The fantastical heap of sheets
I first saw “The Kyiv Commix” in the winter of 2019. It was a week or so into the New Year, and I’d just returned to work following a long-awaited vacation with my wife in Lichtenstein, where we’d finally managed to ‘take in the winter sport’.
As I opened the door to my office, there it was: a curious, loosely corded stack of photocopied pages conveniently plopped on my desk and waiting for me.
I unlatched the windows to let the cold air in to dissipate the odor of the bilious bulk, apparently mailed from somewhere in Central or Eastern Europe in a scotch-taped cardboard box, judging by its remains scattered about the room.
Kyiv Unedited (kyivunedited.com.ua) is the name of the website from which the pages of the manuscript had purportedly been taken by one Jonathan Hartley Finch, a professor of modern literature at Attica College, Boston, MA; apparently just in the nick of time, as that website no longer exists, although I’ve managed to track down proof of its existence from some detritus and remaining scraps on Google.
And what of “The Kyiv Commix” themselves?
What are they, who wrote them, why and for whom; and, more importantly, how did Professor Finch get hold of them – if it was, indeed, he who’d gotten them at all?
Assuming it was Professor Finch, what was the extent of his connection to them, and how deep was his involvement in their creation, dissemination? How did he know, or find out, about them, when no one else presumably had; what, or who, had been his source?
A letter, purportedly penned by Professor Finch, and dated 30 April 2018 [available on the Internet and reproduced in full here, immediately following this intro – AWK], finds Finch – somewhat oddly, in my opinion – assuming the role of apologist-cum-fundraiser for a pair of hard-up/hard-boiled ‘detectives’, whose primary occupation appears to be filing ‘investigative reports’ on the Kyiv Unedited website into the unsavory misadventures of expatriate loiterers inhabiting the Ukrainian capital.
What’s disturbing about this, immediately raising both doubt and suspicion, is that in this letter, Finch not only dons a hat that clearly doesn’t fit him – if only because, well, he’s a professor of literature – but he openly admits, without prevarication, that he does not know the individuals whom he claims to be representing. Which is to say – and no matter how Finch, himself, puts it – that if these individuals are real, then Finch’s help to them is completely unsolicited; nor are they even aware that he has written this letter on their behalf!
Needless to say, one is immediately led to question Finch’s motives for doing this at all.
With regard to the “Commix”, this information pertaining to Finch, if any of it is true, still falls far short of arming us with enough background knowledge on the professor as one possible way toward understanding them.
A related question that likewise remains wide open is whether Finch wrote the “Commix” himself.
Finally, in reading the “Commix”, how much of them are we to believe are based on fact? In other words, are we to treat them as a kind of fiction based on real events, as opposed to, say, mere fiction that seems real? Finch seems to imply as much, however fantastical the stories that make up the collection might appear to their readers.
Although this does not stop Finch from “urging” us to publish the “Commix” as a “work of literature” in a second letter he purportedly wrote, dated close to the end of 2018 and enclosed along with the received bundle.
A dramatic change in tone compared with the first letter finds this second letter providing us with more credible-sounding information and more seriously weighed and considered ‘professorial’ insights into what “The Kyiv Commix” are supposed to be.
I here quote a part of this second letter at length, as I believe it is helpful in this respect, particularly as I lack any other sources of information about the “Commix” to start with:
“According to one of the sources from whom these works were recovered, the website, to which most of these ‘reports’ were posted, had been understood to be a sort of improvised workshop – hence, the website’s name, Kyiv Unedited. ‘The Boys’ had whimsically affixed the motto, ‘On the City’s Edge…’ to the site’s homepage to evoke the spirits of [Dashiell] Hammett and [Raymond] Chandler.
“The website consisted of three sections: ‘Kyiv Commix’, ‘The Checkout’, and ‘Man on Earth’, of which the first was by far the largest.
“In recommending, indeed, urging, the publication of this strange and unique collection as a single work of literature akin to, say, a modern-day saga, or an epic picaresque that harks back to the very ‘Quixote’ itself, I have taken the liberty of titling the work ‘The Kyiv Commix’ as the most appropriate and sensible, taking the website’s motto, ‘On the City’s Edge…’, as the work’s equally appropriate subtitle.
“The bulk of these stories take place in Kyiv, the capital of the former Soviet republic of Ukraine, covering a period of 15-20 years, with the action starting roughly from around the turn of the 21st century.
