A few months ago, Ukrainian novelist Andrey Kurkov, who speaks six languages and is published in 65 countries, was on his maiden Mumbai trip to helm a writing workshop. Attendees described it as a riveting performance. With his hands gesturing, face expressing, and words forming visuals, he showed them how to tell stories and question conventions. When Soviet tradition enforced socialist reality and uncompromising monochrome characters, Kurkov wrote short stories in Russian with black humour and grey characters.Unsurprisingly, publishers weren’t flocking to him. But after the Soviet Union’s fall, his books, such as The Milkman in the Night and The President’s Last Love, gained popularity.

Kurkov returned from Mumbai “amazed by the size and noise of the city”. In view of the Covid-19 pandemic, he has left Kiev for his village of Lazarivka, preferring the countryside’s quiet comfort to the panic in the Ukrainian capital. Between cutting grapes in his garden and editing his upcoming novel Grey Bees , he speaks with BL ink .

We’re always told, ‘the more you read, the better you write’. But you hold a different view...

Writers don’t read much because they understand life better. For writers, it’s difficult to read something easily written because they expect much more from their colleagues. You look for discoveries, you want to be surprised. I can seldom finish a book I’ve started. Reading fascinates you, pushes you to write, but subconsciously, it makes you imitate traditions of writers you love. It’s better to learn from real life than someone else’s fantasies. Writers should be active, sociable and learn as quickly as possible.

Learn quickly in what sense?

Well, for instance, when I was in Kerala to give a talk, I specially made time to visit pepper farms, just to see how it’s grown. I don’t need to know it, but it makes me more experienced. Or, in 1993, I went to the front-line of the Balkans during the Croatian-Serbian war as a member of English PEN and understood what war was about, how people behave at such times. War is also a part of life. It has been the case in Ukraine for the past five years. Thanks to my experience, I understand refugees better. What seemed absurd to me as an outsider, whose life remained untouched by events back then, is now easy to understand with war here — we have 450 km of frontline in Eastern Ukraine, but not everyone left for better, safer places.

Could you talk about the early influences that inspired you as a writer?

I started writing poetry when I was seven. At 13, I was inventing jokes because political and non-political jokes were very popular in the Soviet. An immense experience was my grandmother’s funeral. Lots of people came, her coffin lay atop a truck...the visuals were big. It led to my first short story. By 15 or 16, I discovered I enjoyed travelling. A friend asked me to tag along for a hydrological expedition to measure the depths of a small river. It was my first adventurous experience, I’d compare it to Jules Verne’s; we were travelling to faraway villages in an expedition car. I didn’t exactly understand what his father was doing, but liked helping, liked the feeling of being on a mission. My elder brother Michail, an anti-Soviet activist, often brought home banned books. One day, he got a Bible written in the old Slavonic language; Bibles were very difficult to get. After I finished reading it, I thought, “It’s not well written” and wrote an edition with mystique and adventure. That was my introduction to novel-writing; I was 17 at the time.

Besides banned books, what did you grow up reading? Who influenced your writing?

I read all 14 volumes of Jack London’s collection of novels, children’s book about Lenin, Russian classic literature on Anton Chekhov, Turgenev and Bunin. And I very much liked Ernest Hemingway. I also liked how Andrei Platonov experimented with Russian and Daniil Kharms’s short, black-humour stories. My penchant for absurdity might have come from him. My children’s stories, for example, are about this baby vacuum cleaner — Gosha.

When did you break away from the influence? Aspiring writers often grapple with this...

Allow yourself to be conquered by your favourites, maybe for a few years, till you can mock the author or tradition you love. Breaking away is difficult, but crucial for defining your voice and style; developing an intonation, melody, whatever makes you different. I moved from Platonov’s style after writing four-five novels. By 27 or 28, I’d broken away from both. But I acquired a special appreciation for language — long, strange sentences, and short, dynamic ones. Therefore, I consciously write slow novels too — such as Gardens of Mr.Michurin (2002). It’s based on a famous, old-time botanist, who was also a mad man. It’s a strange literary text, I was sure no one would translate it, but from time to time I can afford to write something that won’t be appreciated by the majority.

Tell us about working for the KGB. How did the stint inspire you to write children’s books?

When I was 24, I was a prison guard in Odessa. The post was generally given to people who weren’t that educated, but I had two diplomas from two universities. So the political officer asked me to do his work; I wrote lectures for the political (communist) education of other soldiers, doing all-nighters with the typewriter. I dreamed of becoming a writer, and children’s books were my best psychological escape. To write for children, you have to use their language, see the world with their eyes, feel like a child...It makes you forget your actual age and where you are. That’s what kept me sane, quiet and reasonable in surroundings filled with unhappiness and violence.

Did Death and The Penguin , your bestseller, come from that time?

Not really. In the early ’90s, after the Soviet’s collapse, there was an economic crisis, and also moral. As there was no money to feed zoo animals, the bigger ones were sent to Germany. The 1995 novel is a surreal adventure and its protagonist is jobless, dumped by his girlfriend. He brings home the city’s last remaining penguin, without knowing it is depressed and has a heart problem.

Your stories often have a notable animal character. A penguin, a monkey, a chameleon...

The animals are there because I’m guilty about the unhappy lives my pets had. None survived my childhood because I didn’t take proper care of them. So I try compensating them with literary lives.

At a time when dystopian plots are trending, you still stand by happy endings. How come?

Well, they can have strange happy-endings or the promise of one. Every book is like a battery that passes on energy, negative and positive. Happy endings leave readers with positive energy, which stays on long after the story is over. Unhappy or tragic endings give readers the idea that the world is horrible, that life has no hope. As literature is taken in slowly, people have a physical reaction to books; dubious or unhappy endings work for visual mediums because they don’t penetrate the psyche like books do. So, As a writer, I feel responsible for the mindset I leave readers with. Also, I feel people forget books which don’t have happy endings.

What’s your upcoming book, Grey Bees about?

It’s a book about forgotten people living in a war zone, who have very different values from those who live far from war. I’m trying to give them a voice and show them as ordinary people dealing with extraordinary circumstances.

Pooja Bhula is a Mumbai-based journalist

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