Kyiv

Kyiv is Ukraine’s political center, but in the novel it reaches the grey-zone village less as a directly encountered place than through departures, broadcasts, interrupted plans, and rumors of change. It is where revolutionary power shifts and decisions are made; to Sergeyich, it is also a remote source of uncertainty, a place that can summon a guest away and whose politics are difficult to reconcile with the quiet routines of village life.

Political Center and Wartime Distance

The foreword places Kyiv at the center of the conflict’s political prehistory. After the uprising known as Euromaidan, the pro-Russian political elite led by President Viktor Yanukovych fled the city for Moscow. The following year, as power passed to pro-European forces, Russia seized Crimea and sent officers, volunteers, and activists into cities in eastern and southern Ukraine to encourage revolts against Kyiv. The account connects the war’s continuation to a political calculation: a Ukraine enduring permanent conflict in its east would be less likely to be welcomed by Europe or the wider world. Kyiv is therefore not simply a capital on a map; it is the symbolic and governmental center against which the separatist revolts are directed.

That national-scale account is set against the village’s narrower experience. In Little Starhorodivka, residents have little reliable access to information: the village has no electricity, and Sergeyich lacks television. When Petro visits, he describes a country where people are being cheated and streets and towns are being renamed, while adding that improvement is expected after the war and that people may no longer need permission to travel abroad. His account makes national political change sound at once concrete and provisional: it reaches the village in conversation, but its promised benefits remain conditional on surviving the conflict.

A Capital Seen Through Conflicting Accounts

Television offers another version of Kyiv’s political world. In a broadcast Sergeyich watches with old Nastasya, three men in ties debate why Ukraine has not collapsed. One attributes its survival to American and European money and predicts that Western citizens might eventually stage their own Maidans; another argues that Western powers treat Ukraine as an instrument against Russia. The broadcast does not resolve the dispute. Instead, its competing explanations expose how the conflict is narrated to viewers from afar, while Sergeyich’s question to Nastasya—whether she understands any of it—underscores the distance between elaborate geopolitical claims and the village’s immediate concerns.

Kyiv also appears in Sergeyich’s memory as the destination that gives a former governor’s visits their significance. Before the war, the village council chairman tells him an important guest will come to sleep on his hives. Sergeyich infers that the former governor, who had risen to the upper levels of government in the capital, will visit his native region for a third time. He values the man’s generosity, but also his apparent directness and openness, qualities Sergeyich finds striking in someone who has reached the capital’s political heights.

Visits Interrupted by Events in Kyiv

The expected visit does not happen as planned. After Sergeyich waits through lunchtime and into the afternoon, a single black jeep arrives, rather than the several vehicles that accompanied the previous visits. A suited aide explains that the governor had intended to come but has received a call from Kyiv and must return because matters there are not going well. The capital’s crisis thus intrudes into a small, personal expectation: a guest who had once traveled out from government life to sleep on the bees is recalled by events in the city.

The episode belongs to an earlier, prewar spring recalled while Sergeyich waits out winter and hopes for warmer days. Its return in memory contrasts the former routine of hosting the governor with the wartime present, in which even ordinary plans are vulnerable to distant decisions. Kyiv is both the source of the governor’s public position and the force that interrupts his private visit.

Kyiv, Exchange, and the Possibility of Return

The city also enters the novel through everyday scarcity and exchange. During the wartime winter, Sergeyich’s supplies are easy to enumerate: honey, vodka, homemade tinctures, bee-pollen remedies, and a bottle of Crimean brandy whose location he cannot remember. Pashka’s mention of lard makes Sergeyich long for it, an example of how an absent item can become newly desirable once named. The passage’s inventory of what is available and missing gives material weight to the national disruptions that otherwise arrive as arguments or political news.

After Sergeyich relocates his bees, honey allows him to establish a practical foothold. At Nadya’s shop, he exchanges honey for food and, unable to select enough groceries to match its value, receives a credit of 560 hryvnias to spend later. The arrangement restores a feeling of stability: his produce has value, the shopkeeper trusts him, and food can be obtained without an immediate cash payment. In the summer, Galya successfully markets his honey as an “anti-alcoholic” product in nearby villages; cash accumulates in the glove compartment of his Lada, and she begins paying for supplies in advance. These transactions show how a local livelihood can partly compensate for disrupted systems of money and provision, without making the war or displacement disappear.

The idea of return remains unsettled. As Sergeyich prepares to leave his home with his hives, he understands that the walls, trees, fences, gates, doors, and windows have protected him, rather than merely being protected by him. The departure is practical as well as emotional: he closes the hive entrances, loads the hives onto a trailer, covers them against rain, and packs honey because it can function as money. On the road, he worries that the alarm clock left behind will stop, leaving no one to keep time in the house until he returns and winds it again. Kyiv’s political distance is part of a wider uncertainty about whether home will still be there to return to; the capital’s decisions, wartime communications, and precarious routes shape that uncertainty without supplying an answer.