“The stories mostly center on Kyiv’s expatriate community at the time, with the focus overwhelmingly on a specific subset of the American expat contingent; namely, a bevy of vain and egotistical carpetbaggers who’d dropped by the place following Independence in ’91 to push their agendas through aggressive and shameless self-promotion.
“Thematically, many of the stories attempt to examine the nature of the impulses and motives driving these individuals to act as they did, and try to show their actions as the necessary outcome of their mere existence, unconnected to any notions of responsibility for consequences.”
So, who is Jonathan Hartley Finch?
If, up until now, I have given the impression that I had no knowledge of Jonathan Hartley Finch prior to receiving “The Kyiv Commix”, that is not altogether accurate as to the actual case.
Hartley Finch had become familiar to me years ago as the author of at least one obscure monograph entitled “Birdwatching Through American Poetry”.
As it turned out, it was the publication of this very monograph that appears to have changed everything for Professor Finch, to put the matter bluntly.
Noted one respected scholar in her review of Finch’s book:
“Professor Finch insists, stubbornly, on working through his analyses within the strictures of an invented and highly questionable method, in the process proving himself to be obsessive, narrow, exasperating, repetitive, muddled, largely incomprehensible, and moribund to the point that one need ask: ‘How is this helpful?’; ‘What does it elucidate?’ and ‘What is the point?’ The result is not only unconvincing, it is disastrous.”
In an even fiercer takedown, another prominent scholar and critic in his review wrote:
“Irksome, and almost hysterical in his unchecked, and apparently unedited, repetitiveness, Professor Finch returns obsessively-compulsively to contrasting what he, bizarrely, terms ‘antithetical moments’ in birdwatching history as tracked in American verse from the 17th century roughly to the present.”
A few years later – and a little more than a decade ago – this House’s publisher asked me to attend a lecture series on Postmodernism in Butte, Montana, with one of the speakers being none other than Professor Jonathan Hartley Finch.
On the last of the three-day event, from the back of the dimly lit log cabin meeting hall, where I preferred to sit, I first discerned the miniaturized outline, and then the details, of the man.
As the fire crackled in the hearth, sleepily lapping the fragrant interior wood with amber hues, Jonathan Hartley Finch stood next to the floor lamp examining his notes, unmindful of his audience, ignoring the armchair, and avoiding the dais, emblazoned with a shield bearing the likeness of a moose, its powerful chest against a bend sinister straining.
Neither diminutive nor large, Finch looked tired, even haggard; his face was covered in several days’ worth of peppery stubble. His eyes blinked and darted rapidly behind black-rimmed glasses, although people are known to lose control of their visual apparatus when exhausted. His hair, which he’d intermittently brush back from his forehead with a hand, was longish and unkempt to the point of being shaggy, and, I thought at the time, in great need of a wash and a cut.
Finch himself was scruffy all-around: a flannel lumberjack shirt stuffed into loose, saggy jeans that, in their turn, were semi-stuffed into a pair of scuffed-up, weatherworn Timberland boots, like some aging urban grunge throwback or latter-day hipster wannabe.
When he finally started, he spoke for nearly an hour, pacing back and forth, stopping every now and then to labor over his notes by the floor lamp before talking again, and by the time he’d got done laying into Postmodernism as “a monumental failure”, “played out”, and “dead”, he’d managed to empty most of the hall.
I do not think that Jonathan Hartley Finch cared; not in the least. He stepped by me, actually brushed by me, keeping his head down, not ashamed, but indifferent, as he left the room.
A local Montana newspaper in its Culture & Arts section wrote up the moment at the event:
“He [Finch] drank his coffee from a large paper cup that he’d placed on the small table next to the armchair, nervously, his hand shaking, spilling the coffee over his hand as he lifted it and getting it on the papers he was gripping in the other hand, and then didn’t even bother to wipe his wet hot coffee hand dry against his flannel shirt or jeans. But as he left the hall, no part of him appeared to be shaking, and he didn’t look nervous at all, but rather, was very composed, looking very goal-oriented and calm.”
Not very well written, I’ll admit, but perhaps quite insightful as to Finch at that very moment – for maybe he’d said everything he’d wanted to say, and there was nothing else left. And maybe that badly written little local report was also somewhat prescient in telling us something about Finch in the future; about Finch today – for the past is prologue, but so is the present.
Whatever in the world happened to…?
