The Ear of Kiev

In 1919, Kyiv was contested by multiple forces: Anton Denikin’s White Army, backed by the Entente, sought to overthrow the Bolsheviks; the Cossacks under the leadership of the otaman Symon Petliura fought for Ukraine's independence; the Red Army struggled to halt counter-revolutionary actions and repel Polish claims over Galicia. Although the novel is set in a specific historical moment, the narrative seems suspended in a timeless world, projected into a despotic reality dominated by disorder and violence—as though conflict, devastation, and crime were the inexorable, immutable hallmark of the borderlands between the West and Greater Russia. A bloody act initiates the tale: the very saber that had killed his father severs clean off the right ear of young Samson; an ear that the boy miraculously manages to retrieve and place inside a candy tin. Samson is frightened and disoriented; left alone, he manages to carry on in a city deprived of heating and food, where everyone’s life hangs by a thread amidst abuses and killings. At that moment, Kyiv is controlled by the Red Army, and it is astonishing how ordinary life persists, and how the new authorities strive to prosecute thefts and murders (even though the "investigators of old" are gone), expend energy taking a census of the population ("three hundred questioning the residents"), persevere in the meticulous bureaucracy of the Tsarist regime (yet paper is running out!), and ensure the supply of electricity, even as the firewood is nearly exhausted.

It is precisely bureaucracy that saves young Samson, providing not only a daily meal, but also a purpose to his solitary life. He turns to the militia to protest the requisition of his furniture, particularly his father’s desk, where he had stored the candy tin containing his ear. The fine penmanship and lucid phrasing of his formal complaint lead to his hiring in the investigative department. And from here unfolds a thriller, as young Samson is determined to discover the perpetrators of an atrocious crime. The police investigation intertwines with a love story; a census worker comes to live with Samson, yet between them there is only a whisper from the young man, "Marry me"—a word timidly uttered while the young woman sleeps, or pretends to sleep. With a touch of irony, Kurkov writes how

breaks the loneliness of young Samson, who feels in his dreams like

The skillful plot and nimble prose cannot conceal the weaknesses of the thriller, and above all do not spare the reader a sense of disappointment. From the title, one would expect the severed ear to be at the very center of the novel. Through the ear, by some miraculous phenomenon, young Samson can hear from afar, distinct and precise, the intrigues and dangers looming over him. Yet this conceit is never fully exploited; and this is because the author has no intention of resorting to magical elements, choosing instead to remain firmly rooted in a narrative realism, which in turn is laden with a "melancholy anticipation" of something that might alter Ukraine's destiny.

Why read it? With gentle irony, it recounts the fraught, agonizing history of Ukraine.