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

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Wherever this wisdom was visible and comprehensible to him, he would compare its manifestations with human life—always to the detriment to the latter.

There are Sergeyich’s bees of course who mean everything to him, and they happy hums make him a happy man. It’s 2014, Russia has seized the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea, and there’s fighting all up and down the line dividing the pro-Russian separatist “people’s republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk from the rest of Ukraine. If this could happen to him, the Everyman of the story, it can happen to anyone, and is certainly happening to the marginalized groups. As the summer season approaches, Sergeyich becomes most concerned about his bees and giving them space far from noise caused by shelling. Kurkov's translator, Boris Dralyuk, renders the warmth of Sergey's inner voice from the original Russian without letting the earnestness creep into the saccharine.The book takes us to the small village of Starhorodivka in the grey zone between combatting Ukrainians and separatists. There had been nothing but snow, and if you looked at it long enough, you would begin to hear white noise — a kind of silence that takes hold of your soul with its cold hands and doesn’t release it for a long time.

Following beekeeper Sergey Sergeyich, a divorced man living alone save for one neighbor—his old childhood bully with whom he now maintains a tepid camaraderie—in the Donbas grey zone, Kurkov’s story moves from winter warzones to summer in Crimea in a deceptively simple story that hums with the qualities of a hero's journey fairy tale ripe with strong symbolism, imagery and an ambiguous hope.One of his beehives is marked by a soldier with shell-shock and is later found to contain a grenade. And, of course, the communal activity of the bees contrasts nicely with the much more discordant interactions among humans all around him . During his time in Crimea Sergeyich grows close to Akhtem’s family and decides to set up his hives next to Akthem’s. Akhtem and his family were Tartars, locals who were infamously deported en masse from Crimea under Stalin. He’s one of only two human inhabitants left in Little Starhorodivka, a two-street village in the grey zone between the Ukrainian and Russian lines.

It is not a book about the war as per se; it is a book about those souls affected the madness of the war and misinterpretation of the history as a foundation for human rights violations. This right papers in combination with the right identity can mean peaceful, almost trouble-free existence during the time of war and political repression.And this sense, which could make him worry terribly at any hour of the day, was focused entirely on one object: his bees. The world of human power struggle, on the other hand, is deeply dysfunctional, cruel, artificially divided, and illogical. De olyan is akad, aki marad - mert nincs hová menni, mert gondoskodni kell a házról, a méhekről, és hát amúgy is: nehogy már egy pitiáner háború mondja meg neki, mit csináljon! Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review 's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers.