Andrey Kurkov: from novelist to Ukraine’s travelling spokesman

Andrey Kurkov in London this month. ‘I could not imagine that [my] happiness could be destroyed so easily,’ he says of the invasion. Photograph: Andy Hall/The Observer

In his new book, a version of the diary he has been writing since Russia invaded his country last February, the Ukrainian novelist Andrey Kurkov writes, among other things, of soup. It is July and on the cultural front, where fighting with Russia has also been “very active”, there is at last good news for Ukraine: Unesco has just registered the culture of Ukrainian borscht as part of its intangible heritage. Kurkov, like the rest of his countrymen and women, is thrilled. Apparently, the world disagrees with Maria Zakharova, the spokesperson for the Russian foreign ministry, who has repeatedly tried to defend Russian borscht from the “encroachment of Ukrainian nationalists”.

Kurkov is a good cook and on the night of 23 February, it was ruby-coloured borscht, made from beetroot and garnished with sour cream and dill, that he was preparing for a group of visiting journalists at his apartment in Kyiv (in Ukraine, there are said to be 300 different ways of making the dish). His guests would never taste the result. At five o’clock the next morning, he was woken by three loud explosions: Russian missiles had hit Ukraine; the war had begun. By 1 March, he and his English wife were living hundreds of miles away in western Ukraine, their lives suddenly and very painfully changed. “I could not imagine that [my] happiness could be destroyed so easily,” he says of finding himself an internally displaced person (until recently, half of Ukraine’s population were IDPs or refugees). “I thought my happiness was not material, but a state of mind, like the energy arising from eye contact with another person.”