Fernaldo Nikhto’s
Coming soon: the apocalypse according to iona
a novel told in three days
Somewhere on the edge of the Black Sea, a man believed to be already dead sits down to write.
Decades later, in a Ukraine consumed by Stalin’s purges, a young music teacher named Ivan Zeleny falls in love with Vasilisa, the daughter of an NKVD major —a love the system cannot allow to survive. War tears them apart. By the time Ivan reaches the ruins of a bombed hotel outside Kharkiv, he has lost his comrades, his home, and finally his own name.
What rises from the wreckage is Iona: a wandering holy fool who walks the streets of Kyiv under the eyes of the secret police, healing what he cannot explain, provoking those who fear what they cannot control —until his path leads, improbably, before Stalin himself, in the dictator’s final days.
Around Iona’s story gather other lives, scattered across a century: a painter who will be executed for the beauty he makes; a journalist whose old lies come home to threaten his own daughter; a factory worker who dares to ask for a second ballot. Each circles the same buried mythology: a tower built to outlast the flood, a fish that swallows the desperate, and an angel, always green, who will not let go.
THE APOCALYPSE ACCORDING TO IONA is a novel about love, memory, identity, the desire for wholeness, and the search for the “Better Man.” At its heart lies the frontier where faith and doubt, myth and history, empire and eschatology continually meet.
About
Fernaldo Nikhto
Fernaldo Nikhto grew up among Russian fairy-tale books, childhood libraries, and the echo of a frontier—Ukraine—that reached his home in the voices of strangers. He studied Fine Arts in Buenos Aires, lived for several years in a village in the Andes, spent some months in Paris trying his luck as an artist, and earned a degree in Theology. Today he dreams he is working with wood and writes what he writes. He dreamt this novel over the course of twenty years, searching in his sleep for the same thing he had searched for since he can remember: that beauty and meaning might not be two different things.
BEYOND The BOOK
A small trapdoor on the floor
The Apocalypse According to Iona is a story told in three days, yet there are infinite landscapes. Here I write about some of them, and ideas that lie beneath its surface—fragments of the road that led to the book, and reflections on what can be found along the way.
The entries are arranged around different chapters of the novel. They are not explanations of the story, but there is a small trapdoor into it.
Recent Entries
The left ear
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The stars
Read entry →: The starsThe stars seem to be presentEven in daylight,Even if I’m enclosedWithout windows,And even if I close my eyes. No, I cannot…
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Ghosts
Read entry →: Ghosts“It was really nice to meet you,” I said, while we were heading to the Abyss. “You changed me,” she said.…
Essays
The Right Ear
A series of close readings and meditations on biblical texts — language, meaning, and the weight of ancient words.
Poetry
The Garden of Divine Songs
Ivan and Vasilisa had a very special place: the Botanical Garden of Kyiv, which they called “The Garden of Divine Songs,” after the Song XI by the Ukrainian poet Hryhorii Skovoroda. There, they shared some of their most profound moments. Here, I share some of mine with you.
