the careful reader
has already questioned:
why the leg[1]
is it your limb and if so
why does it walk so disjointly from you
(Anton Polunin, “Last Will and Testament”, in Noha)
It so happened that while working on a review of the second issue of the literary nonfiction journal Noha, I was also rewatching the old but truly phenomenal series Lost. The premise is simple, and you surely remember it: as a result of a plane crash, around forty people find themselves stranded on a deserted (?) island. Now they have to learn to live anew—in a different society where the rules cultivated by the Western world for millennia no longer apply. Skipping over the details of this philosophically rich narrative about human nature and anarchism, I will say the following.
Perhaps the surface idea of the series is that each of us carries our own island within—a radiant core of happiness and pain, inevitably shadowed by fragments of the past. These islands are buried deep within us, for they are both precious and easily lost. And they are all very different. A female prisoner, a street musician, a Black father, two elderly people, an army soldier, a failed ballerina, and a boar butcher—each has their own island.
A still from Lost
Each night, the next episode of Lost awaited me, along with the next text from Noha. Gradually immersing myself in the kaleidoscopes of two worlds—one real, one fictional—I discovered, with some fright and fascination, that the characters of Lost mysteriously converged with the “characters” of the documentary texts in the journal.
We have a girl who survived imprisonment (Alena Dumasheva); a street musician (Nazar Benytskyi); retirees from Lisa Biletska’s text; a failed ballerina, embodied by Daryna Malyuk; a Black father—John from Philip Olenyk’s story; the soldier whom Anton Polunin eventually became; and butchers—not of a boar, but of a goat—from Inesa Marg’s text.
Now, now, what is this? Is Noha the underside of the unreal, its verso, the other side of fiction? Or is fiction merely a disguise, secretly identical to reality? Or maybe, we just find it convenient to label some things as real and others as not?
One way or another, I was now totally engrossed in examining the deserted islands of these sudden heroes of Noha’s texts—texts written before February 24th, in a world that itself has since disappeared. Because that’s exactly how the time-space before the great war feels: difficult to grasp in memory, barely real.
Artwork by Katya Libkind from the cover of the second issue of Noha. Source: kyivnoha.org
The first to tell her life story, left untitled, is Daryna Malyuk. Although it's hard to call it a story, or even a life. In colorful fragments of thoughts, memories, and visions, Daryna pours out a stream of extravagant phantoms that refuse to leave her in peace.
The text’s motif seems to be the heroine’s rhetorical wails about why she cannot afford certain things: a sequined dress from an H&M store in Krakow, a large wallet with hummingbirds and flowers from a Mango store in Spain, pointe shoes from a PABLOSKY store in Gran Canaria... The list is endless, as you might guess.
"On January 16, 2019, in winter, on a Wednesday, 1 year ago in life, in Krakow in the ‘Bonarka’ shopping center in the ‘H&M’ store why was it unfortunately not possible to buy me the snow-white, single-color, classic, dress with double-sided, reversible sequins????????????????????????? It was high quality, it had good quality, not bad, it had quality tulle fabric, it had quality fabric with double-sided, reversible sequins, it was not expensive, but cheaper, it was fashionable for me, it was cool..."
Alright, but whose voice are we hearing in this electrified stream? That of a spoiled person experiencing an internal crisis? A young woman collecting designer items? Someone neurodivergent? Or is it all just a dog’s dream?
At first glance, it’s hard to understand how such an undeniably remarkable existence—filled with suffering over glamour, cosmopolitan-artistic centers of Europe, and monopolistic stores—can be anything but irritating. Yet, you eventually realize, the story is actually tragicomedic: this neurotic voice, threatened by a post-capitalist apocalypse, often sounds from our own mouths.
