Le Guin territory on how to realize this dream, but it does ask us to look for better ways and look to the freedom of nature. And so it became with his wartime silence, in which military sounds suppressed and displaced peaceful, natural ones, but, in due course, also nestled under the wings of silence and ceased to draw attention to themselves. It’s also a useful reminder to those only just awakening to the situation in Ukraine that the war’s not a recent development but an escalation of a conflict that’s blighted the lives of many of its people for years, destroying and displacing deep-rooted communities.

Behind these recent deaths are previous wars and grievances: Afghanistan, World War Two, and mass displacement under Stalin. In an act of whimsy, Sergeyich swaps the road signs, pleasing Pashka who now gets to live on Lenin St. Sergeyich passes through many different checkpoints whose occupants all have something to say about their country. The whole situation described in the book is absurd and funny and it looks like a scene straight out of a Kafka story or a Beckett play.Silence of course is an arbitrary thing, a personal aural phenomenon that people adjust for themselves.

The Crimea sections are an illuminating representation of the plight of the Crimean Tatars, a non-Slavic minority relentlessly persecuted for their ethnic and religious background by the Russian majority.For the novel to kindle our spine, we must have “some cell, some gene, some germ that will vibrate in answer to sensations that [we] can neither define, nor dismiss. Grey Bees is a typical Kurkov novel, grey and melancholy and wistful but not maudlin, and even charming, despite the harsh environment it is set in. Once in Crimea, this becomes more centre stage—the persecutions faced by the Tartars, disappearances and forced recruitments into the army; the venom and racist attitudes that have spread among some sections. So what does a beekeeper, who lives in the middle of nowhere, in no-man’s-land, who is neither Russian nor Ukrainian, or who is probably both – what does this beekeeper do? The bees are a nice touch too -- not too front and center, but the low-level care and attention they need the kind of obligation that helps keeps Sergeyich focused.

It's very much about society and how we need it, and how people attempt either to destroy it or make it work.The village has completely emptied out, its inhabitants all fleeing, save for Sergeyich and one other local, Pashka Khmelenko. It is finally time to make his way home, but one problem remains to be addressed: his hive of grey bees. Both the severity and the stupidity of the various political games of tug of war in the region are clear throughout Grey Bees. Here, his central character’s Sergey, forcibly retired from his job as a mining inspector after a diagnosis of severe lung disease, bee-keeper Sergey’s time now revolves around his bees, his precious hives taking up all of his attention. I began Andrey Kurkov’s Grey Bees slowly, trying to get a sense of Sergey Sergeyich, the 49-year-old beekeeper who lives in the gray zone between loyalists and separatists in Ukraine’s Donbas region.