Glancing over the details of the appearance, and potential threat, of Sergei the Russian, a crazed madman, but highly effective mimic of Saint Stephan, being a dangerously obsessed fan of his, eventually coming to be known in Kyiv Commix lore based on hypothetically sourced stories as The False Stephan, The False Dmitry, and The Finno-Ugric Faker
As presently told almost exclusively by Steve Kowalski, speaking to Saint Stephan, retelling the latter’s own story, which Saint Stephan had obviously told the former first, allowing the first to recount it, as duly and faithfully documented by same in the below record and filing
Steve Kowalski: But, here’s the rest of it, Saint, according to you:
It is still January, 2017, and after frolicking with the Japanese spy girl with anime-sized tits in her home country for the rest of that month, come the start of February, you tell her you have to move on, and with tears and pulsating love, she reluctantly drives you to Vladivostok in her miniature nuclear-powered submarine.
There, without money, passport, or much of anything else, you somehow manage to get on their cross-country Siberian Express train, and randomly get off at some remote Russian village halfway across that country’s vast expanse, give or take 1,000 kilometers, in one direction or the other.
There, you decide to have just one drink – a single shot of Russian marinated-pepper vodka – a thing you know you should not do, given your past pitiful history before The Ferret stabbed you in the back and left you to die on Kyiv’s left bank, et cetera, blah, blah – whom, by the way, and as you should by now know, I single-handedly vanquished – and so you brazenly kick the door open of a seedy Potemkin hooch-hole favored by ex-convicts and their yobnutiye whores, where you are stared at and marveled at for the entire time you’re there, throwing back that one little burning, gut-rot drink, they not knowing whether to mock you, venerate you, or kill you, or all three, and, lucky for you, not having had some kind of vaster agenda, you begin to walk out the door with a mind of making it back to the train station, when this one guy, Sergei, you say, comes running toward you from the back, stuttering, “Stop… s-s-stop… I… I know you! You are –” and so on.
You are both outside, now, and you note that at a certain angle, this Sergei does bear, arguably, at least a passing resemblance to you, and he pulls out a non-committal baseball cap from somewhere, similar to yours, puts it on backwards, the way you do, and gives you himself in profile, and now the resemblance is suddenly far less deniable, and both you and this Sergei know that he could pass for a Finno-Ugric version of the Ukrainian-American Diaspora Stephan.
Not only that, but it is clear he has made it his business over Lord knows how much time, to imitate your stance, your slight stoop, especially when you are just glued to a spot trying to think something through. He takes some steps this way and that to show you how he’s all but mastered your entire body’s manner of walking, your gait. He speaks, and he’s got the sound of your voice, its timbre, the cadences of your speech all pretty down pat, including a good, even very good, study of your typical word patterns and sentence structures. His English, you note, has suddenly gotten very good. He has lost his stutter.
You smile, and even laugh, but secretly you worry that this Sergei will steal your image for material gain – the type of thing that runs rampant in this-that part of the world, with laws addressing the crime of intellectual property theft, if they exist at all, so full of holes, you could strain cottage cheese through them, and never mind any kind of jurisprudential agency willing to enforce what laws there might be, unless the petition they do so is surreptitiously and cunningly accompanied by a substantial bribe, which will get you about as far as a phone call, and a “We’ll get back to you as soon as the matter actualizes,” whatever that means.
Then, you both begin to joke about Sergei being a False Saint Stephan, based on the idea, and along the lines, of the historical Russian figure of The False Dmitry – an idea, or perhaps more of a concept, that this Sergei actually appears to warm to with a childish enthusiasm that is both childishly great and childishly unabashed – very much like a little baby or toddler, who thinks nothing about being naked in the house, or, for that matter, out in public.
[Hence, the later stories, the true provenance of which we still remain uncertain, popping up in The Kyiv Commix, giving this unknown, supposedly Russian interloper into the world of The Commix, a sobriquet that stuck; namely, The Finno-Ugric Faker, in addition to The False Saint Stephan and The False Dmitry. See, for example, 351, 352, 353, and 355 – The Kyiv Unedited Secret Editorial Board.]
You are suddenly tired (shouldn’t have had that shot of vodka), and this Sergei invites you to his broken-down, rotted-out shack of a hovel just around the corner to rest up before going on your way, and you accept, as you could now use and greatly benefit from several well-applied z’s.
