Daniel Kalder
LOST COSMONAUT
313pp. Faber. Paperback, £12.99.
0 571 22780 5
Daniel Kalder is a clever young man pretending to be a naive fool, whose extensive knowledge of Russia is well hidden inside a mock travelogue that invites the reader to visit the most boring, bleak and bloated landscapes on earth, “grim urban black spots, all the places which, ordinarily, people choose to avoid”. His choice of destination is dictated by the principles of “anti-tourism” which he sets out at the beginning of Lost Cosmonaut; these include a pledge not to visit “places that are in any way desirable”, to seek “locked doors and demolished buildings”, and to travel “at the wrong time of year”. He finds these conditions fulfilled in the most obscure parts of the former Soviet Union known only to diehard Kremlinologists.
It is as difficult to locate them geographically as to pronounce their names: Tatarstan and Kalmykia, Mari El and Udmurtia are huddled more or less together near the lower regions of the River Volga, somewhere between the Azov and Caspian seas, in the South-Eastern part of Russia. These little republics came into existence due to the rigorously pursued Soviet policy of multiculturalism. This sometimes involved mass deportation and forced assimilation before they were granted nominal independence; it also entailed the provision of a fictitious, artificially created or revamped ethnic culture, with an obligatory state theatre in each capital city where plays were performed in a no longer understood language, a local history museum in which nobody remembered the significance of the exhibits; and, in public squares, ubiquitous statues of national poets and heroes whom no one respected. It is “a whole other Europe, a shadow Europe that might as well not exist for all we Westerners care. In fact, it doesn’t exist for us”. We may not notice these peoples but they see us as we pass through their territories. The author summarizes his book as an account of “the secret underground resistance of nonentities, those who stand up and are not counted, those who ask but do not receive, those who knock but for whom the door never opens. The invisible dwellers in invisible cities”.
It is the invisibility under Western eyes, the anonymity of the mundane existence of these minorities that Kalder, an enthusiast of anti-tourism, finds most attractive and refreshing. In recent years, there has been a proliferation of books on Russia, a rich choice of humorous renderings of Stalinist atrocities, profound accounts of bizarre rituals of Russian religion and administration, lyrical insights into the conversational culture of the Russian intelligentsia which extolled the bonds of friendship over capitalist competition and commercialism. All these books were written by “wise men”, as Kalder calls them, “all those pontificating blowhards pronouncing judgements and analyses from their armchairs”, who “lose nothing by their pontification, and they certainly can’t be proven wrong”. There is, indeed, a common trend in modern books on Russia to romanticize the country’s brutal history, to turn it into an exciting tale of bloodthirsty tyranny contrasted with the spirituality of downtrodden people. With ruthless clarity and irony, Kalder exposes the essential dreariness of daily life in Russia omitted by the “wise men”, purveyors of the exotic.
Behind the romantic façade of Russian history lies the grey, boring routine of survival amid the debris of defunct ideology, inside a junkyard of patriotic sentiments and utopian delusions. The gap is filled with strange aberrations and apparitions that people are eager to construct, so hungry are they for any kind of spirituality when faced with the chasm in the order of things after the collapse of the Soviet regime.
In his ironic narrative, Kalder avoids showing his profound knowledge of Russian history, literature, and poetry in particular. He has made, as far as I can tell, only one factual mistake; claiming that Pushkin names Kalmykia as a territory without mentioning Kalmyks as a nation. But in his prophetic poem “The Memorial” Pushkin claims that his poetic legacy of compassion for the downtrodden will last forever and become known all over Russia not only to Slavic peoples but to Finns, too, as well as to “the friend of the steppe, the Kalmyk-man”. This poem is inscribed on the pedestal of the monument to Pushkin in the heart of Moscow.
Kalder is fascinated by the monumental art now marooned in the desert of the post-Soviet era. Life has changed so much that these former icons of a regime began to look strange, in a way not initially intended by their creators. Kalder found in a city park in Yoshkar Ola a strange effigy of Lenin that looked like “a furtive cottager”, with his hands in his pockets, “fumbling with his gonads”. I have often observed that Lenin’s classic image – with his raised hand greeting the proverbial radiant future – could today be an effective mascot for a taxi rank. Pushkin’s statue in Pushkin Square in Moscow has one hand inside a breast pocket; so that what was intended as a poetic pose of contemplation now looks as if the poet is reaching for his wallet. Of course, this interpretation is heightened by the fact that, today, he faces the first McDonald’s in Moscow. That corporation tends to choose a key position in every city, generally close to the most important national monument. A comparative study of McDonald’s premises in the republics of Russia is prominent in Kalder’s travelogue. Where there is no McDonald’s (as in the capital of Udmurtia), its ersatz contemporary – Mig Miag – can be found; therein Kalder discovered striking parallels between its interior design and the radical supremacist paintings of the great Russian avant-garde artist Kazimir Malevich.
Lost Cosmonaut is full of sharp absurdist insights into uncharted territories of boredom, distant lands of bizarre institutions and strange bureaucratic habits. Former Communist Party functionaries have become pagan chieftains and shamans; an old lady single-handedly runs an obsolete Planetarium so that the rare visitor to godforsaken Yoshkar Ola, the capital of Mari El, can continue to enjoy the vision of distant galaxies; a mathematical genius in a wheelchair teaches local women how to ensnare a foreign husband. In Kazan, the capital of Tatarstan, we are told not so much of the history of the Golden Horde or the intricacies of the political and religious strife in this part of the post-Soviet Russia but of a cabinet of curiosities, packed with freakish exhibits of bottled babies which date from the time of Peter the Great. In Elista, the capital of Kalmykia, Kalder visits the International City of Chess, built in the middle of nowhere by a corrupt head of state who declared his country an offshore zone for Russian businessmen and then transferred his ill-gotten gains to a bank in Geneva, the home city of the impoverished International Chess Federation. Kalder also discovered that Izhevsk, the capital of Udmurtia, is the home town of Mikhail Kalashnikov, the inventor of the legendary AK-47 rifle; he and his family enjoy the status of local gods. But these anecdotes are exceptions in the lives of crushing boredom of the inhabitants of myriad, similar concrete apartment blocks in the polluted suburbs of forgotten cities.
Towards the end of this revelatory study, Kalder recognizes that aspects of misery are universal. Is it necessary to travel as far as Russia to discover this? “To me that kind of tourism is based on nostalgia and a belief that there is some kind of essential truth and beauty in the poverty of foreign lands. Shit, I say. There’s as much truth in the graffiti on a Manchester housing estate, or in a dirty shopping centre in Dundee”, Kalder opines. It would take, though, a committed Russian anti-tourist such as Daniel Kalder himself to rediscover the beauty and truth in such exotic locations.
