Grey Bees by Andrey Kurkov is about life in a war zone, specifically the zone of Donbas which in 2014, lay between the Russian and Ukrainian fighting positions, and is known as the grey zone. A front line of 430 kilometres, in parts it is just a few hundred metres wide, in others it is kilometres wide. Most of the residents of the villages and towns that lie in the grey zone left at the start of the 2014 conflict, abandoning their homes, orchards and farms.
Grey Bees is set in one such village – Little Starhorodivka – where just two residents remain, Sergey Sergeyich, the beekeeper, and his old school enemy Pashka. There are just two proper streets in the village – Lenin where Sergey lives, and Shevchenko where Pashka lives. Before the war, neither man had cause to interact with the other and each had successfully ignored the presence of the other. But now they were forced to work together to ensure their survival.
Synopsis of Grey Bees by Andrey Kurkov
Grey Bees begins in the harsh mid-winter in the grey zone where, to a constant backdrop of the sound of bombardment, mostly in the distance, sometimes uncomfortably close, Sergey lives alone with his bees and his orchard. Eking out meagre coal supplies to feed his only source of heating, one potbellied stove that serves both as heater and cooker, Sergey frets about his bees. Housed in the shed in the orchard, the bees are over-wintering but if a stray shell was to fall and damage the shed, his bees would perish.
The frosty relations between Sergey and Pashka are forced to thaw slightly in the circumstances in which they find themselves. One day Sergey notices something lying in the no-man’s land beyond his orchards and asks Pashka if he can borrow his binoculars to see what it is. They discover it is a body which has been left where it fell, in full view of both sides. Angry at the lack of respect for the fallen fighter, regardless of which side he was on, Sergey takes matters into his own hands.
Some days later, Pashka has his windows blown out by a shell that falls in the village, and he is forced to spend the night at Sergey’s house. The next day, Sergey replaces Pashka’s windows for him. As the fighting continues, both Sergey and Pashka find the war encroaching into their personal lives; Sergey meets a Ukrainian soldier who comes to visit in the dead of night, and Pashka falls in with a pro-Russian separatist who brings him supplies.
When the first signs of spring arrive, Sergey fears that his bees, once out of the hive, may be spooked by the noises of war and fly away in fear. So he makes plans to leave the village and travel east to find peaceful countryside where he can safely release the bees to begin their work of collecting pollen. Leaving Pashka in charge of his house while he’s away, he sets off with his bees on a trailer behind his old Lada.
The shape and tone of the novel now shifts from a monochromatic life in the grey zone to the colour and beauty of the Ukrainian countryside.
We follow Sergey as he passes through checkpoints and after a long, slow journey finds himself driving through blossoming herbs beneath the boughs of flowering cherry, apple, apricot and acacia trees. Pitching his tent for a while in a forest outside a small village near the town of Vesele, he trades some honey for food with a local shopkeeper, Galya, with whom he builds a relationship.
Forced to move on when he finds himself under attack from a local, Sergey makes his way East to Russian-held Crimea in search of an old friend, a Tatar whom he met at a beekeepers conference many years earlier.
My Review
Perhaps even more relevant now than it was when it was first published in 2020, Grey Bees by Andrey Kurkov is not a history book, nor is it an account of the war, or a justification for one side or the other. It is a gentle novel in two parts; the first about two men coming to terms with life without power, shops, fresh food or any of the myriad things that make up the life most of us take for granted, and the second which is a love letter to Ukraine and to all that it once was before greed and power tore it apart.
In the original foreword, Kurkov talks about his last visit to the grey zone:
“I saw war becoming the norm, saw people trying to ignore it, learning to live with it as if it were a rowdy, drunken neighbour.”
And that’s what we witness with Sergey and Pashka and their strange existence in this village caught between two forces. It’s a fascinating insight into what life is like in a war zone and it could equally apply to any conflict anywhere in the world. These two men want simply to survive and to maintain the only way of life they have ever known. But even as they try to remain (literally and metaphorically) below the radar, we are aware of forces that are at work, trying to influence them to their cause, threatening to disrupt stability.
Wherever Sergey goes, his childlike honesty and innocence get him through many sticky situations and win him friends in the most unlikely places, and through it all, we share his love for the quiet industry of his bees. In this respect, it feels like Kurkov is presenting Sergey as symbolic of Ukraine, trying to live its peaceful and traditional life while being pulled in two different directions – to Russia from the East, and to Europe from the West.
It’s when Sergey travels onwards to Russian-annexed Crimea, that we find the biggest impact of the war. In search of his old friend, Akthem whom he shared a room with at a beekeeper conference many years ago, he discovers his friend has been ‘missing’ for two years and Akthem’s wife asks him if he can enquire with the Russian authorities as to what has happened to her husband. Although reluctant to raise his head above the parapet, Sergey agrees to help.
Through breathtaking descriptions, Kurkov introduces us to Crimea – an idyll where the long, hot days of summer glide effortlessly by despite the ever-present persecution that the peaceful, Muslim community of Tatars face from their new overlords. Sergey finds himself drawn into the injustices being suffered by his friend’s family and must face the reality of Russian occupation which forces him to walk a precarious tightrope to protect himself and his bees.
Every afternoon, when I closed my laptop for the day and picked up Grey Bees, it transported me to a different world. Affording a greater insight into the conflict which today has increased Ukraine’s front line from 430km to over a thousand, like Sergey, I took refuge in the never-changing world of the bees.
I didn’t want this one to end.
