Before we pass into the final room,
there is a haunting picture, Sevastianov Family, painted by Oleg
Vukolov in 1981, of a Cosmonaut and his family.
The Cosmonaut in his spacesuit,
painted in colour, is on the left of the picture; his wife and daughter (a mere
blur) are on the right in black and white. The only colour in this right-hand
two-thirds of the picture is Mars, the red planet, in the background. The
picture brilliantly sums up so many questions about Space travel and human
relations. Cosmonauts make huge sacrifices to go into Space; but often it is
their families back on Earth who pay the greatest emotional price.
And so we enter the last part of
the Cosmonauts Exhibition. If the
exhibits up until now have elicited admiration, amazement and awe at the
achievements of these pioneering men and women who are Cosmonauts, engineers
and scientists, this room calls for a more emotional reaction. For some
visitors, it encapsulates the mystery of Space travel; for others it is a
disappointing end to a wonderful exhibition.
The room is bathed in blue light.
There is cosmic music playing, in contrast to the Soviet songs of the 1960’s
and ‘seventies which were playing in earlier galleries. There is just one exhibit
in the centre of the room, and a quotation from Konstantin Tsiolkovsky on the
wall, on the left as you enter. And on the ceiling there is a bright red
oblong.
The exhibit, in a large glass case,
is a cradle in which lies the figure of
a man; when we draw closer we can see that the figure has the face of Yury
Gagarin. In the body there are round cavities. The cradle and the figure were
sent round the far side of the Moon in 1970, with human tissue in the cavities
to see if radiation on the other side of the Moon would have any effect on the
tissues.
The attention to detail is
fascinating, and says something about the mysterious Russian soul. From the
point of view of the scientific experiment, a box carrying the tissue would
have sufficed; there is no logical reason why the figure had to represent a
human being. But emotionally, putting the tissue in a human figure and then
giving it the face of Gagarin, who had died two years before, demonstrates that
there is still room for human sentiment in the harsh environment of Space
exploration.
Furthermore, the cradle in which
the Gagarin figure sits ties in with the quotation on the wall: it is
Tsiolkovsky’s words from a century ago, when he was first working out the
mathematical possibility of spaceflight:
Earth is the Cradle of Humanity,
but One Cannot Live in a Cradle Forever
Ending the Exhibition with this
quotation brings us back to the beginning. Tsiolkovsky is the Father of Space
travel. He it was who first worked out the possibility of breaking free of the
Earth’s atmosphere and moving out into the Cosmos. The room is blue; does this
represent our own “Blue Planet”? The oblong on the ceiling is bright red; is
this a symbol of Mars, “the Red Planet”, which we contemplated with the
Mars-500 spacesuit and the painting, Sevastianov
Family? Is the oblong a reference to the obelisk which appears at the start
of Stanley Kubrick’s film, 2001: A Space
Odyssey?
Love it or hate it, the final room
in Cosmonauts: Birth of the Space Age
leaves the visitor pondering some of the biggest questions facing mankind; the
vastness of the Universe and perhaps even the very meaning of life itself.
© Stephen Dalziel, May 2019
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