Andrei Kurkov
Born in 1961 in Russia, is the author of 15 novels, nearly half of which have been translated, as well as seven books for children. His novel Death And The Penguin, published in Ukraine in 1996, has been translated in 33 languages.
Notre sélection
A wall comes down, a world is born
A wall comes down, a world is born
“A country under construction presents the same dangers to its population as a building site does to unsupervised children,” declares Andrei Kurkov, a Ukrainian author who writes in Russian and is well-known for his lucid perspective on post-Soviet society. Here he comments on the late 1980s and the Orange Revolution as well as on more current events.
An interview to mark the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall (9 November 1989), by Katerina Markelova.
You were quite young when the President Mikhail Gorbachev started his perestroika. Were you aware of the limits imposed by the Soviet regime?
At that age and time, I did not think about limits. There simply existed certain rules which it was better not to transgress. As a student, I wrote black-humoured short stories that I distributed at the university (the Kiev State Pedagogical Institute of Foreign Languages). Which got me a summons from the KGB (Committee for State Security in the former USSR). Someone once told me which one of my acquaintances had written letters denouncing me. Informing in this way was very common at the time and more or less the norm. However, I would not define everything that happened during that time in terms of “limits imposed by the regime”.
The universe of your novels often seems unreal and a number of your characters are animals – in Death And The Penguin, for example. Is this a means of expressing your ideas on society without calling things by their real names?
Yes, I think unconsciously, in the Soviet era, I wrote in such a way that no one could accuse me of anything at all. Since the 1990s, however, the settings of my novels have become more real; they are sometimes Kiev, or Ukraine and Russia, or Kazakhstan. The penguins came to mind because they remind me so much of the Soviets. They are animals that live in groups. One individual, isolated, cannot survive; it loses its sense of orientation. The group, meanwhile, possesses a certain collective conscience. Each new generation takes the same path as the one before. Everything is programmed in these animals and they function according to the programme only when they are together. If you put a penguin on a deserted island, the programme stops.
In 1991, with the breakdown of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of the communist party’s hegemony, the programme directing the Soviet people’s collective life disappeared too. Individuals found themselves alone and disoriented. They had to get used to their new life, to autonomy, as well as they could.
What did you think about perestroika? Had you imagined such an outcome?
I welcomed Gorbachev with joy. There was a premonition of great change. Andropov was dead along with Chernenko and in their place a young Gorbachev had emerged full of promise for the future. At about that time I was able to publish my first short stories, which had been rejected previously. I remember that science-fiction, for example, which until then had been scarce, began to proliferate. This meant in a way we had more of a right to dream. So everyone started believing that life would improve. I did too.
The weakening of the State’s control was obvious, but I could never have imagined it leading to the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Then, when the collapse began, there was first the economic crisis – the empty shops, the depreciation of the ruble – then simply decomposition and the separation of Ukraine and the USSR. That was when I began to feel mixed emotions. At the same time, I was thinking it was easier to bring order to a small country than to a big country. I don’t know why, but I imagined that Ukraine would move quickly into a normal orbit. But… that did not happen.
How did you react to the fall of the Berlin wall?
At first, I was confused! I was afraid that it would end badly. I remember, just before the fall of the wall, Hungary had opened its border with the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and about 10,000 East Germans streamed in, to be part of the Federal Republic of Germany. The future seemed precarious at those moments. Maybe, unconsciously, I was afraid they would trigger a Third World War. But my apprehension quickly dissipated. We could follow the events on television regularly and it became clear that the political system of the GDR was collapsing. And as it was much more solid than the Soviet or the Polish system, it was evident that a new era was approaching.
How have the societies of post-Soviet countries, and particularly Ukrainian society, evolved since the Iron Curtain fell?
In many of my novels I describe how, in 1991, life gained the upper hand over humanity. What I mean is that the rules of life – which until then had been universally accepted by societies – had disappeared and people found themselves tossed by the waves of destiny.
On one hand, the majority of retired people – nostalgic for the Soviet Union – were not willing or able to adapt to the new era. On the other, the people of my generation suddenly threw themselves into activities for which they were not prepared. Life pushed some towards small commercial ventures and others towards crime. For example, I had a classmate who was a good student and who wanted to be a chemist. Suddenly, he became a broker. He worked with money of dubious origin, which got him five years in prison. It is different for the new generation, those born after 1985. Young people have a different mentality because they have not known the suffering of political and social rupture.
All this to say that a country under construction presents the same dangers to its population as a building site does to unsupervised children. The people fall, they bump into things, they’re constantly hurting themselves and destroying their destiny. In addition, immorality in politics was legitimized. In other words, if you are comfortable being dishonest, corrupt, etc. – become a congressman. Politics has been reduced to a dirty business in many countries. We can say that people are going into politics to enrich themselves and not to build the State. That is why the State still seems unfinished. This failure to establish the State is still felt today in Ukraine, although less violently. The time of dividing up power among gangsters is over: intelligent wrongdoers turn to financial crime.
What were you doing during the Orange Revolution, which began in Ukraine in November 2004?
I got involved actively: I spent three weeks in Maidan (Kiev’s central square), giving interviews that were broadcast live in Spain, Canada, Germany and England. My writer friends and I organised open debates in the bookshop Nautchnaia mysl (scientific thought) in the centre of the city where followers of both Yanukovych and Yushchenko came to get warm. I do not regret having done that. In any case, what we have today is better than what we had before the Orange Revolution, from a political and moral point of view. Even if now almost all the actors from the revolution are disillusioned because they expected more.
What are the strengths of democracy in the post-Soviet countries and what are the weaknesses?
The existence of political pluralism indicates a democracy. But our democracy is more symbolic than real, because behind the political parties, one sees no ideological programmes. These parties are simply groups of representatives of the economic sector united around common interests who call themselves liberal or something else. Occasionally, I have the impression that in Ukraine, despite everything, there is more democracy than in Russia. But on the other hand, when laws are not applied in a country, when a number of rules are missing and no one is striving to establish them, one has reasons to doubt the validity of one’s democratic regime. That said, we do have a certain freedom of the press and people can, if they want to, participate in all political actions. That is already great progress.
