Reading guide: The Silver Bone by Andrey Kurkov, translated by Boris Dralyuk

Samson Kolechko: a naive and sensitive young police investigator, whose father is brutally murdered at the beginning of the novel. The book follows Samson as he tackles his first case, involving two murders – of a soldier and a tailor – and two unusual pieces of evidence: a fine but very large set of English clothes and a long, mysterious bone made of pure silver. While apparently lacking essential detective skills, Samson is aided by the supernatural powers of his own severed ear.

Nadezhda: a tough, smart and eminently sensible census-taker in the statistics office who assists Samson’s enquiries and with whom he develops a romantic attachment. Nadezhda is no minor character: the book was originally published in Ukraine as Samson and Nadezhda.

Mythili G Rao, Financial Times:

‘Translated from the Russian by poet Boris Dralyuk, Kurkov’s prose is brisk but capacious, with a quiet flair. The innumerable annoyances and small indignities of living through conflict (persistent lice, gelatinous porridge, insufficient kindling, erratic power outages) are presented in all their grating detail. And though it is clear-eyed in its depiction of war’s sheer senselessness, The Silver Bone has an unusual poetic lightness too.’ 

Julian Evans, Telegraph:

‘It’s really Kyiv, a city Kurkov knows perfectly, that plays the leading role, its geography and lawlessness sharpening the tense atmosphere. Kurkov first published this novel in 2020, two years before Putin’s full invasion of his country, but an eerie contemporaneity stalks its pages. The city’s blackouts, a consequence of its firewood having been stolen, have echoes of today’s Kyiv, blacked out by Russian missile strikes.’

Publishers Weekly:

‘Kurkov eschews conventional mystery plotting – the eponymous bone isn’t discovered until two-thirds of the way through the novel – but the finely drawn characters and harrowing descriptions of daily life in 1919 Kyiv leave a far more lasting impression than clever genre tricks ever could. With its earthy prose and stunning attention to detail, this stands apart.’

‘I’ve always been interested in the period around the end of the First World War. One of my first unpublished novels dealt with events at that time, and this book is set in 1919, during the four-year war in which Ukraine declared its independence following the collapse of the Russian empire and then lost it again. Within four years power changed hands 14 times. It was a time of incredible instability. Some people stayed in Kyiv through the whole thing, adapting to the changes; others retreated with the losing factions; many were killed. It was a tough and dangerous time, and also a fascinating one. And here we are again – whether to turn it into a Soviet or a Russian republic or something else, Russia is trying to take over Ukraine.’

Read the full interview in the Guardian

‘My books are now not published in Russian, because bookshops in Ukraine don’t want to sell books in Russian, because Putin turned the language into the language of the enemy, in spite of the fact that 30 to 40 per cent of Ukrainians are Russian-speakers. Now, lots of people are changing language, switching to Ukrainian.’k

Read the full interview in the Telegraph

The novel begins in 1919, during another war between Ukrainians and Russians. Kurkov wrote the book before Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, yet it is impossible not to draw modern comparisons, not least because Kurkov has since become one of the major international commentators on the dire situation in his homeland. Discuss how your reading of the novel is shaped by current events in Ukraine – is it ever possible to read historical fiction without one eye on the present?

According to the Financial Times, ‘Samson is revealed to be thoughtful, sensitive, expressive; in other words, not altogether suited for police work’. In this respect he comes from a lineage of deeply flawed detectives at the centre of crime novels. Discuss the extent to which Samson possesses the characteristics of other great literary detectives.

According to the Guardian, ‘The genesis of The Silver Bone came when a reader gave Kurkov a large cache of Bolshevik secret police files from the post-first world war period. “The papers belonged to her late father, who was a KGB officer in Soviet times and later worked for the Ukrainian secret service,” he says. “The documents were packed with these strange details of daily life in Kyiv during wartime, and it was this texture I wanted to get across in the novel.” Discuss the ways Kurkov manages to balance accurate and realistic historical detail with aspects of the magical and supernatural. Are the book’s realistic and magical elements at odds with one another, or does each heighten the effect of the other?

Also in the Guardian, Kurkov says that the crime narrative, and the figure of the detective in the form of young Samson seeking justice and order amid the mayhem of war, gave him a way of exploring and illuminating a society under extreme stress. Can you think of any other examples where an author uses the conventions of crime fiction to make a broader statement about a society in crisis? If so, how do those examples compare with Kurkov’s efforts?

Kurkov is often described as a blackly comic and satirical writer, although following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 he said he ‘didn’t feel ready to laugh at anything’ and had temporarily stopped writing fiction in order to focus on non-fiction. Discuss the ways in which Kurkov uses humour to make serious observations in The Silver Bone. Would you say that humour is essential in providing an optimistic outlook, even in the darkest of circumstances?