Death and the Penguin, and the Kyiv Zoo

My mom and Heidi are visiting for winter break, and we spent last week in Kyiv and Lviv. With lots of travel time for reading, Heidi (above!) and I both just finished the English translation of the wonderful Death and the Penguin by Andrey Kurkov, who uses satire, dark humor and a little bit of the absurd in writing about today's Ukraine. Death and the Penguin is the first of Kurkov's novels featuring Viktor and his pet penguin Misha, purchased from the Kyiv Zoo when it was downsizing its collection to meet a post-Soviet budget.

In one chapter, Viktor takes the daughter of a colleague to the zoo.

Not many people were about. Following a sign saying TIGERS, he led Sonya along a snow-covered path past an enclosure with a large drawing of a zebra and a stencilled description of its life and habits.
"Where," asked Sonya, looking around, "are the animals?"
"Further on," he said encouragingly.
They passed more empty enclosures with boards descriptive of recent inmates, and came to a roofed-in area.
Here, behind thick iron bars, sat two tigers, a lion, a wolf, and other predators. At the entrance there was a notice:

FEED ONLY WITH FRESH MEAT AND BREAD

Neither of which they had.
They walked along the cages, stopping briefly at each.
"Where," asked Sonya, "are the penguins?"
. . .
Walking on, they came to an empty sunken enclosure with railings around it and a frozen lake in the middle. A board depicting penguins hung above the railings.
"Well, as you can see, there aren't any here," said Viktor.
"A pity," sighed Sonya. "We could have brought Misha to make friends with the others."
"Except, as you can see, there aren't any others," he repeated, stoppping down to her.
"What does still live here?" she asked.

As the book was written 10 years ago, it was therefore a bit disheartening (but perhaps not too surprising) to then find the following article on the Kyiv Zoo in the New York Times this week:

The Kiev Zoo, it seems, has seen better days. Ukraine’s government is in disarray and the political discord has been unrelenting — and, yes, now even the lions and tigers and bears have been drawn in.

The zoo was expelled from the European Association of Zoos and Aquaria in 2007 over poor conditions and mistreatment of animals. Advocates and former workers maintained that a giraffe and other animals died from the zoo’s ineptitude, and that money was siphoned from the zoo’s budget through corrupt schemes.

The zoo’s director was dismissed last year by Kiev’s eccentric mayor, Leonid M. Chernovetsky, after failing to find a mate for an elephant — or so Mr. Chernovetsky said. The new director has stirred an uproar among the staff for her supposedly tyrannical ways, and in October, a brawl erupted among workers during a celebration of the zoo’s centennial.