Shaped by personal history, our desires and dreams drown in the density of names that forcibly define and objectify them: the snow-white sequined dress—a surrogate for peace; the hummingbird wallet—a promise of security; the pointe shoes—a lost connection with childhood that once promised a ballet career. In the feverish attempt to find material substitutes, it’s easy to lose one's own “self” (whether it exists is a separate question), which is gradually pushed to invisibility. Before you know it, you become an ersatz of desire. Time to recall Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus[2]:
“Sexuality is everywhere: in the way a bureaucrat caresses his papers, in the way a judge delivers justice, in the way a businessman makes money circulate; in how the bourgeoisie fucks the proletariat, etc. ... Flags, nations, armies, banks arouse many people.”
Desire, in their view, is part of the economic and infrastructural “base” of society. Schizophrenia, they say—perhaps more as a method—is one of the few genuine forms of rebellion against the system’s tyrannical imperatives. Perhaps this is just what Daryna Malyuk seeks to reveal.
The second text, authored by Inesa Marg, hauls us in an entirely different geographical and existential direction—a village, and judging by the dialectical particularities of the protagonists, a village in western Ukraine.
Describing a typical scene, albeit with considerable skill—grandma and grandpa slaughter a goat named Kvitka (“Flower”)—Inesa does not seem to aim to shock readers. A sedative, a large knife, entrails, the couple’s deliberations, “fucking quarantine,” minced meat, blood, and garlic—a ceremonious rural bacchanalia, familiar to everyone in Ukraine.
Yet, it is precisely through its normalcy that the meticulous description of this village ritual captivates. The combination of brutal animal dismemberment with the tenderness of the elderly couple’s conversations; the poverty of rural life intertwined with an attentiveness to nature, which has become a bad joke for the locals; all this forms an ironic quintessence of life in Ukraine—merciless, crude, yet warm-hearted. In this, the story inevitably evokes Arkadii Nepytaliuk’s brilliant short film Blood Sausage, which similarly portrays the intensity of peasant life.
Marg’s story, according to intratextual hints, was written during the COVID outbreak of 2020—a time of heightened and propagandized personal and informational hygiene. Yet, that time persists: social media is teeming with the latest ideology of the “self-care lifestyle”, emphasizing the necessity of maintaining one’s cleanliness (preferably over anything else). Inesa’s documentary text says: that’s funny, but outside the Sanitary Zone, there’s a grandmother and grandfather checking a goat’s intestine for holes. Outside, in fact, there’s plenty: toxic foam on the Yamuna river, dead horses in Cairo—whatever you can think of; this list, too, is inexhaustible.
But escaping “the Zone” requires exceptional courage—the kind that Nazar Benytsky, the next author in the issue, has in abundance. His texts take up the central part of Noha—both in content and essence.
Using colloquial surzhyk, Nazar recounts his childhood, daily work, fantasies, and reflections on a personal and collective past. It’s quite hard to believe that his prose is documentary, as Nazar’s lifestyle will seem downright fantastic to many. Nazar and his wife build a dugout on one of Kyiv’s Dnipro islands and spend their free time reading books about French history. Nazar commutes to work—playing music on the streets—by inflatable boat; he writes journal entries in Aromakava or any random pub. The couple dreams of “buying solar panels and staying on the island forever.”
Screenshots from the video Life on the Island: We Remove Sand from the Dugout, Build Walls and Paths, Grill Shashlik. Big Release. Source: “Nazar Benytsky” YouTube channel
This spirit brings to mind a Ukrainianized version of Thoreau’s experiment—of civil disobedience and an alternative life surrounded by nature, outside societal laws. The only difference is that Nazar still has to worry about money: “We’re paying off the case for the guitar, and we still need another thousand hryvnias for the boat.”
Nazar reflects on his childhood in an orphanage, on “wonderful caregivers” whose “salaries were miserly,” but who, despite everything, bought the kids “hematogen so we could eat.” He talks about toy trams and a stolen Tetris, about island “shamans and hobbits,” and about singing on the road near the Dorohozhychi metro station—a world that, from where I’m looking, seems like poetry. One way or another, this reversal of conventional scenarios is filled with its own pain. And whose pain is the more refined—the mainlanders’ or the islanders’—remains indefinite.
