“... when you have a real tragedy in front of your eyes, ... you cannot invent a more tragic story than life can produce. I couldn’t write fiction for two and a half years.” Ukraine House hosts conversation with Andrei Kurkov

Kurkov transported the audience back to his childhood in Soviet Ukraine, where laughter was both a weapon and a refuge. He described late‐night gatherings in cramped apartments, where political dissent mixed with cups of port wine. These clandestine salons offered a rare taste of freedom under an oppressive regime. It was in that atmosphere that he first discovered the power of words to subvert authority and connect people. Those jokes arrived with illicit manuscripts, teaching him that ideas can travel even when borders and authorities forbid them. These engagements with secretive satirical culture became a formative experience that laid the groundwork for a lifetime devoted to truth‐telling through fiction.

By the late 1970s, Kurkov started competing in secret joke-telling contests in Crimea. He recounted the thrill of standing before an audience of intellectual dissidents, each story weighed and tallied. These two-week gatherings near Sudak were as much about solidarity as they were about satire. Winning those contests meant claiming a momentary triumph over authoritarian fear: “I started reading illegal literature and satire which I enjoyed very much. […] In 1977-78, my brother and I twice took part in illegal joke-telling competitions in Crimea. People from all over the Soviet Union — intellectuals and anti-Soviets — gathered near Sudak for two weeks, telling jokes, counting who told how many jokes, drinking wine. We won once.” 

He felt empowered to translate that satirical spirit into prose. Yet his early manuscripts, dark and cynical, confronted the wall of Soviet literary orthodoxy: “I never managed to become a Soviet writer because what I wrote was funny, was black, was a bit cynical. […] When I showed my text to different Soviet publishers, they were saying it is not Soviet literature.” There was even a situation, where he was almost ready to give up and betray his humor, when a Communist Party-affiliated publishing house employee promised him to ensure his humourless short stories would be published if he was to marry her. “I decided that was too much of a betrayal — as I would have to write short stories which I didn’t want to write and marry someone I didn’t want to marry — so I refused and my book was not published. And I’m very happy I never published those short stories because they were written as a form of compromise between censorship and myself.”

Kurkov then spent eighteen years smuggling manuscripts through Poland until a Swiss publisher finally recognized his talent. The acceptance of Death and the Penguin brought him from underground dissident to European bestseller.

With creative freedom secured, Kurkov turned his pen to Ukraine’s harsh reality, traveling in 2015 for the first time to the 430-kilometer “gray zone” where civilians lived under constant threat. He recounted elderly villagers cut off from all services, choosing to face bombardment rather than flee. Their quiet endurance became the heart of his frontline chronicles: “There were dozens of villages — some with only two or three people living, old people — no electricity, no gas, running water, medical help, no police, no authority. They were abandoned, and mostly these were the old people… it was easier to imagine that they are killed at home than that they have to travel and nobody knows who will help them.” This experience became the foundation of one of his bestseller, “Gray Bees”, where a lone beekeeper stranded in the “gray zone” between Ukrainian and Russian military positions who rigs his hives against shellfire and smuggles his bees to Crimea, finds his old Crimean Tatar friend and reconnects with a land and people torn from Ukraine. 

Now, in times of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Kurkov also observed that many of his fellow writers have abandoned fiction for non-fiction: “Writers are different but what happened to most of them — almost everybody stopped writing fiction. Because when you have a real tragedy in front of your eyes, you understand that [...] you cannot invent a more tragic story than life can produce. I couldn’t write fiction for two and a half years.” Therefore, the incentive for the writers became to use diaries and articles to actually explain, especially abroad, what is happening and to encourage empathy to secure support. 

Amid that shift, Kurkov still highlighted poetry’s importance in the frontlines. He described listening to a poetry reading for soldiers in a remote field hospital: “In the first year of the full-scale invasion, poetry became extremely important. Poets were visiting soldiers and reciting their poems, and I went a couple of times — I saw like two hundred soldiers crying because a lady poet recited a poem about a mother. Everybody immediately relates to his own family, to his own life before the war. This emotional charge helps them to forget about horrors — but still, they are crying even now, because Ukrainian poets are still visiting soldiers not far away from the front line.”

Kurkov further warned of a looming “black hole” in Ukrainian literature as more and more poets are being killed in war. Those who survive will inherit the task of filling this void: “We have more than 120 poets and writers who are killed in the war. […] There will be several years of emptiness, a black hole in Ukrainian literature. Those who survive will have to write much more to fill this gap.”

Even though Russia is trying its best for Ukrainians to lose hope and live in constant fear and anxiety, Kurkov, as a writer and an intellectual, remains unflinchingly committed to hope and believes that people need a happy end because books give energy and hope. For him, he  “writes for people who believe that life is good, who love life”, because life is good, even when there is so much darkness around.  

Ukraine House in Denmark extends its deepest gratitude to Andrei Kurkov for sharing his journey and belief in literature’s power to uplift and inspire.