Yevgeny Nonik, 1970-2007

If Yevgeny Nonik ever owned any clogs – and as far as I know he didn’t – recent events may have led them to emit a profound sound. A sound that some of us, fed like farm animals on variously inventive forms of rice and corn, will associate with a common inhabitant of the breakfast bowl. A sound that others – if not the same people - may associate with an English rhyme concerning the relatively obscure adventures of a stoat-like mammal. I refer, of course, to the sound of popping.

    What I want to say is this – and please excuse me if my grief confounds my meaning - Yevgeny Nonik is no longer with us. No, let me put it another way. He is dead. For was he ever really with us? Not whilst I have known him. For the past six years, Nonik has been obliged to make his home in a mental asylum. I have seen him once only, a few weeks ago in fact, and can say with confidence that I have had more intelligible conversations with pieces of furniture. Nonetheless, this tragic meeting did not require me to rethink his 'novels' - in which there are definite signs of intelligence, despite the somewhat haphazard structure. Yes, indeed, that which Nonik has left is undoubtedly more than the ramblings of a madman. And if it isn't, or wasn't – could anyone honestly say that the novel was ever anything other than the outpourings of the insane mind? As Leo Barnard once said: ‘No one in their right mind writes’. Unfortunately, Nonik no longer has any mind, 'right' or otherwise. Indeed no. It pains me to say it, but Nonik has made an early departure from this sad and chaotic world, dying with the quiet decorum of a true madman.

    It has only been two days since the unhappy incident, but already the rumblings of empty sensation-hungry stomachs can be heard. There were those, I hardly need to remind you, who thought that I had invented Nonik. Why I cannot say, but just as some clouds must dispense hailstones the size of small hens, some people simply must throw distrust about like so. Now they say that, under their pressure, I have ‘killed him off’. Not so. But I need not spring to my defence. It is a tiresome business after all and I am fortunate enough to have gathered fans willing to do the job on my behalf. I direct your attention to a letter sent in reply to one of yesterday’s ill-mannered, but wholly predictable accusations. In this generous note, a Miss Froitzheim of Finsbury Park (whom I have never met, though she seems to me a lovely sort) makes the sadly accurate point that a man possessing my peculiarly imaginative skills would not be able to kill off a character in so dreary a manner. Not for the first time, I am saved by my foibles. For it is true: if I had ‘invented’ Yevgeny Nonik, there is no way that I would have let him go without a fight. And yet, by all accounts, this is how he went. Quietly, calmly and not – and I must be clear on this point – by his own hand. I don’t know all the details as yet, but his sister assures me that it was a surprisingly regular death, with not a spiny pineapple in sight. If only I had been the architect of Nonik’s end, Lord knows how it might have happened. For as Heidi Kohlenberg has charmingly revealed, when it comes to death I am a true pupil of Jupczek’s fictional Podakolina. I cannot help myself. No disease is too far flung; no last words too dramatic. And yet, Nonik has failed me on both accounts.

    Or has he? Alas, I think so. The last words he wrote ('indistinguishable atop the salad dressing, around about…’) are certainly entertaining – and as absurd as anything he ever penned – but we must look in vain for any key that they may hold. I would not call them nonsensical, for Nonik’s prose has always contained more sense than we can guess at, but I would argue to the end that there is a lack of finality about them. They are not the words of someone who thinks he is about to die. But then, what can we say of Nonik’s thoughts? His mind was unhinged, dislodged: an unmade jigsaw, with many pieces missing. We might as well look for his last words somewhere near the beginning of his writings. Nonik, after all, did not embrace traditional structures. The narrative of his novels – which, I maintain, does exist – is the sort that needs to be pieced together, bit by difficult bit, by the conscientious reader.

    Before pondering how this may be done, a few biographical notes are in order. Since I last wrote on this subject, I have been able to amass a few more facts than were previously presented. A rudimentary sketch remains, but it is the best we have. Nonik was a introspective character, for whom communication was a constant trial. This probably explains why – having misplaced his sanity – his feelings came out in one never-ending sentence. Unfortunately, it makes it rather difficult to pinpoint the facts behind these feelings. Although his sister has since been kind enough to answer my many questions, the bottom line is that his family knew little more about Yevgeny than we do.

