Bukinist is a little bookshop in Chernivtsi, a city in the middle of Bukovina region in southwest Ukraine, where author Andrey Kurkov gave a reading and a signing of his novel while searching for a book he had lost, The Ballads of Kukutis, by a Lithuanian poet Marcelijus Martinatis. Kurkov bought the chapbook in Kiev during the Soviet era, in the late 1970s or early 1980s in a bookshop called ‘Poetry’ which sold only poetry and closed after the first couple of years of independence, following the collapse of the USSR.
In Browse, Kurkov contributes an essay entitled "Something That Doesn’t Exist," translated from Russian by Amanda Love Darragh, that describes his search for Martinatis' book and his visits to Bukinist, which he describes as "a veritable cornucopia of rare and interesting books... Books in Belarusian, Ukrainian, Russian and even a few in Yiddish, which was the main language spoken in Chernivtsi for hundreds of years and which, even today, seems perfectly suited to its old alleys and cobbled streets.
"If you have never been to Chernivtsi – and I’m almost 100 per cent certain that you haven’t – all I will say is that a hundred years ago the city’s bookshops used to sell books in German, Romanian and Yiddish. and the majority of the city’s inhabitants spoke German right up to the end of the First World War – it was part of the Austro–Hungarian Empire, after all. When the empire was replaced by the Romanian monarchy, German was superseded by Romanian in terms of both the spoken and the literary language of the city. "
Browsing the shelves of Bukinist and searching for a book that he will probably never find, Kurkov describes the pleasures of his search and thrills at feeling like an "eccentric urban bibliophile."
