Death and the Penguin

Death and the Penguin is a novel by the Ukrainian writer Andrey Kurkov, written in Russian and first published in 1996 under the title Smert postoronnego, literally Death of a Stranger. It follows Viktor Alekseyevich Zolotaryov, a struggling writer in post-Soviet Kyiv who takes a job writing advance obituaries for a newspaper, and who has adopted Misha, a melancholic king penguin given up by the local zoo when it could no longer afford to feed its animals. Viktor gradually realizes that his obituary subjects are still alive when he writes about them, and that his pieces are in fact being used as a hit list by an unnamed criminal organization; as the people around him, including his penguin-sitter and a militia captain who has become a friend, begin to disappear or die, Viktor is drawn deeper into danger before he flees to Antarctica, abandoning Misha behind him. Blending bleak satire, dark comedy and existential unease, the novel became Kurkov's best-known work, translated into more than thirty languages, and is regarded as a defining text of post-Soviet Ukrainian literature; it later inspired a sequel, Penguin Lost.