Some more years passed, and I’d heard through the grapevine that Hartley Finch had had his tenure at Attica College revoked.
Fast forward to today.
After making inquiries with a number of potential sources who, I thought, might be able to shed some light on “The Kyiv Commix”, and particularly on Hartley Finch, I finally received a reply from a colleague and fellow editor at a small, English-language publishing industry trade journal headquartered in Bratislava, Slovakia.
The colleague said that Finch had made something like a “mad rush” into Central & Eastern Europe to “collect”, “save”, or “retrieve” the “Commix” before they “disappeared”.
He said that in the late summer-early fall of 2018, Finch initially went to Poland, crossing the border on foot via checkpoint into Ukraine at the start of the winter, from where he made it to the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv – the alleged source of “The Kyiv Commix” – by train just before the 2019 New Year.
However, the fact that the postmarks on “The Kyiv Commix” package, which we’d received here, bear no indication of a Ukrainian origin, reveals an idiomatic gaping hole in this “mad rush” version of Finch’s putative foray into C&E Europe precisely because, instead of connecting the package to Hartley Finch, it rather decisively severs that connection.
A second version – this one gotten from my publisher, which, she said, was closer to first-hand knowledge on her part – has Finch going from the States directly to Kyiv in 2011 or 2012. After spending some years there, starting in 2017, he began to flit somewhat erratically back and forth between western Ukraine and points in C&E Europe, finally sending us the “Commix” package from Krakow, Poland, in 2018, a couple of weeks before the New Year.
While not irrefragably tying the package to Finch, this version, if believed, at least brings the moment of Finch’s package handoff to a post-office clerk in Krakow far more convincingly into the realm of plausibility.
Since then – meaning not too long ago, as of this writing – Finch has seemingly dropped off the radar somewhere in Lviv, the unofficial capital of western Ukraine.
According to one, admittedly less authoritative, source I’ve tracked to Lviv State University, “Finch lives in a hostel in a suburb [of Lviv] as a writer-in-residence.” The hostel is owned and managed by an eccentric family of wind and percussion musicians and consists of an old, one-story and thoroughly unremarkable dwelling.
However, this, and other similar, though weaker, ‘leads’ (for lack of a better word), have come up dry, and I have not been able to more conclusively determine with any real certainty what has happened to the professor or where he might be.
Yet, if there is at least some truth to any part of these accounts, then I believe these Finch ‘histories’ all fit a larger life pattern; one which Finch has been unable to break out of, driven, perhaps, by some uncontrollable impulse in his own nature, some demon he could never rein in, thereby condemning himself to an existential form of hellish repetition.
Ever since, say, his “Birdwatching” book, in attempting to escape a malevolent obscurity, Finch would tumble into an obscurity that was even worse – ever more profound, possibly even desperate.
Thus, with Finch’s eradication of himself – first, from the world of academic and intellectual relevance, and then, by extension, from life itself – we have been left with “The Kyiv Commix” in his place; as though he’d sacrificed himself, perhaps inadvertently, so that they might ‘be’.
More missing pieces than pieces
As to the question of Professor Finch’s possible authorship of “The Kyiv Commix”, I am absolutely certain there is no way Finch could have pulled it off.
The “Commix” contain too much specialized knowledge of place and time for Finch to have mastered so perfectly (even during his purported time in Ukraine, according to my publisher’s ‘second’ version), to have ever woven that knowledge so seamlessly and effortlessly into the several hundred stories that make up the “Commix”.
Furthermore, there is a perplexing, indeed, mindboggling, number of disconnected Pessoa-like heteronyms in the “Commix”; narrative voices that play at a free, mercurial, and ever-shifting game of Guess Who under the guises of fitful and unstable authorial names. I strongly doubt Finch possessed the subtlety of aesthetic, the sense of style, or the imagination necessary to create something like the “Commix” on such a fine and nuanced level.
But even if all this goes toward largely settling the question against Finch’s authorship of the “Commix”, there are many things about Finch’s connection to them that, to my mind, remain disturbingly unclear, and what’s worse, unresolved.
Could it be that the Kyiv Unedited website, despite its significance for “The Kyiv Commix”, was nevertheless a Finch ruse, a charade, some sort of elaborate hoax played by him just for the sake of the playing?
