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It’s also a useful reminder to those only just awakening to the situation in Ukraine that the war’s not a recent development but an escalation of a conflict that’s blighted the lives of many of its people for years, destroying and displacing deep-rooted communities. He potters about in his home and does his best to survive in the deserted, shelled village of Little Starhorodivka with only one other resident. Grey Bees, although grounded deeply in the disturbing reality of war, sometimes has the feeling of a fable.
Into this silence were woven the whisper of foliage, the breeze’s breath, the buzzing of bees—all tiny sounds that constitute the peaceful silence of summer.If this could happen to him, the Everyman of the story, it can happen to anyone, and is certainly happening to the marginalized groups. I began Andrey Kurkov’s Grey Bees slowly, trying to get a sense of Sergey Sergeyich, the 49-year-old beekeeper who lives in the gray zone between loyalists and separatists in Ukraine’s Donbas region. Once in Crimea, this becomes more centre stage—the persecutions faced by the Tartars, disappearances and forced recruitments into the army; the venom and racist attitudes that have spread among some sections. While their village isn’t directly in the line of fire, there is the occasional interaction with combatants (including one who befriends Sergeyich) and casualties witnessed or heard.
He makes the big decision to leave Little Starhorodivka but his wanderings, though significant and symbolic, are peripatetic. Grey Bees makes for a surprisingly enjoyable reading experience, as while ‘enjoyable’ is not a word I would use for a book that deals with conflict and persecution, the lens through which we experience everything (Sergeyich’s story) makes it so, for it brings with it a gentleness, warmth and comfort (and a thread of humour), a large part of it perhaps because of his own character—he is warm hearted, well meaning, and tries to help everyone (not for instance being able to sleep when an unknown combatant lies dead in the fields visible from his home, and going out in the freezing night to at least cover him with snow). The deception and deceit increase the closer he gets to the Russian motherland—whose boundaries are quickly advancing westward as more and more territories are occupied. Here, his central character’s Sergey, forcibly retired from his job as a mining inspector after a diagnosis of severe lung disease, bee-keeper Sergey’s time now revolves around his bees, his precious hives taking up all of his attention.It’s 2014, Russia has seized the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea, and there’s fighting all up and down the line dividing the pro-Russian separatist “people’s republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk from the rest of Ukraine. Kurkov’s creation is perfect – a palimpsest, who seemingly emerges from each new interaction essentially unchanged.
The world is on fire in all respects, it seems, and so it is with no small sense of wonder that we follow Sergeyich as he makes do with no electricity and water, as his tea is interrupted by a shell that lands nearby, as he dreams of spring when he can set up a mattress on top of his bees and let their vibration heal his aches and revitalize his spirit. That said, I can see from your closing comments that you got a lot out of it, which is good to know!
The dreams—and the brief moments of friendship and conviviality Sergeyich enjoys while on his journey—offer needed respite, because the book is also filled with cruelty.
Le Guin territory on how to realize this dream, but it does ask us to look for better ways and look to the freedom of nature. No one shot at the enemy from his yard, his windows, his fence, which meant his home had no enemies. His simple mission on behalf of his bees leads him through some the hottest spots of the ongoing conflict, putting him in contact with combatants and civilians on both sides of the battle lines: loyalists, separatists, Russian occupiers, and Crimean Tatars. Bejewelled by expressions in Crimean Tatar, which neither Sergeyich nor most readers are able to understand, the passages of Grey Bees set in Crimea are filled with a sense of the loss of a culture we failed to comprehend and to protect from destruction.
With its focus on Sergeyich, it captures the conditions in this small corner of the world during this time exceptionally well.
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