It was a sad day in 2019 when scientists finally scotched the urban myth that London’s many wild parakeets are descended from a pair of pet birds released by Jimi Hendrix in his Carnaby Street days. Luckily, in his newly translated novel, the Ukrainian writer Andrey Kurkov rides to the rescue with some Hendrix lore of his own invention. According to the book, which has been longlisted for the International Booker prize, the guitar hero’s right hand was smuggled into the USSR with the connivance of the KGB and buried in a corner of Lychakiv cemetery in Lviv, western Ukraine. As a consequence, every year, on 18 September, the anniversary of Hendrix’s death, ageing fans from across the former Soviet Union gather at the cemetery to pay tribute.
This conceit gives Kurkov an excuse to remind us about the existence of an almost forgotten aspect of Soviet subculture: its hippies. Sticking it to the man was a much more perilous activity in Brezhnev’s USSR than it was in Haight-Ashbury.