Through all this, Nazar—probably without intending to—challenges the modern sterilized space of Ukrainian culture, where mistakes, both grammatical and ideological, are not allowed; where any avant-garde is accompanied by afflicted bohemianism; where even the alternative has been defined.
An alternative, although a bleak one, is also offered by Alena Dumasheva, who shares her experience of imprisonment in a russian penal colony.
Fortunately or unfortunately, the topic of incarceration—at least political incarceration—has become one of the most discussed issues in Ukrainian society. But even despite this, the cursed mechanism grinds on: isolation erases prisoners from the public consciousness, “writes them out” of the collective historical narrative. It wasn’t always like this: “Throughout Europe, numerous prisons, hospitals, asylums for the mentally ill, and even leper colonies continued to function in cities in roughly unchanged form until the 19th century” meaning they were semi-inclusive of the incarcerated within working society. By the 21st century, such institutions had gradually acquired the status of “undesirable elements of the urban landscape”—and so, too, did the people within them. Meanwhile, “inside the zone,”[3] history continues—in its way.
A painting of the Florentine prison Le Stinche from the 14th century, likely the first facility in Europe built specifically to hold prisoners. Artist: Fabio Borbottoni
Alena is someone trying to flip the switch and show that the penal colony is a micro-society where one can drink coffee, learn, and love. This documentary account of ordinary prison life strikingly shows how places of confinement can serve as sites for acquiring skills; for example, Alena learned to sew and also “tried everything the camp offered: represented the squad in the historical club ‘Motherland,’ then founded a psychological training group called ‘Alyonki’... painted wall newspapers.” Yet, in a world of literal rather than just symbolic panopticons, burning questions are laid bare, unbandaged by the painkillers of modernity: Should things really be this way? Should socks really only be black, and should a kiss between two women really result in a beating? What even is “punishment”? Who is being punished?
Time for a bit of Foucault:
“And when the prisoners began to speak, they had their own theory of prison, punishment, and justice. What really matters is this kind of discourse against power, the counter-discourse expressed by prisoners or those we call criminals, and not a discourse on criminality….To put someone in prison, to keep him there, deprive him of food and heat, keep him from going out, from making love, etc., is that not the most delirious form of power imaginable? The other day I was talking with a woman who had been in prison, and she said: ‘To think that one day in prison they punished me, a forty year old woman, by forcing me to eat stale bread.’ What is striking in this story is not only the puerility of the exercise of power, but the cynicism with which it is exercised as power, in a form that is archaic and infantile. They teach us how to be reduced to bread and water when we’re kids. Prison is the only place where power can be exercised in all its nakedness and in its most excessive dimensions, and still justify itself as moral.”
With Lisa Biletska’s story, titled “Pension” (for some reason, written in rather complicated English), everything finally clicks: the second issue of Noha focuses on the lives of the unnoticed, those hidden away in the shadows of daily life. This time, it’s retirees who sign over their homes to an illegal (?) company in exchange for so-called “life care” until death.
Considering that retirement policies remain one of the least developed sectors of Ukrainian legislation, to the innocent eye, the arrangement seems like outright fraud. Research indicates that as of October 1, there are over 10 million retirees in Ukraine; studies on what percentage of them are homeless have not been conducted. It is only known that over 20% of Ukraine’s homeless population consists of internally displaced persons, and it is not difficult to guess which demographic finds it hardest to secure employment.
Yet Biletska’s story, playing with perspectives and mediums, does not offer a clear judgment on this seemingly fraudulent scheme, instead leaving us to face an ethical dilemma: is this exchange—an apartment for care—a positive or negative phenomenon? Is it about social security or the monopolization of housing? A similar feeling of uncertainty arises when looking at the actual website of the mentioned company, which is easy to find online.
