Grey Bees by Andrey Kurkov

 

The following is part of a paper I wrote for a 2025 University of Toronto course in Contemporary Ukrainian Literature - Margaret Khomenko.

Grey Bees takes place in the years immediately following 2014 and was published before Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. It's the story of a man "in between", out of time and place.

 Following Russia's invasion of the Donbas region in 2014, the man lives in the grey zone near Donetsk, in between the Ukrainian and Russian front lines. In Godot-like fashion, he travels southwest in search of the unknown. Since he's from the war zone, he is suspected of being a Russian collaborator by people in settlements directly west of his home. Since he's a Ukrainian, he is punished by Russian border guards in occupied Crimea who suspect he is a Ukrainian nationalist. He isn't welcome by either group in either place, so he returns home to the war-torn grey zone, where the other sole survivor accepts him. Life settles in and carries on just as it was before.

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In the novel Grey Bees, the war in Donbas has torn the country apart in ethno-cultural divides, freezing people’s ease of mobility between regions. The separatists’ attacks in the book, supported by Russia, polarized a once-unified country that had dealt with its ethno-cultural differences in peace. The effects of war expose the fact that the protagonist’s self-contained life “in between things” has been informed by Soviet homogenous norms that protect him from overt Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar expressions of selfhood.

Sergeyich, a beekeeper who lives in the grey zone between the Ukrainian and Russian frontlines, travels to other regions to give his bees a break from the shelling. During wartime, whenever he goes outside the grey zone, he is ostracized for being from the Donetsk region, suspected of being either a Russian sympathizer or a Ukrainian nationalist. His Soviet roots, where “everyone was the same” under one Russified state, seem to accentuate his disillusionment while travelling across the country. Ukrainians outside the grey zone suspect him of being Russian, and Russian border guards in Crimea treat him badly because he is Ukrainian. Because of the war’s effect on attitudes across the country, Sergeyich doesn’t fit in anywhere outside of his home.

At the beginning of the novel the author describes how well Sergeyich adapts to having no electricity or heating, little food, and no access to any thriving town life, all a result of the war. Even after his wife and daughter leave him, he devises a peaceful, satisfying life taking care of his bees which represent a kind of ideal order and truth for him. He thinks back to a pre-war time when he was a retired health inspector and expert beekeeper providing relaxing, restorative therapy to people laying over his bees, healed by the vibrations. As long as Sergeyich stays home in the war’s grey zone during the attacks, he isn’t confronted by the polarizing effects of war on the rest of the country.

The protagonist’s adaptability helps him survive while the war rages on very close by. He changes his attitude and behaviour to survive, chatting with invader soldiers who visit his sole neighbour Pashka as well as receiving a soldier Petro from the Ukrainian army into his home. He finds happiness in the small things, such as the aroma of a beeswax candle described on the novel’s first page. The protagonist explains to Petro that he likes using his Russified name «Sergey» not «Serhiy» although he is ethnically Ukrainian.

Since Sergeyich lives to a large degree as he lived in a Russified Soviet Ukraine, he doesn’t grasp that outside the grey zone, he will be perceived as being on the Russian side.

He is a Russian-speaker and a local, so he doesn’t stick out there as an ethnic Ukrainian in the grey zone. During the war, there is no openly Ukrainian nationalistic behaviour anywhere nearby, except within the front lines of the opposing army. Privately to himself, Sergeyich remembers creating traditional Ukrainian wooden boxes with detailed inlays, for gifts at weddings. In a proclamation of his Ukrainian ethnicity (that few besides Pashka will ever see), Sergeyich switches the street signs in his village – moving the “Lenin” street sign to his frenemy Pashka’s street and moving the “Shevchenko” street sign to his own street.

Both ethnic Ukrainians and ethnic Russians are fighting for the Russians in the separatists’ war in Donbas.

People in other Ukrainian regions mistrust Sergeyich because many of his regional Donetsk countrymen are either fighting with the separatists for the Russians or sympathetic to them. His neighbour “frenemy” Pashka is loyal to the Russian side and sometimes receives food supplies from them – which he shares with Sergeyich.

The Russian language and community appear to dominate cultural life in that region of Ukraine, exacerbating ethnocultural tensions for anyone from the grey zone who ventures beyond it. As soon as he plans to leave his war-torn home, Sergeyich is affected by the ethno-cultural divides accentuated by the war. He is advised that he won’t be identified as a Ukrainian when he crosses from the grey zone into Ukraine. Near the beginning of the novel when they discuss Sergeyich's route into Ukraine from the grey zone, Petro tells him to go through Karuselino, near the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) and not through the Ukrainian checkpoints, because the Ukrainians will identify him as a DPR native person, ie loyal to the Russian side. Although Sergeyich is Ukrainian and not on the Russian side, war has divided people even when they are ethnoculturally on the same side and loyal to it.

