Andrey Kurkov and I were supposed to meet for coffee. That’s how I imagined it. Me, an aspiring novelist and the granddaughter of a Ukrainian war refugee, enjoying a latte with Kurkov at a café in Kyiv during my first-ever trip to the country earlier this year. Never mind the air sirens; we would talk about art. But our schedules just missed each other, so I focused on the real purpose of my trip: reporting on Russian war crimes. In early April, when we were both taking a break from the road, we met on Zoom instead.
I first discovered Kurkov while Googling Soviet literature, as I had a sense that its staple sense of humor—dark, wry, arguably slow—might be my biggest asset in the years ahead. A boon to survival. I cracked open Kurkov’s satirical crime thriller Death and the Penguin many years ago as a result, and was charmed, like many, by Misha the penguin, the narrator’s sidekick.
“Odd times to be a child in,” Kurkov writes in the book. “An odd country, an odd life which he had no desire to make sense of. To endure, full stop, that was all he wanted.”
