“Which homeland?”: Towards a postcolonial reading of Andrei Kurkov’s “penguin novels”

This article is an analysis of the Ukrainian, Russophone writer Andrei Kurkov's two novels about the writer Viktor Zolotarëv and his penguin Misha: Death and the Penguin (Смерть постороннего/Пикник на льду, 1996) and Penguin Lost (Закон улитки, 2005). These novels are approached here by means of postcolonial perspectives on space/place and hybrid identities. The study focuses on the one hand on the representation of the post-Soviet (postimperial/postcolonial) condition in Ukraine, and on the other on the identity of the main characters, by discussing the extent to which they identify with their country, and more specifically how and in relation to what they articulate their identity. The author argues that even though these novels do not come across a particularly political literature, a civic engagement on a microlevel can be discerned in them, in particular towards the end of Penguin Lost.