Law and Order, Magic and Murder in Kyiv

Andrey Kurkov’s latest novel, set a century ago, speaks to Ukraine’s current crisis.

The Silver Bone
by Andrey Kurkov
translated by Boris Dralyuk
HarperVia, 294 pp., $28

IN “THE SIMPLE ART OF MURDER,” HIS CLASSIC ESSAY on detective fiction, Raymond Chandler described the typical atmosphere of the “realist” detective novel: it is “a world in which gangsters can rule nations and almost rule cities . . . where no man can walk down a dark street in safety because law and order are things we talk about but refrain from practicing; a world where you may witness a holdup in broad daylight and see who did it, but you will fade quickly back into the crowd rather than tell anyone, because the holdup men may have friends with long guns, or the police may not like your testimony.” If Chandler thought that danger and corruption were endemic to the Los Angeles roamed by his detective Philip Marlowe, he should have taken a look at Kyiv.

Not the Kyiv of today, though it has certainly had its own struggles with corruption and now faces daily threats of bombardment, but that of 1919, just over a decade before Chandler began writing his first detective stories. That is the setting of The Silver Bone, the new mystery by Andrey Kurkov. Recently translated into English by Boris Dralyuk, The Silver Bone—first in what is to be a series, “The Kyiv Mysteries”—transports readers a century into the past and plunges them into a city that was even more tumultuous then than now.

Kurkov is one of Ukraine’s most famous living writers. Several of his earlier works have been translated into English, and he has become an important international spokesman for the Ukrainian cause following Russia’s full-scale invasion. His previous novel, Grey Bees—published in Dralyuk’s English translation in 2020—was set in the so-called “gray zone,” the no-man’s-land between the Russian and Ukrainian lines in the Donbas region from which most citizens fled after Russia’s occupation in 2014. It tells of Sergey Sergeyich, a lonely, divorced beekeeper and one of only two residents remaining in the town of Little Starhorodivka. As it follows Sergey and his bees to Crimea, where they encounter unfriendly Russian authorities, the novel quietly but revealingly probes the personal and social wounds inflicted by the war’s early stages.

In 2022, when the current phase of the war began, Kurkov—having temporarily fled Kyiv and finding it difficult to continue concentrating on fiction—turned to journalism. His descriptions of the war and defenses of a free and independent Ukraine have subsequently appeared in magazines and newspapers across the West. English readers can find a selection of them in Diary of an Invasion, which offers firsthand accounts of the war interspersed with reflections on Russian and Ukrainian politics and culture (Ukrainians are “individualists, egoists, anarchists who do not like government or authority,” whereas Russians, “who lived for centuries under a monarchy, loved their czars”). Remembering all he had left behind—his home, his library, his desk—Kurkov writes, “I could not even imagine that this happiness could be destroyed so easily.”

Although The Silver Bone has only this year appeared in translation, Kurkov wrote it prior to Russia’s incursion, making its setting in a war-torn Kyiv eerily prescient. In Diary of an Invasion, Kurkov writes, “Almost every day, I find more and more parallels between the events of the civil war in Ukraine during 1918–21 and current events. At that time, the Bolsheviks destroyed everything Ukrainian in order to make Ukraine Soviet. Today, the new Bolsheviks bring with them a monument to Lenin and destroy everything Ukrainian in order to make Ukraine Russian.” American readers are unlikely to realize the incredible instability and violence that characterized Ukraine after the First World War. Writing about Lviv—farther west than Kyiv, near the Polish border—international human rights lawyer Philippe Sands has noted that the city changed hands “no fewer than eight times in the years between 1914 and 1945.”

When The Silver Bone opens, on March 11, 1919, the Soviet Bolsheviks have temporarily taken control of Kyiv and are trying to impose order, though their hold on power is precarious (and is threatened by an uprising during the course of the novel). Chandler’s description of a world in which “no man can walk down a dark street in safety” fits perfectly, as we discover on the book’s very first page, where we meet its protagonist, Samson Kolechko. Within one sentence, his father is dead, head split open by a Cossack saber, and within three, the same saber has sliced off Samson’s own right ear.

Describing the gritty world of realist detective fiction, Chandler went on to write, “Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man.” Samson is often afraid, but he is not tarnished, and indeed he fits the rest of Chandler’s description rather well: “He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man.” Samson has already lost his mother and sister to tuberculosis, so his father’s murder leaves him without family. He has studied electrical engineering but is currently unemployed, apparently living on what his father had earned as a merchant before the war shut down his trading company.

Looking for a job, Samson stumbles into detective work by chance. When the Soviet Red Army billets a pair of soldiers in his apartment, they make room for themselves to sleep by having Samson’s father’s desk improperly “requisitioned.” Samson goes to the police station to complain, where he is told to write up the details of the incident in a report. He returns the next morning, and the commanding officer Nayden, short of men, compliments him on his clear, exact prose and says he can get the desk back if he agrees to join the team. “Your duty,” Nayden tells Samson, “would be to combat crime and restore order.” Soon, Samson finds himself enmeshed in a puzzling string of silver thefts, involving his two Red Army tenants, a German tailor named Balzer, patterns for an expensive woolen suit cut to fit someone of unusual proportions, and an anatomically perfect silver replica of a left femur.