    We can now say for sure, however, that he was born in Moscow in 1970; the third child of Jonah and Natalia. His father was a vet, a vocation in which his first child, Roman, followed him. Yevgeny, however, lacked the necessary skills to go this way, opting – after an undistinguished school career (the lone highlight of which, it seems, was a third-place for the triple-jump at sports day) – for the job of postman. After practising this in Moscow for three years, he then moved away to manage a sorting office outside Saratov. During this time he lost contact with his family, excepting a single letter to his sister, which showed him to be in seemingly good spirits. A single phone call followed, a few years later, in which he revealed that he was moving to London. No mention was made of whether he had a new job, but once again he sounded well, though he showed no interest in meeting any of his family again. Asked whether or not this was because his childhood had been an unhappy one, his sister assured me that this was not the case. ‘If anything,’ she said: ‘It was too happy’.

    It is here the trail goes even colder than before. Two years after Yevgeny supposedly moved to London, his sister also came over to England, where she and her husband (originally from Northampton) set up a guinea pig farm. Attempts to get back into contact with Yevgeny, however, failed. That is until she received a call from a mental asylum in Watford, explaining that her brother had recently joined the list of patients. Would she come and visit? This she did, although the man she met bore little resemble to her brother of old. Whatever had happened in the ‘lost’ years between his departure from Russia and his arrival in Watford had taken its toll on his mind. He was never to recover.

    The strange circumstances in which the fruit of Nonik’s madness was distilled and packaged in the shape of the novels molasses pry with wantonness and its companion-piece subtle carnivores have already been discussed, if not criticised in depth. I will not tread that path again, not right now, not with these shoes. I shall not be caught like a fish in one of your spurious ethical nets. Instead, I will present to you one of the more interesting results of my recent contact with Yevgeny Nonik’s sister – to wit, a unique example of Nonik juvenilia, passed on by his parents (who have, as yet, been less keen to answer questions). I must state that it was never known that the 'sane' Yevgeny had any writerly pretensions. Indeed this small poem aside, it would be fair to say that he didn’t. At one moment, however, he did decide to dip his toe into literary waters, with the following result (thought to date from around 1987):

 

‘I dreamt of an elephant corpse

lying on a road leading from London

of course it was my head slyly

coming undone, feeding off thoughts and flying’.

 

    What might this short and simple poem tell us about the prose which later flowed, without cease and without any clear structure, from Nonik’s pen? Well, where can I start? The appearance of ‘London’ is especially interesting – for this was written, we must remember, long before Nonik had ever visited this city. Clearly, Nonik felt some sort of tie with the English capital – a fatal tie, perhaps, for it seems that five years in London near destroyed his soul (as well it might). In fact, the association between ‘London’ and the word ‘undone’ appears to foresee these difficulties, as does the entirely negative atmosphere of the poem. The word ‘slyly’, yet, reveals another side of Nonik’s complex character. Mad he may have been, but there was indeed method to the madness, hard though it is to chart. Critics often refer to subtle carnivores as 'nought but crazy ravings'. But this, I believe, seriously undermines the often cunning use of words. As this early work shows, Nonik had an deep interest in and love for the sounds and the rhythms of language.  And his translator Rudolph Winckler has always been very aware of this. ‘Whatever the level of his insanity, Nonik always had a firm grasp on the chaotic wonder of words’ was the mildly cryptic tribute he offered yesterday. As Winckler has said on many occasions, Nonik was particularly fond of English phrases, constantly making fun of them, as in the following passage from subtle carnivores:

‘..her voice, soft as your pillow, as is the butterfly as it, as it were, whirrs about your head, with a block of cheese on a jumbo jet, balancing figments of her imagination on his head..’