Ukrainian attitudes towards Sergeyich are suspect in a village not far outside the war zone, and it doesn’t take much for resentment there to build against him. He leaves home to save his bees, and befriends a woman, Galya, while staying in a tent in her village near Vesele. He and Galya share meals, and he trades his homemade honey for food in the grocery store where she works. In Galya’s village, he attends a kneeling ceremony with her to bid farewell to fallen soldiers who are returned home, a custom practiced in Western Ukraine. Because he doesn’t want to kneel to pay his respects, he is treated as a dangerous element from war-torn Donbas - even though he is from the grey zone in between the Ukrainian and Russian fronts, not from Donbas. As during his exit from the grey zone, he is suspected by Ukrainians of being loyal to the Russian side.

The author accentuates an abrupt discord between Sergeyich and Galya’s community not long after he and Galya share the warm satisfaction of her homemade borshch in her home. After he is ostracized by her village, Sergeyich considers that Galya may be too basic for him and that they don’t have a real bond. When her townsfolk shun Sergeyich for not kneeling, she does not support him. She sticks with her community and goes to the cemetery with them. When Sergeyich cannot bring himself to kneel before a soldier's coffin, he could be expressing how resistant he is to anything that’s new, such as a custom initiated in Western Ukraine. He could also be expressing that he, too, has indirectly fought in this war, just in another way. This suffering endured in a grey zone is unacknowledged everywhere, except by other people at home who have undergone it.

As he moves West, the protagonist encounters increasing amounts of resistance to him for his roots in a war-torn area of Eastern Ukraine. On the edge of Galya’s village near Sergeyich’s tent, a hostile ex-soldier suffering from PTSD destroys Sergeyich’s car because he’s an outsider in the Ukrainian village. Sergeyich is advised to leave the village because he upsets the veteran with PTSD. Later from Crimea, Sergeyich phones Pashka and has more concern for him and what he's going through, than for Galya who he may not really identify with.

The ethnocultural chasms deepened by the war are not immediately apparent in everyday life on a surface level. At the beginning of his experiences outside the grey zone, Sergeyich seems to integrate and connect to people. But once they’re sharing something deeper and regional customs come into play, he can’t align with either the Ukrainian community practicing a popular custom, or a Crimean community practicing the Moslem faith. He’s seen as “other” in each place and feels ostracized, effectively pushed back to where he came from.

While Russian occupation is being imposed in the Donetsk People’s Republic in the east, the Luhansk People’s Republic in the east, and Crimea in the south – in the rest of the country a growing Ukrainian national identity is being established. This divide plays out in Sergeyich’s travels to different regions. When Sergeyich experiences beauty in occupied Crimea and connects to a Tatar family there, he later feels entirely alienated from their Moslem funeral rights for a beekeeper friend – and doesn’t know how to help when the Muslim Tatar son of his late friend is imprisoned by the new Russian Crimean state. When he hears of his beekeeper friend's Akhtem's body being found, the protagonist feels like a bee in an unfamiliar hive.

Although Sergeyich went to Crimea to give his bees a rest and reconnect with his friend, he is condemned by the Russian Federal Security Service, (FSB) for being Ukrainian. They ridicule his Soviet license plate on his car and accuse him of entering Russian-occupied territory without clearing his bees for entry. His bees are taken by the FSB, and they are compromised and turn grey.

The bees represent an almost spiritual-like power of good for the protagonist, but their ideal order also alludes to his yearning for the simplicity of a familiar past. Sergeyich’s bees produce honey which helps him to survive, but to him they also represent order, truth, family, social perfection in working for a common good, and healing. The protagonist often expresses a desire that people act more like bees.

While in Crimea, Sergeyich feels the magic of the bees’ effects on him, described on p. 306: “As soon as he ceased to see the dark heavenly sea above him, with its stars and moon, he felt the vibrations from the hives beneath his back and feet. He also heard muffled buzzing, as if shutting his eyes had sharpened his ears. … Warmed by the Crimean air and lulled by the vibrations of his healing bed, he had a dream.”

The only place where Sergeyich has a reality that is his own, is at home. Home in the wartime grey zone is so grounding for him that he associates his home alarm clock with the definition of time. When the clock is wound by him at home, time proceeds and life is lived, but when Sergeyich is away and the clock stands unwound at home, time itself stands still as though life doesn't exist there.

Due to effects of the war in Donbas, the protagonist is welcomed by Galya but is not welcomed by her village, then welcomed by his friend's wife and children but not welcomed by the Russian occupiers in Crimea. The novel suggests that Sergeyich does not seem fully aware that since the fall of the Soviet Union, Ukraine has defined itself by national identity – and since the war broke out, he is associated with Russians in Donetsk. Although it is a cohesive community that Sergeyich seems to crave the most, it is also what the war has taken from him in every sense. His model of the socially superior bees becomes more of an ideal as familiar ways slip away from him. The current war in Donbas increasingly polarizes his region ethno-culturally from the rest of the country.

The ethnographically polarizing effects of war in different regions of Ukraine are exemplified through the southwestward travels of an “everyman” from Eastern Ukraine. He lives for his bees and believes in their social model as an ideal one, subtly maintaining a utopian social belief. As a native of the war zone, he encounters ostracism, violence and judgement. Because he is ethnically Ukrainian in Russian-occupied Crimea, he is told he is “a foreigner from a war zone” by the FSB who interrogate him and take one of his hives. When some of his bees turn subtly grey after being captured by the FSB and cannot produce as normal bees anymore, it represents the breakdown of his old assumptions of how to live.