[The first of several articles on Yevgeny Nonik; this was written in anticipation of the publication of ‘subtle carnivores’, his second 'novel'. Nonik died in 2007].
One night in 1974, I drank too much white rum and fell asleep listening to Bartok’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta. As the foreboding strains of the opening movement lay their leaden musical fingers on all thirteen stone of my slumbering body, I sank into the dark waters of a suitable dream. I was on my knees in the heart of a dense forest; the sky faint beyond the trees and the floor thick with thick-leaved shrubs through which I slowly pushed my way, unable to pull myself to my feet. I was looking for my contact lenses – an odd notion, as I have near perfect eyesight, and have never required exterior visual assistance. Yet in this dream I have no doubt that these were my contact lenses – why else would I be so desperate to find them? I must have searched miles of that forest floor for those lenses, slipping my youthful hands beneath the damp leaves of a thousand tropical plants, pushing my fingernails through a million acres of moist mud: all to no avail. Despite my great – and most sincere – attempt, find them I did not.
The simple horror of this part-rum, part-Bartok induced nightmare has taken board and lodgings in my head for some time. Two years ago, its content even reappeared as a dream, provoked neither by a surfeit of Jamaican liquor nor Romanian music – but by a reading of work by British-based Moscow-born writer Yevgeny Nonik. This work was ‘molasses pry with wantonness’, which was in due course published by my very own publishing house ‘Upside-Down-Then-Backwards’ (being the first of our novels that didn’t require acrobatic reading skills from its audience – though I would never oppose this approach). My first impressions were not kindly: reading over a hundred pages without so much as a single full stop left me both exhausted and exasperated. A cheap postmodern ruse, I surmised. However, in a rare error on my part, I had underestimated – or at least misunderstood – the writer.
The word ‘writer’ hardly does Yevgeny Nonik justice, not least because the man himself has never pretended or tried to be such a thing. Rather controversially, he does not even know that he is a published author, despite the gently excited applause with which his first ‘novel’ was received. For this I have been personally criticised – but let me assure you that the matter is out of my hands. Nonik has for the past five years been shut up within an asylum, where news of the outside world is strictly prohibited. Though I am in the process of publishing his second book as we speak, I have never met, or been in any kind of contact (written or spoken) with the man. It is almost certain that he does not even know my name (poor unfortunate man that he is). There is no doubting that I do not favour these circumstances – but equally, there is in the meantime no possibility of their changing.
How then has Yevgeny Nonik come to a published author? This topic was broached recently by an old comrade of mine, Franz Ludo, who concluded that at the heart of the matter was ‘a tangled web of dark duplicity, presided over by not one by two menacing spiders’. One of these amoral arachnids, as it turned out, was me. The other was a young nurse, whose name I am obliged to conceal. It was this nurse who contacted me a couple of years ago, passing onto me the manuscript of Nonik’s first work. Though she described it herself as a ‘novel’, she was at pains to note that it was written under specific circumstances, as an assignment by one of her patients, the primarily result of which was to stabilise his vacillating mental state, not to create good prose. In light of this patient’s unstable conditions she had neither expected him to produce such a volume of words, nor anything in the remote region of the readable. As it was, she was both shocked and exhilarated by the results, which she believed should be made available to the world. This she arranged, without the consent of the patient – a detail on which Ludo is keen to concentrate but which is ultimately an irrelevance, being that the consent of a man as mentally disturbed as Nonik could hardly be considered to be in any way binding.
This is not the only irrelevance. Elsewhere Franz Ludo attacks me for ‘daring to call this document of insanity a novel’. I welcome his argument: I ought not to have been so direct – but then, neither should he. Let us dispense with both of these tags, ‘novel’ and ‘document of insanity’. Let us fling them aside, bothersome as they are. Why tie down our passion with the ropes of pedantic discussion? Fascinating as the circumstances are – if not the issues that they raise – the centrepiece remains the words themselves, on which neither a ‘menacing spider’ nor his jealous rival would ever deign to rest their critical lances. Nonik’s use of words, however inspired, will continue to engage readers for many years to come.
