In his latest offering, a children's book entitled "Priklyucheniya Chepukhonosikov", well-known Ukrainian writer Andrei Kurkov tells the story of a father and the mother who are not happy that their son still does not know how to speak nonsense and they must constantly try to teach him how to do it. Eventually they are successful, but by the end of the book he has proven to his parents that telling truth is better than telling nonsense, even though it does not harm anyone.
The history of the book is almost as fantastic as its contents. Kurkov wrote the fairytale in Russian in 1985, while serving as a guard in an Odessa prison as a part of his Soviet army service. The book first gained circulation as samizdat. Later, a St. Petersburg publisher printed the book without the author's knowledge, claiming he could not be found to sign a contract.
The publishing house Makhaon published the book in Ukrainian in 2003 and this year 5,000 copies were published in Russian by Folio, a leading Ukrainian publishing house in Kharkov. Evgeniya Gapchynska, a prominent Ukrainian artist, created the fantastic artwork that illustrates the edition.
Kurkov plans to further develop his writing with new books in other areas, perhaps even getting into real fantasyland - Ukrainian politics.
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