Andrey Kurkov among the Presidents

Kyiv (Kiev), like the capital of an empire that never existed, a great city of rolling hills and sweeping vistas, golden domes, broad boulevards and shiny modern buildings. A European capital with obedient pedestrians and brazen BMWs driving on the pavement.

What sort of literature - and politics - belong in such a place?

Ukraine’s leading writer, Andrey Kurkov, writes in Russian. Luckily for non-readers of either rival language, his books are available in English, though they gain if you can visualise Saint Andrew’s Descent or the footbridge to leafy Trukhanov Island.

In person Andrey Kurkov is genial, bearded, green-eyed and direct.

His latest novel The President’s Last Love salami-slices Ukraine’s past, present and future to evoke the transition from Soviet republic to a dubious form of capitalism. The vision is both surreal and recognisable.

A miraculous potato, a water-borne summit of world leaders, “Other Hands”, a secret programme of mutual abductions by Russian and Ukrainian secret services - and a canonised Lenin: “henceforth to be known throughout Orthodoxy as the Great and Holy Martyr Vladimir.”

The central character in the novel is the fictional President of Ukraine (in 2015) Sergey Pavlovich Bunin. The book was originally published in early 2004, before the Orange Revolution, in the last months of the murky Kuchma regime.

How did Andrey Kurkov visualise Bunin? Even after 439 pages he remained obscure.

“Well he doesn’t look like Yushchenko, I can assure you. He is, I would say, a Russian macho type, if you know Sergey Lavrov, these officials around Putin who look like real men - not like Putin himself!

“So for me [Bunin] was some kind of transitional model of a political personality from Kuchma towards more democratic leader, so much more decisive but at the same time partially moral - indifferent - a person who is just lucky because he gets what he is given by chance.”

One of Kuchma’s advisers asked Andrey Kurkov how he knew so much about life in the President’s inner circle. Hardly flattering: “Anyone entering this world of power is reshaped, all courage and decisiveness is extracted, any sense of humour frozen.”

There was only one night during the Orange Revolution when Andrey Kurkov feared violence from the authorities. “Oh, it was lovely! I spent three weeks on the Maidan Nezalezhnosti - Independence Square - and we have an old Soviet bookshop there round the corner which is called Naukova Dumka - Scientific Thought - and me and my colleagues writers were organising there tea, sandwiches and open discussions for everybody who wanted to come in to eat, to drink and to warm up themselves, because it was minus 15, minus 20, minus ten.

“So we signed a lot of books during this revolution. It was very strange mixture of politics, commercialism, disco - it was very happy atmosphere.”

Real-life Ukrainian politicians seem determined to outrun the satirist.

September 2007 and ahead of new parliamentary elections at the end of the month, the streets of Kyiv are festooned with solemn posters of Yulia Tymoshenko, former ‘gas princess’, the Evita of the Orange Revolution. She appears as if in emulation of Ceres, Roman goddess of the harvest: hair, once brunette, now blonde, twisted into a braid like a corn-stook across her head, ropes of red beads about her neck like abundant redcurrants.

Not bad for a girl from industrial Dnipropetrovsk. Dressing up like Heidi the milkmaid to incarnate her nation.

Has she, as the Irish would say, “lost the run of herself” - or is it sheer effrontery? The most entertaining figure in European politics since Pim Fortuyn.

Yulia Tymoshenko is said to be a superb orator, playing on the resentments of the crowd, throwing out bold promises. During her brief premiership her instincts were interventionist, running to price controls, popular in a country with an average monthly wage of $258.

Kurkov’s view of his country’s drama queen is gloomy: “She is natural revolutionary leader, but she is very dangerous.  

“She is actress, she is populist, she loves attention, she gets energy from the attention of people who listen to her, but at the same time she doesn’t listen to anybody.

“I was actually offered to write a book about her by her advisers, but | said that I don’t write to order.”

The burly Viktor Yanukovych has had a makeover: he has learned to smile and to speak Ukrainian. In his TV ads he talks about reform and fighting corruption. Kurkov no longer sees him as a threat.

If there is joy in the West over one Yanukovych that repenteth, little hope remains for the tragic figure of President Yushchenko, face ruined by poison. His television performances are painful: slow, halting, formal.

Andrey Kurkov’s next novel envisages Ukraine as a single mother suckling the undeserving politicians.

The President’s Last Love  by Andrey Kurkov

Harvill Secker £12.99

Roger Howe

Andrey Kurkov interviewed, London, 23 August 2007. Thanks to Louise Rhind-Tutt for her help arranging this interview.