Daniel Kalder’s style is to travel to the grimmest places imaginable and attempt to have the worst time possible there, like a kind of Free Presbyterian with a visa. A perverse fancier of the urban dereliction, industrial wasteland and architectural decay of the Russian Federation, Kalder, 32, became hooked on the bleaker side of sightseeing while whimsically accompanying a friend to Tatarstan, one of the federation’s 21 semi-autonomous republics.
Initially merely curious, Kalder quickly found he’d fallen hook, line and sickle for the weary squalor of modern Russia, for a vast, empty land pocked with states nobody has heard of, cities no westerner has ever visited, with cultural and military heroes unheard of in the next province.
“Most travel writing about the Russian Federation is horribly nostalgic,” says Kalder. “It’s only ever interested in the Mongol hordes or the history of the Silk Road. It’s the only part of the world whose contemporary existence is completely ignored.”
The scarred landscape filled with the rusting junk of economic and agrarian stagnation spoke to him in ways he struggled to understand. He moved to Moscow and lived there for 10 years, all the time mystified by his weird passion. “I know people are regularly tortured and murdered for causes I’ve never heard of,” writes Kalder. “The existence of ghost canons and traditions shouldn’t really disturb me. But it does. I shiver when I think about them. They are a mystery, an existential riddle I cannot solve.”
Accounts of four of Kalder’s trips — to Tatarstan and the yet more obscure Kalmykia, Mari El and Udmurtia — make up his literary debut, Lost Cosmonaut, a travel book about places where few could bear visiting. Located on the western fringe of the former empire, the territory Kalder explores is technically part of Europe, but the places he finds are dislocated in time and space, from towns where signs on the lamp posts read We Buy Hair, to New Vasyuki in Kalmykia, a city constructed in honour of the 1998 Chess Olympiad (“The silence of Chess City is something that should be commented on. It is something alien. It is the silence of ice forming in another galaxy”), to the province of Mari El, where the last pagan sect in Europe is believed to live, one that sacrifices rabbits to the gods and, once every five years, a horse.
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“I’m really fascinated by things that nobody cares about, precisely because nobody cares about them,” says Kalder. “It’s a type of pity, I suppose. The travel writer usually tries to fake authenticity and pretend they’re constantly stumbling on beautiful places off the beaten track. I thought it’d be amusing for the writer to go off the track and wish he’d never left it.
“An abandoned factory in Elista might be horrible to look at, but it was once beautiful and romantic to the people who worked there. They would write songs and make films about its capabilities and the role it played in the latest agricultural project. The Russians create their own myths and beauty. It’s more imaginative than our tendency to sigh whenever we see a waterfall.”
To this end, Lost Cosmonaut begins with The Anti-Tourist Manifesto, a cod-Stalinesque 13-point mission statement that outlines the responsibilities of the thinking traveller, including the preference for dead things over living things, a love of bad art, visiting at the wrong time of year and embracing “hunger, hallucinations and shit hotels”.
A cult waiting to happen, it’s a mischievous squib of a book in which nothing happens very quickly and the cast of characters extends to a range of morose Soviets apologising for their homeland, but Kalder’s passion for it all is sincere and infectious, even when visiting Peter the Great’s museum of bottled mutant babies.
Kalder graduated in English literature from Edinburgh University and, after a secretarial spell in the BSE crisis unit established by the Scottish Office during the foot-and-mouth epidemic, ended up as a private tutor to the “psychotic to varying degrees” family of a Muscovite property magnate. Lost Cosmonaut began as several essays sent to publishers on spec. With his agent, Kalder then developed them into the broken, bizarrely comic travelogue that Radio Four will broadcast later this month as its book of the week.
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He has plans for another book, another outlet for his genuine fetish for ugly melancholy. 'I dunno,' he mulls. 'Perhaps if you come from Dunfermline you're just born into it.'"
Lost Cosmonaut by Daniel Kalder is published by Faber and Faber, priced £12.99