and worked there several times during summers.

SR: Your books often feature three prominent threads: alcohol, the Mafia, and death. I’d like to ask you a general question about each of these.

SR:Alcohol: is there a relationship between the absurdities of your novels and the heavy drinking that the characters get up to?
AK: Alcohol can be in fact useful to understand the absurdities of post-soviet life as well as alcohol can make people to be absurdly creative.

SR: The Mafia: At times it feels that the Mafia are everywhere in your books. Were the Mafia as central to everyday post-Soviet life as you portray? Has this changed in the years since?
AK: In 1991-1997 Mafia was playing big and rather sad part in the society, fulfilling the functions of courts, judges, tax-offices etc. Now it’s very different. It might be present on the high level in arms-deals and similar things, but it’s not obvious anymore, much more obvious is civil servants corruption and such.

SR: Death: Death features prominently in many of your books, yet they are never morbid. This leads me to suspect that death is more of a metaphor in your work than an impending terror? What is it a metaphor for?
AK: Life can be compared with a sentence, where comas are problems of all kind and full stop is death not as a tragedy but as a reason to stop ones story in order to start a new one or to continue another one. Death can be deserved as in negative so also in positive sense. I don’t like any elements of terror since terror for me is something artificial created by evil people whereas death is natural and not necessarily evil.

SR: What impact do you think Soviet society, and in particular Soviet communal living has on the characters and mentality of your books?
AK: Huge impact in most of the cases, although in my latest novels the characters are already post-post-soviet, i.e. born too late to bare the traces of soviet mentality.

SR: Your last book translated into English was The President’s Last Love, which contained a not very thinly veiled attack on Vladimir Putin. Do you know whether Putin ever read the book?
AK: Well, his aides definitely read the book and the result was that my Russian Publisher suddenly decided not to publish my works anymore, books were removed from all bookshops in Russia and one could get some of them only in internet-shops. This situation continued for 18 months.

SR: Have you always wanted to be a writer?
AK: Yes, while I thought that writers don’t need to go to work every morning, and I felt I have enough imagination to become one.

SR: Are you working on another book at the moment?

AK: I am writing a novel set in a wonderful West Ukrainian city of Lviv. In fact this city has more than 5 names, named each time by the nation which was then removed and replaced by next nation. It was once Roman, once German, once Polish, than Soviet and now Ukrainian. It’s slightly surreal story about todays Ukraine. In fact Lviv is a place where Masochism was created by Leopold Zaher von Mazoh (UK readers might better recognise Leopold von Sacher-Masoch)– German-Jewish writer who was an ordinary civil servant.

SR: Are there any other, similar books you would urge us to read?

AK: Well, why not to read Zaher von Mazoh’s books?

SR: Will do! Which other writers do you admire?
AK: Andrei Platonov, Maxim Gorky, Jack London, Gogol, Bulgakov

SR: What are your favourite books?
AK: Sorokin Kremlin Made of Sugar; Day of Oprichnik, Knut Hamsun’s, James Kellman (how late it was, how late),

SR: Finally, are there any questions we should have asked but didn’t? Is there anything more you would like to say but haven’t had a chance to?
AK: I wonder is a reader always happy to find in the book of a preferred author exactly what he expected from this author?! Clichés used by writers to please the readers.

SR: An interesting thought to conclude, and one that probably has many different answers. Andrey, thank you for taking the time to talk to us today.

House of Meetings - Martin Amis

Read: November 2006

The latest offering from Martin Amis tells the story of two brothers caught in a love triangle with a woman they both love. It is set around the ‘house of meetings,’ a half-way house where Gulag prisoners were permitted to enjoy, or more commonly endure, conjugal visits. Emotive subject, one might expect. So how is it that he makes it so bland and detached? It reads like it has been written by an avid amateur; a wannabe Russian who has read a lot of books and thinks he understands the native mindset. The narrator does not convince, his life is an amalgam of disparate influences and we are deluged with facts and fragments of everyday life that read more like a ‘Schott’s almanac of Russia’ than a novel. Martin Amis is an intelligent writer, I wish he wasn’t so determined to prove it all the time.

3 out of 10

Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida

If ever there was a book to belong on every bookshelf then there would be no point in diversity of reading. However, no bookshelf can be said to be complete without this fabulous collection of Russian short stories. Spanning almost two hundred years from the Napoleonic Wars through the end of serfdom and the advent of the Soviet Union to its eventual collapse you will not find a more complete history of a nation’s literature. Everyone is included: Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Bulgakov, Zoshchenko, Solzhenitsyn and many many more. This really is the compendium to end all compendiums.

