The Glory and Freedom of Our Ukraine Has Not Yet Perished

Nick Owchar reviews Reuben Woolley’s new translation of Andrey Kurkov’s “Jimi Hendrix Live in Lviv.”

By Nick OwcharAugust 16, 2024

• Fiction

• Music

SEVEN MONTHS BEFORE Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Vladimir Putin published an essay later seen as his rationale for the invasion. A 5,000-word argument that Russians and Ukrainians are really one people, “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians” frames Putin’s so-called special military operation as an attempt to erase the historical divide that has wrongly separated them. In the two-and-a-half years since, there have been many refutations of that argument—especially Putin’s deliberate oversimplification of the common heritage shared by Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians—but one of the more persuasive isn’t a work of scholarship or punditry—it’s Andrey Kurkov’s 2012 novel Jimi Hendrix Live in Lviv (now available in an English translation by Reuben Woolley). The novel is at once a comic romp around Ukraine’s cultural capital and an unexpected glimpse into the complexities of cultural and national identity—something the Russian autocrat’s feeble essay fails to recognize.

“We need to save the city! Is it not our city, after all? All bells must be rung!” These words belong to Captain Ryabtsev, a retired KGB officer who has noticed some unnerving “anomalies” in Lviv, a city located in the country’s west and, in Kurkov’s hands, on the threshold of The Twilight Zone. Flocks of seagulls are suddenly attacking the citizenry like something out of a Hitchcock film, and there’s a strong briny smell of “rotting seaweed” in the air that revives an old urban legend that a prehistoric sea under Lviv may be rising again (which may explain why so many gulls are circling this landlocked city). Among the homeless population, there are sightings of an old sailor who might—in a Borgesian touch—be a character escaped from someone’s novel.

A man who devoted his professional career to investigating conspiracies, real or otherwise, Ryabtsev enlists the help of Alik Olisevych, an old hippie (and die-hard Jimi Hendrix fan) upon whom he used to spy and who is now his friend. Of course, the gulls and smells could be the result of a sewer leak or a fertilizer plant accident, but that answer would be too simple—and Kurkov has too much of a taste for the surreal to settle for that.

On the other side of town, a young cabbie named Taras notices the anomalies too. He makes a living with “Vibrotherapy” sessions—taking people afflicted with kidney stones on nighttime drives on the cobblestone streets to shake the obstructions out. His recognition that something is wrong in Lviv takes on a more visceral form. He’s been having bad dreams, and whenever he walks alone on the city streets, a vague sense of terror overwhelms him: “Taras took another few steps back, and there he felt a jolt. A shiver went through his entire body from top to bottom. He froze. […] All that was left was fear and the salty air, which was hard to breathe.”

Joining him in his sleuthing efforts is his lady love Darka, a night clerk in a currency exchange whom he visits whenever a Vibrotherapy customer pays him in foreign money. Taras grumbles at the euros, zlotys, and rubles he often receives, but on the bright side, it gives him plenty of chances to see her. Darka sits in her locked booth wearing elegant elbow-length gloves, not out of any sense of style but because handling money gives her a terrible allergic reaction—a complaint Taras eventually cures with an amusing (albeit bizarre) solution.

An acclaimed novelist who has chronicled the Ukraine war in Diary of an Invasion (2022), Kurkov has crafted here a whimsical detective story that serves as a love letter to a beautiful city long central to Ukrainian cultural identity. All of Kurkov’s characters are endearingly eccentric, and the novel’s odd, tilted perspective shares much in common with the work that first brought the author to public attention, his 1996 novel Death and the Penguin, which follows the unlikely adventures of an obituary writer in Kyiv. That book is a darker, grimmer portrait of a country fresh out of the Soviet nightmare and struggling with a legacy of corruption and violence. Even though Jimi Hendrix Live in Lviv appeared over two decades later, it serves as a complement to that earlier book, evoking some of the challenges of nationhood and identity that still affect ordinary people long after the Soviet Union’s collapse.

Those challenges are depicted in fairly obvious ways—Ryabtsev’s longing for the good old days​, for example, or the confusing mix of currencies, languages, and automobile brands that remind us how often Ukrainian lands have changed hands over the centuries—but they are also embedded in the story’s surreal premise. Taras and others experience a strange sensation of dread whenever they move through the city—a general feeling of unease, of instability, as if something bad could happen at any minute. One can’t help seeing Ukraine’s tragic history reflected here, especially considering the country’s long, difficult struggle towards sovereignty and the anxiety of living in a society always on the lookout for the next invader. Kurkov doesn’t belabor the point, but it’s there, running underneath his deftly plotted mystery—which ends in an amusing solution involving the enigmatic sailor that is perfectly in keeping with the surreal atmosphere.

Faced with a prevailing sense of social instability, Ryabtsev seems to offer the best response. At one point, he tells Alik that it’s impossible to worry about the past or what’s happening at the moment, since you can’t control any of it. What matters most—and what you can control—is what takes place inside yourself: “The old world was held together by conventions, and that’s why it fell apart […] This world is held together by conventions too, just different ones! It’ll fall apart too, with time. The most important thing is to protect your own personal, internal world from all these conventions!”

That internal sense of meaning comes from the stories we tell ourselves. Stories give us a purpose, whether they’re true or not. Consider the book’s title. It refers to a concert that never happened, and also to a rumor that after his death, Hendrix’s right hand was smuggled into Ukraine by the KGB and buried in Lviv’s Lychakiv Cemetery. For old hippies like Alik, that story gives them a reason to show up every September, on the anniversary of the guitarist’s death, to pay their respects. It’s small rituals such as this that, Kurkov suggests, are the best—if not the only—way to cope with larger crises and challenges.

Another such ritual involves Taras listening to the radio after returning home from driving his patients around. Right before he drifts off, he hears, every morning, the playing of the Ukrainian national anthem: “‘The glory and freedom of our Ukraine has not yet perished …’ sang the well-accustomed radio set.” That’s a story this nation has been telling itself for centuries, and it’s especially moving now as missiles continue to rain down on its cities. The words ring with far more poignancy today than they did when Kurkov first wrote them.