Death and the Penguin

Post-Soviet Kyiv in the mid-1990s: a broke city where the zoo gives its animals away, a lonely writer keeps a king penguin in his flat, and a job writing obituaries pulls him into a quiet, lethal machinery of favours and funerals. The map runs from the residential streets of the centre out to the zoo on Prospekt Peremohy and down to the frozen Dnieper.

Viktor

Viktor's flat

Opening

The story begins in the small apartment a struggling writer shares with a king penguin he took in when the zoo could no longer feed its animals. The bird pads across the parquet, the writer works at short pieces for money, and both of them keep a companionable, melancholy silence. The book fixes no street for the flat, but everything about it belongs to the lived-in centre of the city.

Opening chapters

inferred The novel never gives Viktor an address; it reads as an ordinary flat in the central districts of Kyiv, so this marks a representative point in the residential centre.

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Viktor

Kyiv Zoo

Opening

The penguin comes from the city zoo, which in the hungry years after independence gave animals away to anyone who could keep them. The real Kyiv Zoo sits on Prospekt Peremohy in the west of the centre; its collapse into poverty is the small civic disaster that puts a flightless Antarctic bird in a Kyiv apartment.

Opening chapters

explicit The novel names the Kyiv Zoo as the penguin's origin; this marks the real zoo on Prospekt Peremohy.

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