For example, if the “Commix” materials are from that website, then (following the ‘first’ version of his CEE exploits outlined above) could not have Finch, with great ease and convenience, simply downloaded and copied them in the United States, instead of rushing off to Europe to do so? After all, Kyiv Unedited would have been just as available in the States as it was in Europe or elsewhere in the world.
Or, in the alternative (following the ‘second’ version), if Finch was “over there” and desperately felt the need to bring the materials to our attention, why not just download them to a memory disk and send that to us (you know, drop it inside a greeting card with a verse from Emily Dickinson, or something)? Or, barring (for any variety of reasons) the sending of the MS by email, why not upload the file to a secured site and send us the link, instead of doing what he did?
Or, was the Kyiv Unedited website already gone (as Finch in his second letter indeed refers to it in the past tense), but Finch’s “sources” had kept hardcopies of their work and had either been willing to give, or sell, copies of them to Finch, or simply allowed him to make photocopies, a set of which he then proceeded to send to us by mail?
Or, did he outright steal them?
However, regardless of how Finch came into possession of the copies, the result remains unchanged under the present circumstances of Finch’s disappearance, whether brought about by willful act, accident, or someone else’s volition; namely, that Finch can in no way benefit from his silent contact with us and the “Commix’s” publication, which leaves at least me wondering about the sense of it all – if there is any.
For is there not something odd about all this, no matter how one turns it over; you know – fishy, loopy… absurd?
Could not all this be some extravagant, intricate ploy concocted by a madman, full of sound and fury, for which the rational mind can find no explanation?
Some Notes on the Text
Before the Reader ventures off into the world of “The Kyiv Commix”, for the sake of some further, and final, elucidation, I have here taken the liberty of extrapolating a few more pertinent parts from the second letter purportedly by Finch explaining them.
Historical Background
“Significantly, starting with late 2013 and continuing into 2014 and beyond – the slaughter by sniper fire of protesting civilians in Kyiv’s main public square, Russia’s subsequent annexation of Crimea, and particularly the Russian-backed separatist war in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region – serve as the historical backdrop for many of these stories based on their filing dates.
“While these traumatic and dire events are only rarely directly referred to in these stories, they nevertheless sometimes exert a macabre influence on their mood and atmosphere.”
Transliteration
“The English-language differences in the names of some Kyiv locations, which are meant to be the same places in different frames, are the result of the differences between their Ukrainian and Russian variants; for example, the Dnipro and Dnieper, Kyiv and Kiev, Podil and Podol, and many others.
“Most of these were kept as originally written and not edited [by the sources from whom I’ve recovered these ‘Commix’ – JHF] to some single standard, thereby echoing the quotidian reality of bilingual Kyiv itself.”
Protecting, and Exposing, Identities
“Where we found it necessary [my sources told me – JHF], we have changed the names of establishments, such as businesses and bars operating in Kyiv at the time these reports were written, in the interests of protecting their identities and reputations, as well as those of their owners, employees, clients and patrons.
“These names, as well as those of some ‘characters’, change every now and then within the reports, typically in minor ways, but we [my sources – JHF] believe astute readers should have no great difficulty in figuring out the ‘targeted individuals’ behind different names or altered name spellings.
“Although the names of some other ‘characters’ never undergo any changes at all. In hindsight, we [my sources – JHF] can’t really put our finger on the reason for such inconsistencies, but have decided, for the sake of the record, to leave the matter as is, feeling there must have been some reason for it, and that’s good enough for us.
“Likewise, speech is sometimes in quotation marks, and sometimes not, with no real justification for it.
“The accents and speech modes given to some of the characters to suggest their provenance and manner are not meant to be accurate and true, except in highly distorted verisimilitude ranging from vague approximation to extreme exaggeration.”
[If there is a semblance of truth to what’s been reported here from the second letter, there is no doubt in my mind that this final part, immediately below, is purely Finch’s invention, for why would his so-called “sources” ever say the following things about themselves, especially if they’re true?! – AWK]
“Some of the texts are offensive in nature, giving voice to prejudices of a degree that some readers might describe as vile and depraved. Probably the most striking and derogatory are the works’ pervasive racism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, homophobia, misogyny and sexism, as well as ethnicism of every sort, and ageism not at all subtle in its insolence, disparagement and denigration. Only ‘class’ seems to be missing.”
Following is Finch’s first letter, in toto.
Alfred Wojak-Krauss
Editor-in-Charge
The Mar-Jones Publishing House
Spring, 2019