A Russian odyssey

Daniel Kalder is a sort of mad men&rsquos Marco Polo chancing upon a serendipitous wealth of weirdos during his year-long Russian alternative-odyssey. This strictly uncharted path is paved with sloshing subterranean sewage, and lorded over by a crowbar-waving &lsquoKing of the Underground&rsquo. This path echoes with the barks and growls of teenaged girls being exorcised, and rings out with the twee poetry of the followers of the Siberian Christ.

Not for Kalder, the romantically doomed glories of imperial Russia or its new oil-and-gas borne czars and their now-legendary taste for luxury. His is the Russia of bomzhi (homeless drunks) rootling through trash, where sad-eyed old ladies sell cabbage pies on street corners, where fast food joints resound with &ldquorancid&rdquo Russian pop music, where you&rsquore likely to find bobbing on the train alongside you a beggar whose handmade board declares I KILL COCKROACHES. This might sound like a hunt for freaks and loons, but Kalder prefers to call it an &ldquoepic metaphysical existential quest&rdquo.

As the journey rolls on, you&rsquore inclined to believe him. Kalder has a strange affinity for the retinue of lonely, maladjusted men he follows into the strange worlds they&rsquove retreated to. He plunges into the Muscovite sewers with their self-professed &ldquolord and living legend&rdquo Vadim, a Russian Ignatius C. Reilly who lives with his fearful mother. He goes on a Ukrainian &ldquoexorcism-musical-beach-holiday&rdquo, with a documentary filmmaker obsessed with demonic possession. He spends a week in a mountaintop commune, watching the Jesus of Siberia dispense &ldquosupernatural orgasms&rdquo and (often dubious) advice on washing-powder use and &ldquoconsanguineous breast-fondling&rdquo to his followers. He tracks down the anti-climatically un-quixotic architect of a 13-storey wooden tower in Arkhangelsk, and is led through a Barnumesque wax museum of horrors in Kreschatyk by a guide with whom he has this surreal exchange

&lsquoZis Cyclops with one eye, penis on head and no cherep.&rsquo &lsquoYou mean skull&rsquo &lsquoCherep skull&rsquo &lsquoYes.&rsquo &lsquoSank you.&rsquo

While Kalder&rsquos dyspeptic doodling sometimes livens up his mission to find &ldquoconquistadors of the useless&rdquo, at times, it does have a leadening effect. For instance, it&rsquos droll to know that Father Grigory &mdash the Ukrainian exorcist priest &mdash has a ringtone featuring a &ldquojingle by a collective of Russian oligarch&rsquos girlfriends who perform in their underwear&rdquo. It is, however, less amusing to hear him bang on about the number of flies wriggling on the flypaper, his lengthy descriptions of livestock and furniture, and his Lord-of-the-Flies-inspired imaginings featuring Father Grigory&rsquos brood of 14 children.