Screenshot from the site: https://pension.ua/
Parallel to the central, ambiguous “mystery,” Lisa tells the stories of pensioners connected to this Assistance and Social Protection Center: amateur poet Andrii Yakovych and his dog Amur; ballet master Vasyl Vasylovych; lathe operator and baker Nina Ivanivna. It seems that beyond these names lie rich and turbulent lives, but for the “Assistance Center,” something else lies beyond them: the inevitability of death—a death that will finally free up the right to property.
The theme of owning one’s own death also echoes in Anton Polunin’s text. Shifting the journal’s dominant genre, the author presents a poetic autobiography structured as a will, evidently intersecting with the historic tradition of Ukrainian poetic testaments.
As often happens with contemporary poetry, it is quite difficult to keep up with the author’s train of thought (his “entropic vortex”): the hints and uncommon metaphors are striking, yet also blur the overall impression, leaving the reader in an impressionistic chaos.
and so death what is the death of things
if not the death of the souls of things
kantian things-in-themselves platonic ideas
the aristotelian paradigm in a word
a gray man in a toga and cowboy hat
carries it safe and brief in a backpack
swollen in protest against
the five best weeks of vacation
in seaside remoteness
where they taught me to dive
fighting pain
breaking breast on asphalted water
Perhaps this was the plan—Polunin leaves us to the mercy of death’s stark intrigue, which looms over the poetic row. Layering autobiographical imagery, the author sharpens the question: where is this text, which encompasses all of life, even going? Inevitably, one thinks about that second before death where one’s entire life flashes before the eyes.
In fact, it has recently been discovered that oscillating patterns of brain waves influence a sudden retrieval of memories in moments of mortal danger. Because of this, approximately thirty seconds before our brain slowly dies, we dive into a sequence of memories—scattered pieces of our “self.”
Similar oscillations occur during dreams; this is precisely what Anton’s lines evoke. Why the brain does this, scientists have yet to determine.
Philip Olenyk focuses on another mystery of the human brain—the tendency to disrespect difference, the drive to avoid it. He continues to explore neglected galaxies of the Ukrainian public sphere, this time touching on the issue of racism.
For a predominantly "white" Ukraine, the issue of racism has almost never been in focus; however, this does not mean it does not exist. Olenyk insists on the opposite: all the Black individuals in his documentary narrative have faced discrimination from white Ukrainians in one way or another. Some experienced unjustified violence, others endured contempt and bullying, and some even died due to denied medical assistance. These documentary notes are not misleading: according to research, Ukraine ranks 49th in the world in terms of racism.
Philip tells the stories of different social groups: Nigerian poet Remi; Simi, who came to Ukraine to study medicine; self-taught barber Edi; clothing store vendor John. Between the lines, one can make out Rimbaud’s paradoxical formula: “Je suis un autre” (I am another): despite self-identity, a subject cannot avoid being constructed by others; we are responsible for others just as we are responsible for ourselves. Or perhaps, in the end, we are not so different after all:
“John once told me: ‘You kind of look Moroccan. If you’re curious, go to the Ministry of Internal Affairs yourself. Speak only English and apply for asylum. Then you’ll see what it’s like.’”
A still from Lost
Who knows whether the overlap with Lost’s “characters” was just a coincidence. Scientists have discovered another phenomenon: the “Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon.” This is a cognitive bias in which a person begins to notice a particular concept, word, or phenomenon more frequently after having recently learned about it.
One thing I know for sure: delivering stories of people lost on the fringes of society and pulling them into our brief gaze, Noha reveals something about ourselves—about the variations of our “selves,” or rather—about who we always already are. Je suis un autre.
Perhaps the less superficial idea of Lost is that, in reality, we all live on the same island—a populous one. A radiant core of happiness and pain, inevitably shadowed by fragments of the past. The trick is to find a way to tell your pain to another.
