In February 24, 2022, Andrey Kurkov, one of Ukraine’s most acclaimed novelists, woke up to the news that Russia had invaded his country. For the next two-plus years, Kurkov—who moved from Russia to Ukraine with his parents when he was two years old—put fiction writing on hold and worked as a journalist and commentator covering the war.

“In the beginning of the full-scale invasion I took this as my mission, because this was the best I could do for Ukraine,” Kurkov says via Zoom from Barcelona, where he was speaking at an event about the conflict. “At first, I was upset by my inability to concentrate on fiction, but I couldn’t hide inside of a story. I had to be aware of what was happening on the front lines.”

In 2024, Kurkov returned to fiction and completed The Lost Soldiers, which will be published in May by HarperVia. “I was unnaturally excited when I finished it,” he says. “It was a bit over the top, my state of euphoria.”

The novel, which is translated from the Russian by Boris Dralyuk, is the third installment in Kurkov’s bestselling Kyiv Mysteries, a surrealist historical crime series set in Kyiv in 1919, when multiple factions were fighting for control of the region. “My way back to being a novelist was a very tough experience,” Kurkov admits. “I have been writing about the war every day. And I turned into a journalist, an essayist, instead of a novelist.”

Kurkov often writes about Ukrainian life and identity, particularly after WWI and in the post-Soviet era; the impact of war, corruption, and authoritarianism; and the absurdities of the Communist state. He’s the author of numerous novels, including Death and the Penguin; Jimi Hendrix Live in Lviv; Grey Bees, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2022; and The Silver Bone, the first installment in the Kyiv Mysteries, which was longlisted for the International Booker Prize. He has received the Halldór Laxness International Literature Prize and the Prix Médicis étranger, and his books have been translated into more than 45 languages, according to Diogenes Verlag, his Swiss publisher.

The Kyiv Mysteries centers on rookie detective Samson Kolechko, whose right ear, which was cut off in an attack by a Cossack fighter, can somehow still hear, and is used by Samson as a surveillance tool in his investigations. In The Lost Soldiers, Samson is tapped to look into the disappearance of 28 Red Army soldiers from a local bathhouse and plants his ear in the clothing of a bathhouse worker to gather information. He eavesdrops on suspects, interviews grumpy locals, and with each step seems to move further from the truth. Along the way, he deals with other, less pressing cases, including the petty theft of canned food, in a city where laws change on a whim, red tape reigns, and everyone’s a little dishonest—and hungry.

The novel, which also features Samson’s wife, Nadezhda, and his friend, Kholodny, a former priest, has the narrative pull of an Alexander McCall Smith mystery and the dystopian surrealism of a Kafka story. While unpacking the case of the missing soldiers, Samson, who is himself being spied on by the secret police, finds a human bone in an incinerator—a discovery that takes him on a few absurd detours, revealing the corroding effects of oppression and bureaucracy.

Kurkov was inspired to start the series nearly a decade ago, when an acquaintance brought him a cache of original documents from Kyiv’s Cheka (a predecessor of the KGB), which operated in the city during the Russian Revolution and subsequent civil war. “I learned a lot about daily life from these files,” Kurkov says. “And, in a way, it helped me to live in today’s Kyiv, because I understand that in spite of all the dangers we have, life in Kyiv in 1919 was much more unpredictable. Every few weeks there’d be a new army, with new rules and a list of people who should be arrested or executed. It was very dangerous.”

Juan Milá, Kurkov’s editor, applauds the author for his ability to combine history and mystery in inventive ways. “Andrey is incapable of not being original,” Milá says. “You go from one sentence to the next and there’s always a little surprise, always something new.”

Kurkov was born in 1961 near Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), and grew up in Kyiv. He wrote his first existential poem, about his lonely pet hamster, at age seven, and kept a collection of cacti, which he grew using seeds bought on the black market. In 1983, he graduated from the Kiev State Pedagogical Institute of Foreign Languages, and was employed for a time as a prison warden in Odesa as part of his mandatory military service. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, he arranged to have reams of paper shipped to him from Kazakhstan and self-published his books, often selling them in the town square. “I made myself an inscription that read ‘I am the author’ and wore it around my neck,” he recalls.

During the period when Kurkov was handselling his books, he was also sending query letters to publishers across Europe, with some help from a friend in Poland. In the late ’90s, Diogenes Verlag agreed to publish his novel Death and the Penguin, which became an international bestseller. “I assume I have the biggest collection of rejection letters in Ukraine,” Kurkov says. “For years I spent hours preparing synopses and packaging them.”

Dralyuk, Kurkov’s translator, has been bringing the author’s books to English readers for a decade and was working on the first installment of the Kyiv Mysteries when Russia invaded Ukraine. “I fell in love with Samson, this kind of Candide character,” Dralyuk says. “He’s working cases that not just reflect the chaos of that time but foreshadow the terrible things to come under Soviet rule: the growth of red tape, the arbitrary imposition of justice—justice only in the eyes, perhaps, of the bureaucrats running the show.”

Kurkov, whose books are banned in Russia, speaks multiple languages, including German and French, and sometimes gets criticized in Ukraine for writing his novels in Russian, his first language. “I’m hated by lots of Ukrainian intellectuals,” he admits. “Russian is considered the language of the enemy. But I cannot write the same quality text in Ukrainian as I can in my mother tongue.”

In his fiction, Kurkov displays a gift for balancing dark moments with surrealism, magical realism, and black humor. Things never get too bleak in a Kurkov novel, and that’s by design. “I like dramatic stories, but I don’t like the effect they usually have on readers,” he says. “I don’t want my readers to become depressed by the stories I tell. Black humor helps to create emotional distance between unhappy or tragic events and the reader. I’m trying always to leave a hope, that something will be better in the future.”

Elaine Szewczyk’s writing has appeared in McSweeney’s and other publications. She’s the author of the novel I’m with Stupid.