Here is a man who knows how to construct a sentence. Or am I hopping ahead of myself? We must not judge the product until it is finished – and as far as it goes, Yevgeny Nonik has in fact yet to complete the construction of a sentence. Across the hundred or so pages of ‘molasses pry with wantonness’ a single uninterrupted sentence wound its never-ending way. This same incomplete sentence is taken up again in his Nonik’s forthcoming work ‘subtle carnivores’ and without wishing to spoil the reader’s experience, I will reveal to you here that this work finishes in the same manner as its predecessor – sans full stop. Though long sentences are by no means unprecedented in the history of literature, one wonders whether this one will ever end. Indeed, one even hopes that it will never end. The pleasure of reading Nonik comes in the anticipation of an end, not in the end itself. Paradoxically this is not because the end is not worth getting to, but because for once we can be sure that the writer – fail though he does – is at least making a sincere effort to get there. As I scrambled through the dark forests of my dreams in search of a pair of contact lenses, so to is Nonik scuttling through the depths of his mind, in search of something with which to finish his sentence. It is said that he is afraid of full stops. However it cannot be not the mark itself which bothers him, but the words which immediately precede that mark. Nonik’s fear is not for full stops, but for conclusions.
It is for this reason, above others, that some critics think him to be comparable to the Lithuanian writer Vladimir Dorwindovitch – an association which I wish to contest. There is an air of aimlessness to Dorwindovitch’s prose, gaining him the complement of having creating what Heidi Kohlenberg calls ‘pleasurable nonsense’. Nonik provides the same kind of satisfaction from what seems to be an equally illogical narrative. But amongst these nests of similarity lurk two peculiarly distinct insects. That life is absurd is the final goal of Dorwindovitch’s writing; in this way his plotlessness is contrived; his nonsense almost self-conscious; his scattergun approach strategic. His answer is that there is no answer – an answer in which he revels, like the habitual bear in a honey factory. On the other side of the bridge, we find Nonik asking the same questions, finding the same lack of answers, but – and here’s the rub – differing in his refusal to put a stop to the evidently fruitless search. Dorwindovitch thinks there is nothing, and drives happily towards nothing. Nonik thinks there is something and keeps finding nothing. The results are pretty much the same, but the winds that blow the sails are coming from quite different directions.
Of course, ‘pretty much the same’ is not the same as ‘the same’. And it is in the restricted zone of this fine line that Nonik gains the upper hand over his Lithuanian counterpart. According to Kohlenberg, Dorwindovitch is known to be thoughtful and ‘deeply religious’ – and yet his works appear to me to preach against the possibility of meaning. Alternatively, Nonik is certified as mentally insane – and yet amidst a similarly gloomy prognosis his works leave open the door, lest that diminutive creature hope should chose to make a late appearance. Consistently disheartening and eternally aimless, Nonik is yet the most hopeful writer there has ever been, refusing as it he does to make any conclusions – always allowing for the possibility of a new idea, a fresh narrative string, further and further eddies, springs and streams of words cascading across his pages, driving to the most ‘something-like’ nothingness ever imagined. His work is that rare thing: it is sincere. And this is why we keep reading: not because we do believe that there will be an ending, but because we want to believe that there will be an ending.
Wherever Yevgeny Nonik is going – and I do believe he is going somewhere – his journey there is no less than tortuous. He is like the migrating bird with a broken wing who tries to dig his way south. And yet his endless diversions are surprisingly entertaining. I am reminded of the French author Xavier de Maistre, who once took a forty-two day trip around his room, ‘following one’s ideas wherever they lead…without even trying to keep to any set route’. Nonik takes a trip around his own head, with similar consequences. I do not suppose that he craves consistent curtailment; he simply invites it unconsciously, by way of his perpetually wandering concentration. One thing, as they say, leads to another. Or in Nonik’s case, one thing leads to a million others (and counting).