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AS WITH MOST HARD-BOILED DETECTIVE FICTION, The Silver Bone is carried along less by plot than by atmosphere and character. Kurkov nicely captures the menace of a Kyiv torn between competing factions, where the Red Army and Chekist secret police vie with saber-wielding Cossacks and Ukrainian insurgents for control of the city, gunshots ring out in the streets unpredictably, people are left for dead in their looted apartments, and the mere sound of footsteps on the street at night is sufficient reason to take cover. Meanwhile, ordinary citizens hunker down, uncertain where their next meal will come from or whether they will have electricity and water from one day to the next. They grow understandably cynical about all the competing factions. “Order comes in many varieties, these days,” says the doctor who treated Samson’s wounded ear. “There is the order of the Bolsheviks, the order of Makhno’s anarchists, the order of Denikin. None of these is written down on paper, and they all change like the weather in England. Nothing is settled. Yet that’s precisely what life requires—a settled order, established by law, so that the same rules apply to everyone.”

Not everyone is a cynic, however. The appealingly earnest Samson accepts at face value that it is now his duty to combat crime and restore order. Even more idealistic is Nadezhda, the young woman with whom he becomes romantically involved. Their slowly developing relationship, touching in its authenticity and sheer normality, is one of the ways in which The Silver Bone departs from the hard-boiled models of Chandler and Dashiell Hammett to which it otherwise owes quite a bit. (Kurkov is incidentally to be commended for having pulled off something apparently difficult for modern novelists: In Samson and Nadezhda, he persuasively depicts a romantic relationship that remains, at least in this first novel of the series, entirely platonic, although the couple involved comes to share an apartment and in one scene even a bed.)

Samson and Nadezhda both possess a certain idealism, but their personalities are very different, and the subtle contrast between them is one of the book’s most enjoyable features. Nadezhda, who works for the Provincial Bureau of Statistics, is enthusiastic about the new regime and its promise. When Samson asks whether her work is interesting, she replies, “Work shouldn’t be interesting. . . . It should be important and necessary for society.” She wants to “set an example as a person of the future,” she tells him. And although her parents “belong to the world of the past,” she insists that they agree with her that “a person of the future should be determined, hardworking, and kind.” She is proud of her statistical work, which is “extremely predictable! Everything’s based on mathematics.” Emblematic of this is the census of Kyiv she has just helped complete, counting all the city’s residents, “measur[ing] every home and factory, every flat, every public building,” and classifying everyone according to nationality, age, and literacy.

Samson, by contrast, is more intuitive. Not long after hearing Nadezhda decribe the census, he is struck by its futility. Reflecting upon the twin killings of the tailor Balzer and a Red Army soldier named Semyon, who had been assisting Samson in his investigation, “Samson realized that, although the census had not yet been fully analyzed, it was already inaccurate, because, in all likelihood, Balzer was still alive by its lights. And Semyon wasn’t even in it. So they aren’t that important, these statistics. But he wouldn’t say that to Nadezhda—she wouldn’t understand.”

And if the census is emblematic of Nadezhda’s rational, scientific outlook, Samson’s most unusual investigative aid symbolizes his somewhat different perspective, while also providing the book’s most significant departure from its noir forerunners. At crucial moments, Samson discovers that he can still hear with his right ear—the ear that had been severed off, but which he has preserved in a metal box. Hidden in his father’s desk or on a bookshelf, the ear, apparently immune to decay, lets Samson eavesdrop on secret conversations, or it alerts him to the presence of an intruder. Needless to say, this sort of thing was not among Philip Marlowe’s investigative techniques. But its fantastical strangeness serves to augment the seeming unreality of wartime Kyiv.

The chief appeal of The Silver Bone lies in Kurkov’s ability to sketch, often very quickly, the diverse reactions that ordinary men and women have to that unreality: the tired resignation of frightened citizens lacking everyday goods such as butter, salt, or firewood; the frustrated dedication of Nayden as he seeks to restore order with limited resources; the fear and despair of soldiers attempting to desert and return home to their neglected farms and families; the hopeful idealism of Nadezhda and her colleagues in the Bureau of Statistics as they confidently work to build that better world of the future; and the exhaustion of Nadezhda’s father, who says at one point, “If only someone would win out and take power for good. Otherwise, they’ll all just kill each other—and us, too, while they’re at it.” In all these ways, Kurkov’s book, despite its historical setting, reminds us of the ongoing struggles still faced by the Ukrainian people, who have been dealing with changing regimes and new conquerors for over a century now. As Samson thinks at one point, “no matter where you hide, you can’t escape a collective misfortune. It will always catch up with you, making sure you get your share.” One hopes and prays that Ukraine still has enough Samson and Nadezhdas—and Andrey Kurkovs—to escape soon from its long, ongoing collective misfortune.