The Silver Bone

by Andrey Kurkov

translated by Boris Dralyuk

published by HarperCollins Publishers

Copyright 2020 (Russian) English Translation 2024

288 pages

ISBN 978-0-06-335228-5

Summary by Kathy Hamara 

 About the Author:

Andrey Kurkov has been referred to as Ukraine’s most famous living author. He was born near Leningrad in 1961. His father was a pilot with the Soviet Air Force and when the unit was decommissioned, he moved his family to Kyiv where he found work at an aviation factory. Andrey was 1 or 2 years of age. Kurkov still lives in Kyiv. He holds a Ukrainian passport.

Kurkov studied at the Kyiv Institute of Foreign Languages, graduating in 1983. He speaks seven languages (Russian, Ukrainian, German, Japanese, English, Polish and French) and trained as a Japanese translator.  He writes in Russian, his mother tongue, drawing the ire of some Ukrainian nationalists. He worked diverse jobs including journalist, prison warden, cameraman, screenwriter and writer of children’s stories before becoming a novelist and self-publishing.

Kurkov’s writing features satirical portrayals of post-Soviet life, corruption and the complexities of Ukrainian identity and society. He is a prominent commentator and journalist, democracy advocate and critic of Putin. He is on the Kremlin list of Ukrainian activists. He has at least 19 books to his name. The Silver Bone was longlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2024.

 Notable Works:

2001 - Death and the Penguin

2003 - Jimi Hendrix Live in Lviv

2014 - Ukraine Diaries: Dispatches from Kyiv

2016 – The Bickford Fuse

2020 - Grey Bees

2022 - Diary of an Invasion

2025 – The Stolen Heart, Book 2 of the Kyiv Mysteries (Samson Kolechko must rescue his kidnapped fiancée while investigating the illegal sale of meat in the lawless 1920’s Kyiv. Based on a real-life case.)

In his novels, much has been drawn from Bolshevik secret police files from WWI which were passed along to him by a reader. His novels have been translated into 41 languages.

About the Translator Boris Dralyuk

Boris Dralyuk was born in 1983 in Odesa. He left Odesa at the age of 8 but has maintained close ties. He is a Ukrainian-American writer, editor, translator and university professor of Russian literature who holds a PhD in Slavic Languages and Literature from UCLA. He published a poetry collection in 2022 – My Hollywood and Other Poems and has translated at least 18 books including a Ukrainian children’s story Who Will Make the Snow? which was included in the New York Times list of best children’s books of 2023. 

Synopsis

The Silver Bone is a historical mystery novel set in the chaotic Kyiv of 1919 following WWI and the Russian Revolution. The city is controlled by the Red Army and beleaguered by different factions vying for control of Ukraine. The opening scene is dramatic and bloody as Samson Kolechko’s father is murdered by Soviet Cossacks in front of him. Samson’s ear is sliced off by a sabre, though he manages to retrieve it and store it in a tin box in his father’s desk. He is now a young, orphaned, unemployed electrical engineer living alone until rooms and furniture in his flat are requisitioned and two Red Army soldiers move in. He soon discovers the magical properties of his severed ear: he can hear everything through it, even at a distance.

When his father’s desk is mistakenly requisitioned, Samson heads to the police station to reclaim it, only to be hired as an investigator by the supervisor who admires his superior writing skills. His first case is focused on the investigation of the two soldiers in his flat who have amassed bags of stolen goods.

The yard sweeper’s widow in the flat below serves as matchmaker and introduces Samson to Nadezhda who is a single statistician drawing up the city census. She becomes a love interest and assists Samson in solving cases. He follows a trail that eventually leads to the discovery of a theft of silver objects including a silver femur replica and a man’s suit of unusual proportions. He eventually solves the murder of a soldier and a tailor.

Kurkov deepens his story with a vivid portrait of Kyiv that emphasizes the city’s atmosphere of fear, danger and considerable material deprivation including food, firewood, electricity and water. The Silver Bone is at once dark, comical, ironic and absurd with an affable protagonist, finely drawn characters and descriptions of daily life in Kyiv 1919 and the endurance of the human spirit.

