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

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As the summer season approaches, Sergeyich becomes most concerned about his bees and giving them space far from noise caused by shelling.

but the act serves as an early look at how fragile and fairly meaningless official government concepts are in the grey zone.Kurkov has a way of explaining to the rest of us what’s happening in his country in an entertaining way. Die Schüsse und Einschläge sind Hintergrundgeräusche im Leben der beiden Männer, sie haben sich damit arrangiert. On his way to Crimea and in Crimea he meets many characters, who see him, a man from the no-man’s land with rather ambivalent feelings as they are never sure which side he stands on.

While describing Sergeyich’s activities—an almost meditative catalogue of repeated gestures and little life tasks—Kurkov allows glimpses of the war to intrude around the edges, above all once Sergeyich relocates, first to a larger village controlled by the separatists and then to Crimea itself. Sergeyich's experiences over the course of the novel are mostly of the fairly simple sort, and Kurkov wisely stays mostly away from the overtly political .

Her translation of Yoko Tawada’s novel Paul Celan and the Transtibetan Angel is forthcoming in 2023 from New Directions. Oddly charming tale of an odd and solitary beekeeper living in a grey zone (the areas between the fronts of the Russia/Ukraine war in the 2010s).