Sergey Sergeyi and his frenemy Pasha Khmelenko are the only two natives remaining in a village in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine after the Russian attack in 2014. They are somewhere in the gray neutral area between Russian and Ukrainian forces. Sergey, a beekeeper abandoned by his wife and 4 year old daughter before the Russian assault, is strongly pro-Ukrainian and Pasha is equally pro-Russian but they are forced to cooperate to survive.
Sergey leaves the area to find a suitable place to set out his six beehives away from the constant shelling, and travels in his beat up old Lada with a trailer throughout Ukrainian and then Russian-controlled areas ending up in Crimea at the home of a Muslim Tartar, the widow of a murdered former fellow beekeeper, enduring cruel bureaucratic persecution by Russian officials at border crossings.
I could easily understand the loving attention of beekeepers for their charges and the amazingly complex life of bees, having grown up next door to my beekeeper uncle. The author relates such details of the trade as use of the honey extractor machine and how to return rogue swarms to the hive, that I concluded that he must have first-hand experience with it. I watched as the honey extractor machine was used at Hutchinson’s apiary in Mount Forest, and as Uncle Tom removed a swarm of his bees from a tree on our farm. The title refers to the sickly bees in one hive after Russian officials took it away temporarily, supposedly for a health inspection.
Sergey’s vivid and complex emotional musings and dreams are mixed in with his real life experiences. A missing grenade adds some tension to the story, but the plot is not very complex and the characters are easy to follow. The fictional characters are made to seem so real that I found myself wondering what has happened to them since the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine earlier this year, after the story was published. Silly, I know.
My only criticism is the lack of a geographic sketch of the area as the many small villages, towns and cities with long foreign names can be confusing to readers who, like me, are geographically challenged.
The writing style is best described as simple but perceptive and delightful with a deep appreciation of everything in the natural world. “All of a sudden, outside the window, the February sun began to shimmer and shine playfully, as if enjoying the first taste of freedom after long months of captivity.”
This is a timely, beautifully written story obviously aimed mainly for a Ukrainian readership, but has universal appeal.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Thanks
The New Yorker.
The Passionate Reader 