There are so many delightful snippets of life in these pages; from the archetypal Russian down-and-out of Dostoyevsky and Gogol to the earthy vigour of Tolstoy. There is something here for everyone.

Perhaps my favourite of all is Mikhail Zoshchenko, writer of the satiric and the subtle and this book is worth the cover price alone if only for Electrification. In its two pages of understated life it captures that moment in history when people are moving forward, installing electrical lights in their houses and moving into the brighter future. But not all is as you might expect: “Light’s all very well, brothers, but it’s not easy to live with.”

Bursting with down-to-earth and memorable characters this is the perfect introduction to Russian literature, suitable for anyone who has ever picked up a book and found themselves lost in the pleasure of a story.

7 out of 10

Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky

Read: September 2007

Ah, that most capricious of customers: the classic. The very idea can conjure up the image of dark alleyways, men in top hats and overcoats, enticingly dusty smells and dark oil painting covers. There are some which you pick up and can’t believe you never read them before. The Great Gatsby, Frankenstein and Catch-22 are three classics I received in such rapturous delight. For these wonderful books, the word classic barely does them justice. They are so much more than just a word, they are whole, complete works of fiction to which I will always be drawn.

And then there are the others, the ones you read and know you are reading a classic which thousands of people have loved, and you can tell its crammed with really great ideas, but for you it doesn’t quite do it. Sadly for me, Crime and Punishment found its way into the latter of these two categories. It tells the story of Rodion Romanych, a young student with a Napoleon complex who has fallen on hard times but dreams of a glorious future, both for himself and his fellow mankind. Feeling wronged by misfortune his thoughts begin to turn towards the good he could do were he in possession of the requisite finances. He writes essays on morality and justice, arguing that it is just for a man of genius to transgress moral law if it will ultimately benefit humanity. He posits that the test of this genius is the ability to transgress moral laws and not feel guilty, to be wholly focused on the grander scale. To this end he begins to plot the perfect crime, the murder and robbery of a horrible old pawnbroker, universally hated by all. So begins Crime and Punishment, a book of great scope and plot and a powerful study of a psychology in turmoil. It is an investigation into the grand ideas so prevalent across nineteenth century society: the social implications of rampant capitalism, the crossover between morality and legality, and the growth of psychology as a means of explaining mans actions.

Crime and Punishment unfolds slowly as the author lays out his message through the intermeshing of the various characters. Dostoyevsky has been described as an author for whom an idea is always rooted in human skin, that no idea is removed from its very intimate human bondage. That is never more prevalent than here, where much of the story is told in miniature tales, single chapter stories in which supporting characters appear to share their story, then leave almost as quickly as they arrived. This method of telling the story is incredibly seductive, it draws you into a world you feel is almost boundless and encourages you to involve yourself within it.

All the while I was aware I was reading a really great novel. But I was bored. The whole premise of Crime and Punishment has been done better elsewhere. Take Albert Camus’ The Outsider, or Kafka’s The Trial if you are interested in the psychology of crime and the nature of punishment. There are some startlingly good characters here, each with a really fascinating story to tell and the chapters in which they espouse their tales are brilliant examples of secondary characterisation. But then there are long, long passages in Raskolnikov’s life in which we trudge around like his shadow in the sludgy snow and wait for something of interest to take place. All the while growing cold and tired. A third could be cut from it just like that. There are no superfluous plot lines but there are many flabby periods when I just wanted to get back into something interesting.

Although Raskolnikov develops into a rounded and really powerful character and his mentality is intriguing at times, there is something about his ‘woe is me’ attitude which really gets on my nerves. Like the snivelling little creatures that populate many of Gogol’s short stories and Dostoyevsky’s own Notes from Underground I found the most powerful impression he engendered was not sympathy but disgust. Pathetic disgust for a man who expects the world to unfurl before him without any effort. And even though this impression was diluted as the novel progressed to the point where he had become partially interesting his is still a story of unmentionable blandness. Perhaps this is the point, but it doesn’t make for great reading.

Another problem, as with many works of Russian literature, lies in the translation. Even with an award winning translation such as this one, much of the lyricism is lost so we are left with the story and ideas Dostoyevsky intended, but without the expressive and poetic prose in which it was originally written. And although I noticed a slight difference between this translation and another by Sidney Monas, it was not enough to change the essential chunkiness of any Russian translation. It is in the language that I believe a real classic is borne and I believe this language would have kept me enthralled through the long journeys in Raskolnikov’s mind, but shorn of much poetry I found it a struggle to finish.

I suspect I may re-read Crime and Punishment in the future and wonder how I could ever have written such drivel about a great work. For when that day comes, I shall just say sorry.


6.5 out of 10