Since the opening words of ‘molasses pry with wantonness’ (‘Now I was getting to the pavement, hot as a freshly baked biscuit’) he has generated page after page of words, all of which derive from this single source, by an almost unlimited variety of means. To the casual reader, it might seem that Nonik proceeds according to a logic of irrationality. Bearing in mind the arguable impossibility of such an approach (psychoanalysts having taught us long ago that the mind is never random) it is not hard to see in which areas the construction of this idea bears the cracks of misapprehension. Indeed, in the majority of examples, Nonik appears to follow a reasonably explicable line of word associations, ranging from the austerely comic to the unusually oblique. Consider for instance the first section of the second excerpt from his second work ‘subtle carnivores’:
‘artic aloofness resounding with artic research, plucked from between the jars of a rapacious polar bear, a fox’s mint, mountains carved into the shape of fluffy bunnies, reflected in your little round glasses, in your little round eyes, if only I could get close enough to see my own eye in your eye, the test is the test, it becomes me, shrivels like the autumn leaf on your grandmothers windowsill, the flippancy of memory, can’t find a skeletal holly leaf today, won’t find a four leaf clover tomorrow, it passes like a sheep in the night, or a jeep in the half-light….’
Here we see almost the full range of Nonik’s working methods, starting with the faintly ridiculous movement from ‘polar bear’ (an animal which reoccurs with surprisingly regularity within the writer’s work) to ‘fox’s mint’ – a clear cultural reference – before taking in a visual connection (that of an animal standing on, or being associated with a mountain or rock-based outcrop) proceeding into the uncertain territory of the anonymous ‘little round glasses’ and ‘skeletal holly leaf’, trading in a series of common clichés – ‘four leaf clover’, ‘sheep in the night’ – and then moving effortlessly into a typically Nonikian rhyme-based pun with ‘jeep in the half-light’. Brief though this interpretation is, one can already see how rich Nonik’s prose can be to the intelligent reader: over brimming as it is with a myriad of cross cultural references, inscrutable cod philosophy and curious wordplay. On top of this, if you look hard enough, I believe that there is also some kind of narrative, demanding a deeper level of academic study. Though no one is ever named (except perhaps his parents) there are frequent references throughout the text to various people, of both sexes. Were someone to bring together all of these references and attempt to determine the separate personalities, one wonders whether we might have taken a further step towards building a road through the wild desert of Nonik’s memory-based ravings.
Whilst on this subject it has come to my attention that there are some who believe that the insanity of Yevgeny Nonik ought to dissuade any reader from attempting to interpret his work. Because the man is loony, his writing must be considered to be incomprehensible: outsider art that deserves attention only as an object of momentary wonder, not dedicated examination. Allow me to fire the cannons of reason into the frail frame of this flaccid logic. Granted: I will not try to pretend that Nonik is not a madman; nor that his writings are no more than the result of such a blatantly barmy character trying in vain to sort through the tangled mess of the mind. What I will ask, however, is this: how does Nonik differ from any other writer? The answer is, surely, that he is unfortunate enough to have been exiled to an asylum, where others are free to attend whichever literary festival they wish. For the truth is this: though many mediocre writers may be in it for the money, the best of the breed are merely trying to hold off insanity. We don’t all have nurses provoking us to put our words onto paper, but the impulse is the same: writing is an assignment designed to relieve the intense confusion invoked by the experience of life. The difference between most of us and Nonik, however, is that where we pretend to have succeeded in drawing lines underneath all the issues, he consistently refuses to close the case. His single sentence goes on and on: endless, eternal, undying…
Where will it end? Will it ever end? One cannot even begin to answer either of these questions, not at least on account of the conditions in which Nonik’s prose is produced. Admittedly the set-up is far from regular, relying heavily on the assistance of the third party – in this case the patient’s nurse. But as a representative of the publishers, I can assure you that Nonik is not being taken advantage of, in either financial or mental ways. What little profit that can be gained from a work as challenging as ‘molasses pry with wantonness’ is passed onto the writer’s family and channelled into his care, so that he could certainly be said to have benefited from the arrangement, both in the assistance supplied by the process itself and through our subsequent interest in that process. Further to this, I have been recently assured that his mental health – if not radically improved – has in no way worsened. To this we no doubt owe that which will soon be published as the book ‘subtle carnivores’ – a book which will, in turn, lead either to the desired improvement or required stability of our own insecure mental condition.
Georgy Riecke
Further Reading:
[...] Yevgeny Nonik: An Appraisal [...]
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