    The ‘as it, as it were, whirrs’ segment is typical of Nonik, as is the subtle link between the ‘butter’ of ‘butterfly’ which, after whirring, becomes the ‘cheese’ that rests, like a head on a pillow, on another sort of flying object. Considered thus, how can anyone ever have suggested that Nonik’s prose is either meaningless or, worse crime, joyless? Putting narrative aside, he frequently discloses an intense lust for the eccentricity of language.

    But this is not all. Undoubtedly, Nonik’s writings also contain biographical material. Here we must tread cautiously. Take off your shoes and socks and speak in whispers only. Of course, not every fragment can be taken to mean something personal. But neither can we discount the presence of passages which seem to relate to the little that we know of Yevgeny’s strange life. For example, consider this:

‘..principled attacks poke salt-streams from the edge of the eye-corner, for there was a time, yes, there was a time when the sea-mammal wall-paper was not enough, when cowards fled, swimming upward into the arms of a human sun, closeted and covered, over and out, she said that he said nothing, to which he replied, the shape of nothing is most like the form of an octopus…’

    Surely ‘sea-mammal wall-paper was not enough, when cowards fled’ refers to the biblical Jonah, after whom his father was named? In which case the ‘human sun’ might be his mother. As for the octopus – well… Let us leave the poor octopus alone. The ocean depths remain un-chartered for a reason. Further hints of his heritage, however, may be found scattered all over the text. Relatively nearby we find a reference to a ‘samovar’ – a clear Russian reference point. Also, I am beginning to discover a range of anti-American passages, as in the following, wonderfully peculiar excerpt:

 ‘the day when you left a blueberry pie on the windowsill of the two hundred and fourteenth floor and an eagle with the President’s face grafted on it swooped down and said that he wouldn’t eat it but left his gob on the rim all the same so that no one else could’

    This is not to say that Nonik was himself viciously anti-American, but that this tension was clearly relevant to that which he was - whatever that was. And as to the extent to which this identity, mysterious as it is, can be reconstructed from his writings, well, this is not to be scoffed at. It will take time, granted, but it is possible, given the appropriate metaphorical toothpick and the appropriate metaphorical steady-armed metaphorical tooth-pick handler. For, as I said, not all of Nonik’s prose can be used to reconstruct his identity. One simply has to separate the facts from those purely absurd, making-love-with-words passages which are as large an element of his prose as the more personal excerpts. That way, we may one day come a little closer to understanding what it was that pushed this Russian postman over the edge. And if the task proves to be impossible, at least we have the simple under-rated joy of words and liberal juggling of many varied ideas to fall back on. In the very depths of lunacy, Yevgeny Nonik’s grasp on the chaos of the human condition was stronger, probably, than that of any sane man. It may not be easy to read, but once understood, one imagines that we will be thankful for the effort expended.

    There is always more to be said on the subject of Yevgeny Nonik – but none of it, I hope, on the question of whether or not he ever existed. If you will allow me a moment or two of humility, let me say to my detractors that I hardly think myself capable of creating a character of such complexity as Yevgeny Nonik, let alone getting any closer to explaining what it is that is so interesting about him. And if I had invented him, rest assured that Miss Froitzheim is correct in supposing that I would not have killed him off with such a lack of style, nor given him a life story so full of holes. And certainly, as head of the publishing house that prints his ‘novels’, I would have surely waited for him to have written more than he was able to before attempting to cash in on his demise (which, I hope, I shall not be seen to be doing at any stage over the new few weeks).

    No, let us put such questions aside, and mourn instead the loss of a writer who, albeit unintentionally, made it his mission to condense the bedlam of the modern experience into a single lengthy sentence. As to whether he succeeded - well, it will take many sentences to discover that. But rest assured they will all - or almost all - be worthwhile.

Georgy Riecke, November 2007

    Yevgeny Nonik's two novels, 'molasses pry with wantonness' and 'subtle carnivores' are published by Upside-Down-Then-Backwards. An exclsuive fourth excerpt from 'subtle carnivores' can be found here

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