As Samson Kolechko, the protagonist of Andrey Kurkov’s detective novel The Silver Bone, takes a romantic evening stroll through a park with his love interest, Nadezhda, she says, “It’s amazing how one doesn’t feel history here.” Yet history is precisely what readers will encounter in this novel — the history of Kyiv and Ukraine, in the tumultuous period from the 1917 Bolshevik revolution through the Civil War and the establishment of the Soviet regime in 1921. The novel is set in 1919, in the middle of this violently chaotic period, which was especially so in Ukraine. As Boris Dralyuk writes in his translator’s note, this was a time in Ukrainian history “when the reins of power seemed to pass from hand to hand every few weeks.” With the Bolshevik regime not yet firmly established, various groups were vying for control — the Reds, the Whites, and the various Ukrainian nationalist leaders who sought to form an independent Ukrainian state, which briefly came into existence. Since many English-language readers will be unfamiliar with names and events mentioned in the novel, the translation includes a “Select Chronology of Ukrainian History 1917-1921.”
This emphasis on history complicates one’s sense of this novel’s genre. The Russian-language original (Kurkov is a Russophone Ukrainian writer) is designated a “retro detective novel” (retrodetektiv) on the back cover. A retro detective novel suggests a historical mystery, set in a particular period that provides a distinctive backdrop to the action. Other writers, including Ukrainian ones, have produced such works, for example, Yuri Vynnychuk in The Night Reporter: A 1938 Lviv Murder Mystery (translated from Ukrainian by Michael M. Naydan and Alla Perminova, Glagoslav, 2021). Still, the expectation for this, as for any other detective genre, is that the untangling of the murder mystery drives the plot. To be sure, there is a case to be solved in The Silver Bone, which revolves around the activities of two coarse and unhygienic Red Army soldiers, Anton Tsvigun and Fyodor Bravada, who come to be billeted in Samson’s apartment. Samson finds stolen goods in their possession: lots of silver items such as forks, and “a sack of clothes and patterns from some tailor”; they also mention a certain Jacobson, who has some connection to the stolen silver. When Samson attempts to return the merchandise to its rightful owners and one of them is subsequently murdered along with Samson’s colleague, he sets out, in a way that goes from amateurish to on point, to find the killer.
However, The Silver Bone undercuts the expectation that the detective plot must be the central element in a detective novel. While clues are sprinkled in early on, with some that could be considered red herrings, the murder mystery doesn’t become prominent until fairly late, with the silver bone making an even later appearance. The English-language translation highlights the novel’s detective bona fides by using this image as the title. In contrast, the title of the original is Samson i Nadezhda (Samson and Nadezhda), which spotlights their relationship, one that develops in a place Kurkov foregrounds and describes in detail: a volatile Kyiv caught between various forces. The narrative weight in The Silver Bone is not found in Samson’s investigation of the murders, but rather in his attempts to find his place and navigate his budding love in a city in turmoil.
Kyiv emerges as a character in its own right. Signaling the focus on geography from the outset, the original contains a plan of the city inside its front and back covers listing the significant places where the novel’s events occur. In its emphasis on the importance of place, Kurkov’s novel participates in a long literary tradition shared by many otherwise disparate works. These include, for example, Martin Edwards’ Harry Devlin detective series, which showcases the still rough but up-and-coming Liverpool of the 1990s, and Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion, featuring a shimmering, hedonistic Venice during Napoleon’s reign. The Silver Bone is a deeply atmospheric evocation of early 20th-century Kyiv. More than the whodunit, it is the whodunit’s setting of a city in violent transition that keeps readers turning the pages.
With Nadezhda the one stable, joyous element in Samson’s life, his world is dangerous and hostile, as Kyiv is a “blood-engorged town.” In the novel’s opening scene, Samson’s father is killed in the street by Cossacks, who also chop off Samson’s right ear. The streets are littered with corpses; shooting can be heard at regular intervals; things are particularly fraught at night, when bandits and thieves abound. As always, ordinary residents bear the brunt of war-like conditions: characters are constantly bundling up indoors and experiencing darkness due to a lack of firewood and fuel, going hungry due to a lack of food, and whose currency, even if they have some, has been rendered little more than paper due to the different monetary systems. Moreover, there is an omnipresent threat of regime change. The Bolsheviks have a tenuous hold on Kyiv and Red Army guards, including Chinese regiments, patrol the streets, but are unable to keep order, and neither can the more ominous Chekists (secret police). Denikin, the Whites’ leader, is rumored to be advancing on Kyiv; within city limits, anti-Bolshevik, pro-Ukrainian independence forces include Petliura and the hetmans, who mount the short-lived but violent rebellion that sends Nadezhda’s parents across the city to shelter in Samson’s family’s apartment into which their daughter has recently moved.
