Ukrainian novelist Andrey Kurkov on defending freedom, China’s idea of ‘harmony’ and the power of black humour
Death and the Penguin writer, addressing Hong Kong’s position, says no one born free can remain sane if freedoms are taken away, and shares experiences from Ukraine, where his novels appear to have foretold some dark events
Andrey Kurkov, who is about to turn 57, says his generation was born as “small birds in a large cage” in the former Soviet Union, blissfully unaware of the Communist Party’s “red lines”. Then came the unravelling of the USSR in 1991, which brought the first taste of freedom.
This was the opposite of what some feared would happen in Hong Kong, where people were born with freedoms of expression and opinion and could stand to lose them, the celebrated Ukrainian novelist said on his first visit to the city.
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“Anyone born free with an understanding of such freedoms cannot remain sane if those freedoms are taken away. I hope China sticks to ‘one country, two systems’,” he says, referring to Beijing’s governing formula that promises to uphold in Hong Kong civil rights that are denied to people in China.
People in Europe and the US are becoming less intellectual and less interested in questions of morality. They read very few books and they discuss ideas aggressively
Little wonder, then, that some of the Russian language’s greatest satirists are his literary heroes: Nikolai Gogol, Mikhail Bulgakov and Daniil Kharms (a great influence who died at 36, probably from starvation, in prison).
