ON STRANGENESS
Daniel Kalder is a Scotsman living in Texas, who has spent a lot of time in
Russia. In fact, Russia has become ingrained into his psyche after
spending the best part of 10 years in the country. Kalder is the author of
Strange Telescopes – a book about his encounters with four very
different people over the course of a year.
These four people are not living like you and I. The first is ‘The Digger’
who loves the tunnels beneath Moscow, the second is man trying (badly)
to make a documentary about Russia’s exorcists, the third is a former
traffic policeman who says he is Jesus and lives on a mountain top in
Siberia, and the fourth is a jail-bird businessman who built the world’s
tallest wooden skyscraper. A diverse quartet.
“So Daniel, you seem to have trekked around Russia, the Ukraine and
Siberia to talk to four nutters,” I say.
Daniel laughs, a little defensively, and replies: “I wouldn’t really call them
nutters. The Digger is eccentric but not mad and he had actually been
used by the Government because of his knowledge of the tunnels under
Moscow. The exorcist man follows an unreasonable idea that demons
actually exist, but it appears completely logical to him. The man who
says he’s Jesus has a lot of devotees following him, so you could say he
is successful.”
The Jesus-themed third section of Strange Telescopes, concerning
Vissarion aka Sergei Torop aka the Messiah, is the most intriguing part
of the book. Kalder makes a huge effort to stay away from assuming that
Vissarion is the next David Koresh or Reverend Jim Jones. He refuses to
use the word ‘cult’ and decides “to just play along.” He spends as much
time analyzing the people following Vissarion, many of whom had
achieved much in their previous existence, as the so-called Messiah
himself. Kalder does extremely well to keep a lid on his cynicism when
faced with babbling disciples and obvious contradictions.
“It was probably the most fascinating experience of my life,” said Kalder,
who now lives in Austin and published his debut book, Lost Cosmonaut,
in 2006. “I decided to dismiss all the marginal stuff, and just go and meet
him. It was a long protracted process but it was clear that a lot of people
believed in him. They all just seemed to be in a different reality.
“Of course, there have been hundreds of Jesuses popping up over the
last few years but most of them just fade away. The interesting thing
about Vissarion is that he was successful. He had built a world and you
touch it. His days as a traffic cop were just no longer there for him. That
seemed a bit unreal for his followers too.”
Kalder, who originally hails from Fife in Scotland, moved to Russia after
graduating from university. “I’d lived in the same town for 22 years,” he
said. “I had an English degree and could have been a teacher or a civil
servant but I’d never even been abroad. Russia was opening up at the
time and there were huge possibilities, it was in chaos too.”
The chaos of ‘New Russia’ under Boris Yeltsin appealed greatly to
Kalder, who paid the bills by working as an English tutor and a journalist,
and his encounters with the four figures in Strange Telescopes are highly
chaotic – full of broken promises, missed trains, wasted journeys, and
utter incompetence.
“It’s very intense to be in a place that tests you to the limit,” he said. “I
learnt Russian from a book. It was Yeltsin’s heyday and it was total
nihilism. It was shocking in some ways and almost like living in the middle
of the Weimar Republic. History was being made. It was dynamic, ugly
and beautiful, all at the same time.”
The Digger lives in his mother’s apartment, seemingly content in the
knowledge that he knows more about Moscow’s tunnels than anyone
else. One feels the moviemaker couldn’t organize the proverbial piss-up
in a brewery. The man and his wooden skyscraper is a very sad tale,
especially as no-one is remotely interested in his bizarre tower – a
building constructed for no apparent reason.
Strange Telescopes is no travel book and does not compel anyone to
visit the mountains of Siberia, the tunnels of Moscow, and the churches
of the Ukraine. Many of his descriptions of Russian life are painful even
before he turns the spotlight on the four main figures. Kalder is attracted
by the little details of life and uses his eye for detail to paint a dark
picture of the absurd and the downright bizarre.
Richard Davies, Abebooks.com May 2009