Readers might expect a contemporary writer depicting competing political ideologies of the past to signal his or her opinion on what path the country should have taken. Yet The Silver Bone is even-handed: it does not come out on the side of any of the regime options, suggesting instead that none of them are desirable. Samson’s boss and colleagues in the police department and especially Nadezhda espouse optimistic belief in the communist future. Yet others, including Samson, are wary of both the Bolsheviks and Ukrainian nationalist leaders (while this is not stated in the novel, those familiar with Ukrainian history are aware that Petliura’s troops engineered pogroms that killed thousands of Jews). As Dr. Vatrukhin, a doctor whose help Samson seeks, tells him, none of the regimes can offer the requirement for a normal life: “a settled order, established by law, so that the same rules apply to everyone” (a no-mass killings policy, markedly absent from both Bolshevik and nationalist agendas, would also not go amiss). Solving crimes is Samson’s way of attempting to establish this law and order. As he says to Nadezhda, “every person one day finds themselves witness to evil or to some sort of crime, and […] everyone pays for this either by becoming a victim or […] an accomplice.” Samson refuses both roles, choosing instead to devote his life to combating the evil around him. In a violent, compromised system, the choice to stay clean becomes a sign of profound strength. Rather than pledging allegiance to a particular collective ideology, Samson remains his own person, a human being with a strong internal core who holds true to his principles.
At the same time, some of the novel’s humor stems from the origins of Samson’s role as a detective, into which he falls purely by chance, without any actual experience. The billeted Red Army soldiers requisition Samson’s father’s desk, containing a treasured family passport, and while the police cannot return the desk because they have office furniture shortages, they offer Samson a job, which allows him to sit behind said desk (and receive coupons for Soviet cafeterias with better rations). Unsurprisingly, his detective skills are virtually non-existent. Unfamiliar with police procedures and the process of detection, he is out of his depth; only after his boss scolds him for not having thought of it does he ask a fingerprint expert to test the crime scene. An intelligent and sensitive person, he is keenly aware of his shortcomings and plagued with self-doubt; as he bemoans to Nadezhda, “how can I figure out the answer to a question that I neither perceive nor understand?” If Poirot and Holmes are at one end of the ingenuity spectrum, Samson is at its opposite.
However, Samson has something other detectives lack. In the novel’s surreal twist, his severed ear, which he keeps hidden in a hard candy tin in his father’s desk, retains “the gift of hearing whatever happened around it and transmitting the sounds to his brain.” In this way, he overhears Anton’s and Fyodor’s malicious plotting in his apartment, as well as various goings-on at the police station when the desk moves there. This “omnidirectional hearing,” which allows him to hear things far away and at great volume, is also a metaphor for the detective’s heightened ability to process information. As Dr. Vatrukhin tells him, people “are given ears not simply to hear but, above all, to listen”; listening, observing, and putting the clues together is what a good detective does. Indeed, it is not merely his ear’s extraordinary abilities, but Samson’s own intelligence and perseverance that ultimately allow him to piece together the solution, which, in a rarely-seen turn, involves a human bone made out of silver and a tailor’s patterns for a suit. He not only gets to keep his desk, but law and order, as well, even as life outside is anything but.
Andrey Kurkov’s work has been widely read and richly celebrated with multiple literary prizes in Ukraine and abroad. Kurkov’s longtime translator, Boris Dralyuk, was awarded the National Book Critics Circle’s inaugural Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize for Grey Bees, the story of a beekeeper in war-torn, post-2014 eastern Ukraine. The Silver Bone glitters in his new incisive translation. With the outbreak of full-scale war in 2022, Kurkov has become one of the most prominent Ukrainian voices, focusing his writing on the invasion. While he has been writing nonfiction, The Silver Bone is the first part of a planned trilogy (the novel ends with the words “The end. But to be continued”), which means that readers will be treated to more of Samson’s detective adventures and his budding romance with Nadezhda (it will be interesting to see if she loses her Bolshevik fervor). In Russian, nadezhda means “hope,” and while the title refers to her name, it is tempting in the current circumstances to read it in this other meaning, of hope for the residents of Kyiv and all of Ukraine, for decisive victory and enduring stability.
[Published by HarperVia on March 5, 2024, 290 pages, $28.00 hardcover]