Edinburgh Book Festival: Andrey Kurkov - "I’m a pathological optimist. This is a medical state.”

Ordinary vexations get a lot more vexatious when your country is at war. Take, for example, an airline losing your luggage, which happened to Andrey Kurkov the day before our conversation.

With civilian air travel grounded in Ukraine since Russia invaded in February 2022, retrieving his bags meant a 1000-kilometre round trip by road to an airport in Poland.

As the Ukrainian writer who is best known around the world, and a fluent English speaker, Kurkov, 64, has become a kind of ambassador for his country, a ubiquitous giver of lectures, organiser of fundraisers and writer of articles for foreign press. He is also generous with his time in interviews with people like me.

“I was already, for many years, an explainer of Ukraine,” he says, mildly, speaking on Zoom from his Kyiv apartment. “I would be invited to different festivals to talk about my books, but in the end I would talk about Ukraine and my books.”

Andrey Kurkov | Orenda Books

As with so many things in Ukraine, Kurkov’s career divides into two parts: before the war began, and after.

“Before”, he was a writer of highly acclaimed crime novels set in Ukraine, books with a sardonic edge and dash of the surreal. His best known is Death and the Penguin, published in English in 2001.

“After” has turned him from novelist to statesman, commentator, public intellectual.

When Russia invaded, he stopped writing fiction and turned to non-fiction, writing for newspapers and websites around the world. He has published two collections of non-fiction writing: Diary of an Invasion and, most recently, Our Daily War. As the war grinds on, it feels more important than ever to share the day-to-day experiences of ordinary Ukrainians. Kurkov’s calm demeanour, precise observation and wry sense of humour make him ideally suited to the task.

His two-day journey to collect his luggage meant he missed a heavy night of shelling in Kyiv.

“It was very bad. There was an explosion not far away from my daughter’s home in the centre, 100 metres away, a high-rise was damaged, the windows were out.”

This is daily life now for many Ukrainians: checking air raid siren apps; reckoning up the previous night’s damage; checking in regularly with family and friends. On nights of intensive bombardment, no one gets much sleep.

Kurkov says he has lost his sense of humour only twice in his life: at the beginning of the full-scale Russian invasion, in February 2022, and in 2014, when Russia annexed the Crimea. The day after being woken at 5am by the sound of explosions, he and his wife, who is British, left the city for Uzhgorod near the western border, partly to make it easier for Kurkov to travel.

“When we were in the car, I was driving and speaking on the phone to journalists. Then, when we reached Uzhgorod, I was asked by several newspapers to write articles to explain the reasons for the war. It happened automatically, naturally. I just started writing, sometimes four or five big articles every week. I forgot about fiction at the beginning of the full-scale invasion.”

When the Kurkovs returned to Kyiv in July, morale in the city was high.

“When the Ukrainian army pushed the Russian army from Kyiv region, there was euphoria and everyone was sure that things were coming to an end,” he says.

Did he think that?

“I didn’t, I was sure that Russia will not stop the war until the death of Putin. Putin will not stop the war because this is his last war, and he started it in order to be remembered in Russian history as somebody who made Russia great again. But I was sure that we would have enough military help from the West to liberate the occupied territories and to keep Russia at bay.”

When this did not happen, and the war in the east of the country became entrenched, Kyiv stared to return to a strange kind of normality. Shops and cafes reopened; the alcohol ban was revoked; people began to distinguish between the sound of a drone and a ballistic missile; danger became part of everyday life.

“Your behaviour adapts to the war, you know,” Kurkov said. “You think perhaps I can go and have coffee, and if there is a siren I will move away from the windows in the cafe.”

Cultural activities resumed too, and were embraced with a new passion. Kyiv hosts a book festival in June, and Kharkiv’s is at the end of August. Ukraine’s second city, 30km from the frontlines, is under constant bombardment, so all the events will take place in bomb shelters and underground spaces.

Meanwhile, the theatres in Kyiv are full. In Odessa, when the shelling allows, people are going to the opera and drinking champagne. In this war, culture is a contested area.

“People understand that culture is actually the source of energy and the source of hope, because culture is part of national identity. This is a war against Ukrainian national identity, because this is the identity that forces Ukrainians to defend their land.”

Writers have long been revered in Eastern Europe. Being a literary figure tends to be synonymous with speaking for your country, politically and philosophically.

“Writers were punished by the regimes, they were killed, they were exiled. The nation remembers them, and they become symbols, they become heroes. For Ukrainians, there are no military figures who are considered as important as poets.”

The country is also reckoning its losses, at least in part, by the loss of its writers. 120 Ukrainian writers, poets and publishers have been killed since the war began. When I ask Kurkov if he worries about his own life, he says simply “No, I don’t think about my own life, because if I worry I cannot function.”

The mood in Kyiv, he says, is stoic. Humour has become blacker, his own included. People drink more coffee to cope with the sleepless nights.

“There is no depression. People are angry, bitter. They don’t hide that they are afraid every night for their lives, they write about it on Facebook, but nobody is addressing Zelensky or anybody else publicly asking for peace at any cost. People joke that if you are not killed in the night then in the morning you have to go to work. I think the level of trauma, psychological trauma, is very high.”

Returning to a kind of normality has also meant that, after a two-and-a-half-year hiatus, Kurkov has returned to writing fiction again, finishing the third novel in his Kyiv Mysteries series, The Lost Soldiers (not yet available in English).

The books are set in 1919, during the four-year period in which Ukraine declared its independence from Russia after the fall of the Tsars, provoking fierce retaliation by the Red Army. The first in the series, The Silver Bone, was longlisted for the International Booker Prize.

“The thing for me is that writing fiction is a pleasure and you cannot expect pleasure in this time of the suffering in the country,” he says. “There was something immoral in this desire. It was escapism. But I am irritated with myself if I can’t write fiction. I think, if I go to the theatre - and I go to the theatre with great pleasure now, much more than I used to - then why not find time to write a story?”

He says the parallels between 1919 and the present situation are self-evident.

“It’s the same situation. In 1919, the Red Army attacked Ukraine in order to turn Ukraine into a Russian province. And the level of violence today against the Ukrainian civilian population is the same as it was then.”

But there is enough distance to write about it through the lens of imagination.

“I use my imagination and I use archives. It’s a pleasure, it’s very interesting, and I can add my fantasy and my imagination to the real events, which I cannot allow myself to do with today’s reality. I would not even start a novel about today’s situation.”

I ask him if he’s still optimistic?

“Well, I’m a pathological optimist. This is a medical state.”

His eyes twinkle just a little.

“I’m still an optimist, but I would say ‘cautious optimist mixed with realist’. I think everybody who remains in Ukraine now, even if they don’t realise it, they are optimists.”

Andrey Kurkov will talk about Our Daily War at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on 19 August at 5pm, and with Richard Lloyd Parry in a discussion on How to Resist, 18 August at 1.15pm

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