#RivetingReviews: Rosie Goldsmith reviews THE STOLEN HEART by Andrey Kurkov

War seemed to wander aimlessly through the former Russian Empire … The Tsars had gone but the Bolsheviks and Soviets and Red army were making only patchy progress.

The horrors and destruction of war are everywhere in Kyiv; crime, violence and corruption are rife; buildings lie in ruins, and poverty and hunger gnaw at its citizens. Andrey Kurkov is back with his second Kyiv Mystery. But this is 1919, not today, and although Kurkov, Ukraine’s best-known contemporary writer and public champion of Ukraine against Russia’s aggression, doesn’t shy away from describing the horrors of war, his style and pace are gentle, poetic and unshowy, granting time and space for his characters to develop, to fall in love, exchange smiles and hold philosophical conversations about God and the world. The Stolen Heart is many things: it is an intriguing mystery and a historical novel based on fact; it is also a love story and political satire. The “heart” of the title is perhaps a metaphor: meat to some, love to others. It throbs (!) and thrives on small acts of goodness and humanity, and flashes of beauty: Nadezhda’s green sundress, spring sunshine, the warmth of a wood fire and nourishing food. The “Spanish plague” of 1918 and ill health generally are still rampant. This is a fascinating and rich period for a novelist, a period that Kurkov began writing about in The Silver Bone, Samson’s first case, and we’re told at the end of this novel, the Kyiv mysteries are “to be continued.”

The story of The Stolen Heart goes like this: One balmy April in 1919 the young investigator, Samson Kolechko (a kind, clever and sympathetic young man with a severed ear), is walking through Kyiv, his bare right ear hole took in all the noises of the world. With a few delightful sentences and Kurkov’s light literary touch we are back on the streets of Kyiv with Samson and his police colleagues from the Soviet Workers and Peasants Militia. There’s the defrocked priest Kholodny (with whom Samson has many long profound discussions about religion, philosophy, humanity and the ways of the world), station chief Nayden (bellicose and authoritative but honest and hardworking) and his new colleague, the puny, thin-lipped Chekist Abyazov. They set out to investigate the case of the slaughtered pig (however unlikely that sounds) and the illegal meat trade (however unsavoury that sounds; vegetarians turn away now). Then suddenly Samson’s beloved fiancée and flatmate Nadezhda disappears and the pace picks up. She is a statistician for the Soviet bureau of statistics and is conducting a census, resisted, it transpires, by Kyiv’s railway workers. Do they have something to do with her disappearance? A distraught Samson sets out to find her down by the railways but is himself captured:

The heavy door slid aside, then rumbled shut behind Samson’s back. He found himself squatting against the inner wall of a wagon, in weighty, viscous silence. A lump of hunger rolled up to his throat, while his fingers clenched into a fist all on their own so as not to tremble from the cold dampness. From time to time, despair seeped into his thoughts, transforming them into rubber and pulling at them as at the strings of a Romani guitar; their verbal meanings were stretched into mere sound, into a groan, a nervous rattle that twisted Samson’s lips, expressing pain. He wanted to distract himself from this inner noise, this nervousness, this fear that seemed to send him tumbling into the black railway pit above which the entire sky was crosshatched by tracks. He wanted to distract himself, to forget, but he couldn’t. Fear bound him as a bog binds one’s legs, preventing them from taking a free step towards salvation.

Throughout The Stolen Heart we catch glimpses of the stifling and ridiculous Soviet bureaucracy which complicates every action taken by Samson and his colleagues; the new laws, documents and regulations, as well as the hilarious job titles, department names and official acronyms. A couple of my favourites: the Society for Proper Hunting, and, ExProFooCom (Extraordinary Provincial Food Committee).

The writing (and naturally the translation, from the pen of Kurkov’s regular translator, the incomparable Boris Dralyuk) is superb. We are blessed with great Kurkovian set pieces, such as Samson’s training course in interrogation (a major part of police life of course) led by a military man of short stature who teaches rookie interrogators how to blow cigarette smoke into detainees’ faces to intimidate them. Fully drawn, believable characters enhance our reading, as does the meticulously detailed picture of early 20^th century Kyiv: we see and hear the trams, cabs and cart horses on the cobbled streets; we learn the names of those streets walked by Samson and his beloved; we smell the stink of pollution, body odour, death and animal slaughter; we are introduced to Kyiv’s distinctive architecture, its railway station, police station, army barracks and blocks of flats. We meet the neighbours, scoundrels and apparatchiks making a life in the chaos and multicultural mayhem of traumatised, embattled Kyiv. With Kurkov’s literary forays into early photography, cuts of meat, Jewish sweets and religion, The Stolen Heart teams with life and erudition. And in spite of the gore and violence, it is a delight to read, with nothing more delightful than witnessing Samson and Nadezhda’s love story as it unfolds.

Is the stolen heart ever found? Read the novel. You won’t be disappointed. Long live Andrey Kurkov! Slava Ukraini!

Reviewed by Rosie Goldsmith

THE STOLEN HEART (THE KYIV MYSTERIES)

Written by Andrey Kurkov

Translated from the Russian by Boris Dralyuk

Published by MacLehose Press (2025)

March 2025 #RivetingReviews titles are available to buy from bookshop.org.

Rosie Goldsmith is Director and Founder of the European Literature Network and Editor-in-Chief of The Riveter. She was a BBC broadcaster for twenty years and is today an arts journalist and presenter. She was chair of the judges for the EBRD Literature Prize 2018–2020.

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