Have you heard of Tatarstan, Kalmykia, Mari El or Udmurtia? Daniel Kalder bets you haven’t. In his travelogue, Lost Cosmonaut, he journeys to all four of these small republics in the wasteland of Southwestern Russia in search of nothingness. For Kalder (and for the reader), these locations’ complete and total lack of anything of interest makes them bizarrely fascinating travel destinations.
For the first dozen or so pages of Lost Cosmonaut, I found Kalder to be an annoyingly central narrator, but once he gets into the book, his tone becomes less forced and show-offy, and the rest of this travel narrative is as witty and informative as it is bizarre. Russia is one of the few countries that hard-core travelers will dissuade you from exploring – “Seriously,” they’ll promise. “See Moscow and St. Petersburg, but that’s it.” – and as such, I’ve always been curious about it. Thanks to Kalder, I now know that out there in all the bleak vastness, there are indeed some oddities scattered about: embalmed babies, a “city” built entirely for chess, mail-order bride warehouses, pagan rituals, and earnest community theater.
