Grey Bees: A captivating, heartwarming story about a gentle beekeeper caught up in the war in Ukraine

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His wife has left him and decamped to the district capital with their daughter, and these days his only companion is a “frenemy” across town, his adversary since elementary school. Und wie der Autor es am Ende schafft, das Leben der Menschen und der Bienen gleiche Bedeutung beizumessen, so dass man sich fragt, wer denn nun eigentlich die Grauen sind, ist schon eine raffinierte Symbolik. Sergey Sergeyich, the protagonist of Grey Bees, lives in Little Starhorodivka, a village in the 'grey zone' of the Ukrainian Donbas, the no-man's land between the fighting forces of the Ukrainian military and the separatists fronting for Russia. 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. Kurkov’s translator, Boris Dralyuk, renders the warmth of Sergey’s inner voice from the original Russian without letting the earnestness creep into the saccharine .

BECOME A MONTHLY OR ANNUAL RUMPUS MEMBER AND RECEIVE EXCLUSIVE CONTENT, EDITORIAL INSIGHTS, MERCH DISCOUNTS, AND MORE!This is an apt depiction of the novel, a war that occasionally rattles windows but not much else despite knowing that it is a horrible thing.

I continued to read, more quickly now, aware of the soft buzzing, if you will, coming to me from the gentle character Sergeyich, who, stuck living in the gray zone, has one focus: the well-being of his bees.If this could happen to him, the Everyman of the story, it can happen to anyone, and is certainly happening to the marginalized groups. Now Sergeyich lay in bed, seized by a strange anxiety because of the snowfall, which seemed too loud. He seems to be apolitical, but then he spent a day tearing down the Lenin Street road signs and replacing them with his own made Shevchenko Street signs. The functional community of the bees repeatedly stands in contrast to the human communities Sergeyich moves in -- though on a smaller, usually individual scale he finds and gives considerable support where needed.

Such a gentle, passive character who somehow manages to show more human decency and bravery than most people he encounters. Sergeyich is a witness to the constant harassment and subjugation of the Tatar community by the Russian authorities.He receives a visit from his former school rival Pashka, the only other resident left in the village. It's also a devastating commentary on Russian interference in Ukraine and the good old Soviet/Russian tradition of lying while oppressing people. This is the setting for Grey Bees by Andrey Kurkov, a novel of the conflict that takes place aside from it to capture the everyday life of those trying to get by while forces greater than them vie for their land and existence. year-old safety inspector-turned-beekeeper Sergey Sergeich, wants little more than to help his bees collect their pollen in peace.

The bees are a nice touch too—not too front and center, but the low-level care and attention they need the kind of obligation that helps keeps Sergeyich focused. There's a lot of destruction here, with the appalling bigotry shown to Muslims and the relentless grinding damage of the war that has become a new normal, but there's also a lot of human warmth and decency standing stubbornly in the face of it all. This landscape of devastating historical memory is also a landscape of practical action; death and healing intersect on the grounds of this clinic where treatment continues even as the war continues to kill and maim.Sergey Sergeyich is one of the great introvert characters and he made me think of the main character in Robert Seethaler’s ‘A Whole Life‘. Eigentlich ist es nicht nur ein Roman, sondern auch ganz viel Sachbuch über einen bewaffneten Konflikt nicht weit vor unserer Haustür, über die Mentalität der Ukrainer, Russen und Tataren und über die Frage, wie wichtig Heimatverbundenheit ist in einer Zeit, die die Menschen immer wieder entwurzelt. He has been compared to Mikhail Bulgakov and Franz Kafka, with government paperwork and the absurdity of systems playing out in the background being a large theme that does invoke them, though I find the former a more apt comparison particularly with how frequently near-presceint dream sequences that dip into surrealism which inform the narrator’s logic and do a lot of the heavy lifting for the novel’s symbolism. During his time in Crimea Sergeyich grows close to Akhtem’s family and decides to set up his hives next to Akthem’s.