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Mother Russia through a mental flashlight

STRANGE TELESCOPES:
Following the Apocalypse from Moscow to Siberia
By Daniel Kalder
401 pp. Overlook Press $26.95

Reviewed by Gary Presley

Strange Telescopes actually began with the idea for a magazine article, according to its author, but then serendipitously he began to stumble across off-beat icons illustrating aspects of his beloved Russia and learned enough to fill a book. The book, in the hands of someone who knows only a little about the land, reads as a social study in the form of four odd characters, an examination of a society fractured and repaired by the incoherent teamwork of democrats, demagogues, and the decadently rich.

Kalder, a Scot, was a long-time resident of Russia, and the impetus for this book came about when he became fascinated with legends surfacing from Moscow’s underground. Secret subways for the elite, cities of bomzhi (homeless people, mainly men), and ...

... other teams of dissenters, of idealists, of utopianists, of shamans, of ufologists, alchemists, lycanthropes, oneirocritics, paraphysicians, heresiarchs, rhabdomancers, and parorexians were lifting manhole covers and descending into the realm of phantasmagoria, of shadows, of pure imagination, heading down, not up, for their glimpse of transcendence.

While that sounds much like an answer to an essay question on Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Kalder hasn’t tripped so far on the magic bus that he doesn’t recognize that the supposed Moscow maven of the underground, one Vadim Mikhailov, the so-called leader of the “Diggers,” may not be operating with fully charged batteries for his mental flashlight.

It’s is at this point in the book that a reader begins to suspect Kalder is after more than a peek into Moscow’s underground. While negotiating with Vadim, he meets Edward, a Russian with a plummy English accent, who intends to make a film on exorcisms.

Once Vadim fails to produce, after much delay and several dollars of magazine advance expense money later, Kalder is off with Edward to seek Ukrainian exorcists, where his writing segues from psychedelic to a more straightforward narrative. Kalder meets an Eastern Orthodox priest, a man with fourteen children and a pet pig. There’s much mud involved, both in the Ukraine and, at least for me, in the focus of the writing through this segment, although the character sketches of the priest and his family are intriguing.

Strange Telescopes next finds Kalder seeking Jesus of Siberia, a quest inspired by a half-hearted reference in a Russian magazine. The Siberian savior is a former traffic policeman named Sergei Torop, who is also known by the name of Vossarion and who claims that “he and Jesus were the same person, although not in any ordinarily understood sense.”

Ensconced upon a mountain top in far away Krasnoyarsk and surrounded by thousands of followers, he preaches a return to the simpler existence of the 18th century. Two gods are involved, plus alien civilizations, and a generous borrowing from Buddhism, Taoism, and, of course, with Jesus mentioned, a measure of Christianity and Islam. Oddly, Hebrew theology is neglected, and instead the people of the First Covenant are referenced only in the form of oblique anti-Semitism.

It is only near this point deep into Telescopes, and before Kalder begins a rumination on Nikolai Sutyagin, “constructor of the Great Wooden Tower of the Arctic Circle” near Arkhangelsk, that the author takes time to fully sketch out the motivation for his quest.

“Er ... modern developments in spiritual life in Russia,” I said.

I did not want to talk about my theories of alternative realities ... I was absolutely certain that these new mutations of the spirit would have been impossible except in the last stages of the USSR. They were thus inextricably connected with the birth and life of post-Soviet Russia.

Much of Strange Telescopes is an intriguing read, a journey through the foggy, snowy hues of the mystique of Mother Russia politely rendered through the lens of Western post-modern ironic perceptions, but it isn’t a straight-forward study of Russia and its people.

After finishing the book, I began to feel as if the four characters are symbolic of the Russian spirit throughout recent history—Vadim the Digger, a dark hidden underground nature during Soviet oppression; Edward the exorcism hunter, a reflection of Gorbachev and Yeltsin; Vossarian the savior, the promise of democracy; and Sutyagin the tower builder, the hubris of capitalism and subsequence corruption.

Telescopes isn’t comedy, nor spiteful, nor patronizing. Think Alastair Cooke in the Appalachians rather than Christopher Hitchens at a camp meeting.

The book incorporates funny moments and scenes, all flavored with an insider’s knowledge of enigmatic Russia, but neither is it a happy Bryson-style travelogue. Truth be told, parts drag. For me, it was the opening. It took far too long to understand Vadim the Digger had no majestic City in the Tubes to reveal. I believed. And I was disappointed. Perhaps here a reader should think that the much-delayed mucking about in sewage is symbolic of Kalder being mired in his own illusions about what Russia was, and is.

I closed the book knowing that Kalder loves Russia, what it was and is, and believes the best guides to its true spirit, both in the metaphysical and emotional sense, are the souls shunted aside by both despots and democrats. In Telescopes, Kalder chronicles but four of them, and I’m left to wonder what we might read were he to offer us a Russia rendered in the fashion of Least Heat Moon’s Blue Highways or Steinbeck’s Travels with Charlie.

Perhaps we will have to wait. Kalder, whose first book, Lost Cosmonaut, was termed a “sensational new travelogue from an anti-tourist,” now resides in Texas.

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Gary Presley resides in Springfield, Missouri, retired after a career spent primarily in insurance customer service. Although he once had a job writing news and advertising copy for a radio station, his original work was published mostly in local newspapers. He only began serious study of the craft after entering and winning a regional essay contest. Since then, his essays have appeared in publications ranging from Salon.com to Notre Dame Magazine to The Ozark Mountaineer. His memoir, Seven Wheelchairs: A Life beyond Polio, was published by the University of Iowa Press in October 2008. You can follow his journey through postings to his blog.

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