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Book Details
Abstract
Picturing the Cosmos elucidates the complex relationship between visual propaganda and censorship in the Soviet Union in the Cold War period, focusing on the 1950s and 1960s. Drawing from a comprehensive corpus of rarely seen photographs and other visual phenomena narrating the Soviet Union’s 1957 victory in the ‘Race for Space’, the author illustrates the media’s role in cementing the way for Communism whilst retaining top-secret information. Each photo is examined as a deliberate, functioning part of a specific political, ideological and historical situation that helped to anchor the otherwise abstract political and intellectual concepts of the future and modernization.
Iina Kohonen is a researcher specializing in space-related visual propaganda and photojournalism in the Soviet Union.
Table of Contents
| Section Title | Page | Action | Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cover | Cover | ||
| Half Title | 1 | ||
| Title | 3 | ||
| Contents | 4 | ||
| Foreword | 7 | ||
| Acknowledgments | 11 | ||
| 1: Introduction | 15 | ||
| “The Current Generation of Soviet People Will Live Under Communism” | 17 | ||
| Secrecy and Spotlight | 19 | ||
| Material Used in the Book | 20 | ||
| The Structure of the Book | 24 | ||
| 2: A Slash Across the Heavens | 27 | ||
| Racing into Space | 29 | ||
| To Conquer – or to Explore? | 31 | ||
| The System of Secrecy | 33 | ||
| Scouts of the Heavenly Depths | 39 | ||
| To the Moon and Around | 44 | ||
| A Map of the Moon | 49 | ||
| 3: Travelers in the Void | 57 | ||
| The Gaze of Apollo | 58 | ||
| Cosmic Landscapes | 61 | ||
| Alexei Leonov, an Artist on a Journey | 64 | ||
| Horror Vacui: On Infinity and Congestion | 70 | ||
| Photograph Versus Painting | 73 | ||
| 4: Story of the Heroic Conquest of Space | 77 | ||
| Cosmonauts and the Regime of Secrecy | 80 | ||
| Visual Narratives of Space Heroes | 83 | ||
| The Hero’s Homecoming | 86 | ||
| The Tomb | 89 | ||
| The Jubilant Crowd | 92 | ||
| A Call from the Secretary General | 96 | ||
| 5: A Completely Ordinary Hero | 101 | ||
| Devil in the Detail? | 102 | ||
| The Hero as an Everyman | 106 | ||
| 6: The Housebroken Hero | 111 | ||
| Mothers and Sons | 113 | ||
| A Modern Space Heroine — and a Cosmic Love Story | 115 | ||
| Fathers and Husbands | 117 | ||
| Modern Homes for Ideal Citizens | 120 | ||
| 7: The Tormented Hero | 129 | ||
| Hero on the Threshold | 132 | ||
| Man — Machine | 135 | ||
| The Death of the Hero | 143 | ||
| 8: Conclusions | 149 | ||
| The Tamed Infinity | 150 | ||
| Cosmonauts as Examples of the Good Life | 152 | ||
| Imagery as a Modern Space Narrative | 154 | ||
| The Last Journeying Men | 158 | ||
| The Descended Hero | 161 | ||
| Endnotes | 165 | ||
| Sources and Literature | 175 | ||
| List of Figures | 200 | ||
| Copyright | 206 | ||
| Back Cover | Back Cover |