Kurkov/Dralyuk Interviews and Articles

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/24/magazine/ukraine-andrey-kurkov.html

https://www.guernicamag.com/andrey-kurkov-the-border-between-real-and-surreal-lies-somewhere-else/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrey_Kurkov

https://chytomo.com/en/people-who-go-into-battle-with-a-joke-on-their-lips-interview-with-boris-dralyuk/

A Boy in Winter

 

By Rachel Seiffert

Vintage International Publishers

Published in 2018; copyright 2017

238 pages

ISBN: 978-0-8041-6880-9

 Summary by Uliana Pasicznyk

This poignant novel begins in Nazi-occupied Ukraine in November 1941. The German Wehrmacht has pushed the Soviet Red Army across much of western Ukraine and is advancing toward Kyiv.  Following the Wehrmacht, the German SS has arrived in the town where thirteen-year-old Yankel and his family live. Yasia, a seventeen-year-old Ukrainian girl, is in the town too, having arrived there from her family’s farm in the surrounding countryside. Stationed nearby is the German engineer Otto Pohl, whose task is to build a solid road for the Germans’ use. Their lives soon intertwine in a remarkable and memorable story.

In the town, people fear the SS’s presence and what its occupation means. Yankel’s parents and small sister are already in the crowd of people gathered in the brickworks factory in the centre of town, having been commanded to appear there along with all other Jews. But independent-minded Yankel has no intention of heading there. His little brother, Momik, is with him, and he must find some other place for the two of them to go.

Ostensibly Yasia has come to town to sell fruit, but her real aim is to see Mykola, her beloved, who abandoned the retreating Red Army and has begun policing for the Germans. Venturing out at dusk to seek him out, Yasia chances upon the two brothers keeping to the shadows along a dark side street. What are they doing out here, she wonders fretfully, especially now, when the whole village is strange and times are troubled? When the boys follow her, she realizes they have no place to go. Apprehensive and reluctant though she is, Yasia hides them in the loft of her cousin’s barn.

Outside the town, Otto continues to oversee his workers and report on the construction of the road that is his responsibility. But he is uneasy, and he avoids dealing with the SS and German military in the area. Why are they still here, he wonders irritably, when the victorious Wehrmacht has marched on? Why is he obliged to make local men labour on the road for such long stretches of time without adequate food or rest, resulting in less than good work? And then there was that scene he witnessed, the way the SS had treated the town’s Jewish schoolmaster and his mother – it appalled Otto. He has gradually begun to realize what the goals of the Nazis he is working for are, and he is increasingly troubled by them. The only person with whom he can share all this is his wife back in Germany, but he knows his letters to her are read by censors and so anything he writes could endanger them both.

Readers of the novel encounter others who are part of what is happening: Yankel’s worried parents Ephraim and Miryam with small Rosa; the battered schoolmaster and his bewildered elderly mother; rash Mykola and his unyielding parents; Otto’s calculating SS supervisor, Arnold; Yasia’s fearful cousin Osip, and his suspicious neighbours; her reticent uncle, and members of his community far out in the marshlands; the partisans who also roam there. Always at the centre of the story, though, are Yasia and the two brothers she has unwillingly become responsible for. As Yasia and Yankel work through their distrust of each other, dangerous incidents and horrific events occur, and they must depend on each other to survive. At one point, Otto comes across them and their lives are literally in his hands; the actions he takes then alter his life, as well as theirs.

Our Rozmova group had much to say about A Boy in Winter. Several members noted events and characters in the book that resembled wartime experiences they had heard about in their own families. The group was appreciative of the clear writing style, fluid yet precise narrative, and use of concise dialogue that characterize the book, agreeing that together they allowed readers to  “witness” characters, actions, and scenes vividly. One example was when restless Momik must be kept quiet in the barn loft lest a noise reveal their presence; Yankel acts by swiftly and silently fashioning animals from bits of straw and twigs for the little boy to play with, as Yasia, still apprehensive but now also appreciative of Yankel’s quick thinking and ingenuity, looks on. Another element focused on was that the main characters spoke three different languages, at times conveyed by italicized words in those languages, so communicating effectively with one another was a complexity evident from the start.

The author, Rachel Seiffert, is a prize-winning writer whose first book, The Dark Room, was short-listed for the Booker Prize. In interviews she has spoken about elements in her personal history – for instance, her German family background – that have affected her choice of topics and characters to portray. One theme strongly present in her work is how the individual acts within the context of history, that is, in critical historical events as they are happening around him or her. Rozmova members agreed that in dealing with her characters and their actions, Seiffert writes in a way that allows her readers to visualize them clearly and in depth. In sum, her skill as a writer allowed her readers to make their own judgments about these characters and actions, and that was something Rozmova readers valued highly in this book.