Andrey Kurkov – Ukraine’s most celebrated living author – has stopped writing fiction. Since Russia’s full-blown invasion last year, he has become a roving ambassador for his country and its embattled people and culture. Kurkov’s reports on the war have appeared in newspapers and magazines across Europe and the US, including in the Guardian and the New Yorker. Radio 4 has broadcast his work as Letter from Ukraine.
Last autumn, Kurkov published his Diary of Invasion. It is a vivid personal journal and a portrait of a nation struggling against extinction. He recounts his own dramatic exit from Kyiv as enemy tanks approached, on 24 February 2022, and describes the plight of Ukrainians, displaced and under attack. They are, he notes, different from Russians: self-organising, democratic and anarchistic. He’s currently penning a second volume.
Kurkov’s novel Jimi Hendrix Live in Lviv appeared in Russian in 2012 and is now translated into English. Longlisted for the 2023 International Booker prize, it is a reminder of Kurkov’s prodigious storytelling gifts and a throwback to an earlier, happier age. Like Death and the Penguin, Kurkov’s first global literary hit, it is playful and ebullient, shot through with magical twists and supernatural turns. Its characters, for the most part, are agreeable oddballs.
The action begins in classic Kurkov style in a graveyard. A group of superannuated hippies have come to pay their respects to Jimi Hendrix. Or, more accurately, to his hand, smuggled out of the US by the KGB after the guitarist’s death. This relic is interred in Lviv’s Lychakiv cemetery. One of those who comes along is a retired secret policeman whose job it was to spy on the long-haired. He is full of regret, it emerges, and a passionate Hendrix fan.
The novel’s hero, Taras, meanwhile, is a young man who has found an unusual niche in private medical services. He treats Polish clients suffering from painful kidney stones by driving them at night over Lviv’s cobbles. The cure works. Taras’s peregrinations – think Leopold Bloom in a rusty, bouncing Opel Vectra – lead him to a money-changing kiosk. And from there to a chaste love affair with a mysterious woman wearing long green gloves.
There are animals, too: not penguins but angry, shrieking gulls that attack people from the sky. Plus a weird smell of iodine. Lviv is a long way from the sea, so where did they come from? Solving this conundrum involves bottles of vodka and a visit to an expert in paranormal occurrences. There is a Scooby-Doo-style chase featuring a supercilious writer. He may have inadvertently caused the anomaly by deleting a character from his latest manuscript.
At the heart of this joyous caper is Lviv, the biggest city in western Ukraine. With its baroque churches and art deco villas, Lviv has “belonged” to Poland, Austria-Hungary and the USSR, before it became a centre of modern independent Ukraine. Kurkov lovingly evokes its “Polish houses” and “subtle sonic culture”. His characters get around this history-rich metropolis by foot, in taxis and on a yellow Piaggio moped. The streets are real, even if the fantastic events that happen in them are not.
Kurkov wrote Jimi Hendrix Live in Lviv at a time when Viktor Yanukovych was Ukraine’s president. Yanukovych was corrupt, despotic and beholden to Moscow. In 2014, he fled to Russia after his security forces shot dead more than 100 anti-government protesters who had gathered in the Maidan in downtown Kyiv. Vladimir Putin then annexed Crimea and kickstarted a war in the eastern Donbas region, which has lasted for nine years.
In the context of today’s horror, the novel feels like a missive from a more optimistic and sunnier place. There is no monster neighbour. Kurkov compares discussions between a reformed alcoholic hairdresser and the woman he is trying to woo to negotiations “between Russia and Ukraine over the price of Russian gas”. The book ends in the manner of a Shakespearean comedy. There is satisfaction all round and the plot tied up.
Kurkov’s writing after 2014 is darker. His 2018 novel, Grey Bees, is an elegiac tale featuring a beekeeper living in an almost abandoned village in the war-torn east. The beekeeper and his “frenemy” in Lenin Street are the last two holdouts; there is a road trip to Russian-occupied Crimea. There will be no more fiction from Kurkov until peace arrives. For now, his mission is to explain Ukraine to the world. He is his homeland’s essential voice and its commentator-in-chief.
Luke Harding’s Invasion: Russia’s Bloody War and Ukraine’s Fight for Survival is published by Guardian Faber
• Jimi Hendrix Live in Lviv by Andrey Kurkov is published by Quercus (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