But when there, Sergei insists you drink with him, and naturally, after you demonstrate your adamance against what is the best, and only, gesture he knows to show you his hospitality, he gets angry, while you, with your eyes already closing, filling quickly with sleepy sand, crash out on an old, variously stained and, quite frankly, revolting mattress in a corner, among crust-caked dishes, rancid swill-filled cups, greasy utensils, trash piles, and generally built-up filth – which is everywhere, together with a disgusting, drunk man’s home’s odor…
Only to wake up a few hours later, before the crack of dawn, to the sight of your breath in a freezing room and, just in the nick of time, as the saying doth go, to a raging Sergei coming at you with an ax, the blood on it still fresh from an early morning chicken kill.
You manage to crash yourself out the door into the frozen mud road and, in a signature Saint Stephan move that not even this booze-soused lunatic Sergei would think of imitating, you thank your host for his graciousness, as you calmly turn in the direction of the train station and perambulate yourself off his evil and typically Russian premises (see Dostoevsky – all of him, et al) toward your desired objective.
Later that morning, a stomach-churningly booze-stinking Sergei, pathetically tearful and altogether emotionally overwrought, shakes you awake on the bench you’ve fallen asleep on in the train station, which, by the way, is a surprisingly and unexpectedly nice building for such a jerkwater village, and apologizes profusely for his rabid behavior to try to kill you just some hours before. You tell him that’s fine and not to worry about it, that you’re not angry at him in the least, adding, again, in a way that only Saint Stephan could muster, that you are grateful to him for waking you up just in time for your train, going west, of course, toward Ukraine.
With this clearly unstable and dangerous nutjob Sergei now behind you, this getting to Ukraine, you say, takes up pretty much all of the rest of February, and then, naturally, March goes by and, you further say, by that time you’re definitely in Ukraine, but you just can’t remember where you were or what you were doing…
Saint Stephan: That is correct, Steve… nothing eventful. I’d just decided to get off the train before the Russia-Ukraine border and explore all the ways I could get into the country on foot without being stopped.
SK: Naturally, you succeeded. March goes by, and now, Whan that Aprille come around, you hear the very first dubious story, off these very pages, of Saint Stephan visiting the main Puzata Khata cafeteria eatery in Kyiv’s Podil District [See 341]. There, he manages to capture everyone’s attention and give some kind of speech about his-your most recent adventures in Los Angeles, with Nicolas Cage and Goldstein and the like.
SS: Oh, that was definitely the Russian Sergei.
SK: Very well. But how did he know all of those things about –
SS: Come on, Steve! He read it in The Commix. It’s clear he’s an obsessed fan.
SK: All right… all right, then. So, what about that time you were run out of Josh Davies’s apartment on Kyiv’s Red Army Street, by the man himself, for lusting after his beautiful, significantly younger, long-legged, blonde archaeologist wife, even though Davies had both already been beheaded as part of a centuries-old game played between the somewhat other-dimensional and curiously (some would say tragically) long-living Hunched Cornish and Half Guinea, and discovering himself dead in that same apartment?
SS: What time are you referring to, Steve? As you know –
SK: Well – that time, for example, involving Zippy Zamazda… [See 370]
SS: Oh, that time! Well, by then, that was definitely me… playing the False Dmitry… playing me. Don’t ask me why, Steve, because why not?
SK: Okay, I won’t. But then all those other times before that; since, apparently, this guy was first seen in the Kyiv Podil cafeteria, and then something like all throughout that same summer, in Josh Davies’s apartment, lusting after his wife – over and over again? And then Davies kicking him-you out – also, every single time? [See, for example, 349]
SS: Yeah, that was still him, Steve – The Finno-Ugric Faker False Dmitry Sergei. But that very last time you referred to, involving Zippy Zamazda, and even the Ferret, ha-ha… that was none other than me. Like I said, playing him playing me. By then, The False Dmitry was already long gone, relatively speaking.
SK: And why, and by what manner, did he leave? Can you tell me? Do you know?
SS: No, Steve. That’s the end of the story. Drop it.
SK: Is there any reason, then, why you came back here – at all?
SS: Let’s just say, you’re going to be needing some… no, let’s make that, a lot of help, son – and that, pretty soon…
Filed by Steve Kowalski, April 6, 2026