Grey Bees and Snails: Two Novels about Ukraine

 

In Survival, Margaret Atwood's fascinating essay about Canada and its literature, she analyzed the relation between animals in a nation's fiction  and its views about itself.  The United States' animal stories were all about overcoming them, she pointed out, while English ones had cozy human-like beasts who ended up taking tea  together.  In Canadian writing, on the other hand, the animals were always victims which, she  argued, reflected Canadians' basic attitudes toward life.

Interesting idea, I remember thinking, but put it away, until recently when I've read two extremely good novels by Ukrainian writers, Grey Bees (2018) by Andrey Kurkov (translated into English by Boris Dralyuk) and Endling by Maria Reva (2025). Kurkov's hero is a beekeeper who wants little more than to allow his bees to do what they do best--collect pollen and make honey.  But he lives in territory that Russia invaded in 2014, and undertakes a long journey to safer, more clement country. It's  a quest and he encounters many adventures.  He and bees survive, which is saying something.

Reva is a Ukrainian-Canadian who immigrated with her family when she was a child.  Her novel starts off as a near-farce: three young women enroll themselves in a "beautiful Ukrainian bride" scheme, largely to make some money.  One of them also is a biologist bent on saving snails from extinction, and she's outfitted a van as a lab.  The other two are hoping to make contact with their militantly feminist mother who has disappeared, perhaps to avoid the consequences of her previous wild protests.  But they, and Reva, come up against the 2022 Russian incursion into Ukraine. The story first skitters to a false end, and then takes off in another direction involving kidnapping 13 would-be husbands for Ukrainian brides and snail match-making.  Quite funny, and very relevant.

All this to say: if you apply Atwood's scheme for comparing a people with its literature, particularly its animal stories, Ukraine comes across as a small being that survives great odds.  Makes sense, doesn't it?

Grey Bees won a slew of prizes when it came out, and--this just in!--Endling has won the 2026 Amazon.ca First Novel award.  Well deserved.