Once in orbit, Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin was transformed overnight from senior lieutenant to major and from third-class pilot to first-class pilot, a Hero of the Soviet Union.
However, the Soviet propaganda machine was organized in such a way that it was not enough to elevate the new hero within his military and diplomatic statuses – through its efforts Gagarin turned into a super-authoritarian, a specialist in all the sciences and arts. Of course, he was often helped by his extensive reading and the multifaceted education he received at trade and flight schools, but he did not always manage to stay within bounds.
For example, Gagarin was periodically tried to be involved in the evaluation of literary works. In his tastes, the first cosmonaut, as we know, was quite traditional: he liked the brightest of classical works and modern patriotic prose, read science fiction. Of course, many writers and poets dreamed of meeting with Yuri Alekseevich at the peak of his popularity, to attract additional public attention to their existence, but not everyone succeeded: only a select few were “brought” to the cosmonaut.
As a result, many years later there are stories about how Gagarin met with the legendary personalities of the era in an unofficial setting. For example, there is information about the cosmonaut’s meeting with Vladimir Semyonovich Vysotsky. The biographer of the great bard, Mark Tsybulsky, wrote about it in his article “Vladimir Vysotsky and Yuri Gagarin” (2007). The story deserves special attention, so let us dwell on it in detail. Once at a concert, Vysotsky said:
“I was in a movie called ‘Dismissal ashore’. When Gagarin and Titov came to the ship [the cruiser Mikhail Kutuzov], they chased everyone away… And I was on the set at the time, and I lived there with the guys in the cabins. All the film crews were kicked out, but they forgot me, because I was also in uniform and dressed like everybody else, they got used to me on the ship. So I was the first of very many civilians who saw my face and talked to Titov and Gagarin”.
Unfortunately, this story is fictional. In “Shore leave” Vysotsky was filmed in July-August 1961, and from the diary of Lieutenant General Kamanin follows that in the Crimea cosmonauts first arrived on September 14, and went to the cruiser on September 21 – at this time Vysotsky was in Leningrad, where the shooting started film “713 asked to land. Probably the bard, surprised by close coincidence of dates (the visit of cosmonauts to Sevastopol was widely covered in the press), invented this story for the sake of red lip service, to amuse his audience – a common trick of people who often give concerts.
Another story about meeting a cosmonaut with an artist was told by Anatoly Grigorievich Utyliev, a colonel of medical service, who worked in the State Research Institute of Aviation and Space Medicine (I quote from an article by Vitaly Golovachev “The first forever”, published in Trud newspaper on March 5, 2004):
“On the morning of the first of January 1964 or 1965, Gagarin came to the apartment of engineer Valery [Nikolayevich] Sergeichik in Zvezdny Gorodok. Everyone was still asleep after a noisy New Year’s Eve night; I got up early out of habit. “You know,” said Yura, “I was given an unusual tape cassette yesterday – some guy sings just terrific. Let’s hear it…” And he played the tape recorder so that the guys (and there were Nikolaev, Khrunov, someone else in the apartment) immediately forgot about the dream. I told Gagarin that I knew the singer – he was Vysotsky, an actor at the Taganka Theater. Yura immediately asked me to introduce him to the actor. The meeting of the two idols took place in May in my apartment in Moscow on Protochny Lane. It was a warm Saturday afternoon. Gagarin arrived from Zvezdnoye with his friends in his black Volga, and Vysotsky with his guitar in the metro. They hugged each other tightly, man-to-man, and, in my opinion, they liked each other immediately. Yura said that Volodya’s songs made a strong impression on him. A lively conversation continued at the table. Toasts were pronounced, of course, but Vysotsky drank only juice – he was “in the zone”. But he sang a lot of songs. Volodya was obviously on fire that day. We stayed up late. We agreed to meet more often. But, in my opinion, Yury and Volodya were not destined to meet again”.
Colonel Utyliev in a personal conversation with Tsybulsky confirmed this meeting and specified the address of the apartment where it took place: 5/20 Smolenskaya Naberezhnaya Street, apartment 25. Moreover, we were able to determine the approximate date – May 1965. Another meeting that took place in April 1966 was described by actor Georgy Epifantsev, Vysotsky’s friend from the Moscow Art Theatre School:
“Vysotsky asked Gagarin: ‘And now, if we have to play cosmonauts, here’s how it is in space, purely human: what to live with, what to breathe with? What is the main feeling in space?” Gagarin answered: “Look, I can tell you, I won’t feel anything, but this is a state secret. You can get in trouble if you divulge it. The main sensation in space, from a purely human point of view, is that it’s scary. There’s this black, black sky, these bright, bright stars in the black sky… And there, in that blackness you have to go there for some reason. Two months later Vysotsky and I were in Tbilisi. We stayed in the same hotel, in different rooms, but we called each other at night, because Vysotsky also worked at night (there was no other time) and wrote. And so, so at six o’clock suddenly he called: “Zhora, run to me! If you only knew what I wrote!” I always answered him stereotypically: “Well, yes, that’s right, I ran! You’re the only one who writes, no one else does!” And he said, “No, you’ll run if you find out what I wrote, what about. I wrote a song about space!” Of course, it was very great joy for friends, for relatives, that Vysotsky began to write about space. And I came to him, and he read the beginning of the song of space wanderers. Look how it’s written with the consciousness of the subject… “You won’t believe me and you just won’t understand…” This song Vysotsky spent a long time later processing, working on it, finalizing it for another few months. But sometimes he wrote very quickly. Especially if the songs were humorous. Here, humor really helped him work, and these songs he wrote easily. The song in question here is “March of the Space Rascals,” which really dates back to 1966. As for the conversation with Gagarin, you can see: he openly joked with the actors, trying to cause them awe: “Here is this black-black sky, here are these bright-bright stars in this black sky…” If only he knew what Vysotsky would turn his joke into!”
It is possible that Gagarin and Vysotsky met many times, but alas, no other more or less reliable evidence has survived. In any case, cosmonautics influenced Vladimir Semyonovich’s work, and he wrote many beautiful poems (including those with a fantastic element) devoted to it. The most emotional, of course, remains the poem “The First Cosmonaut”, first published in the magazine Moscow (1982, No. 1) – unfortunately, after the death of both Gagarin and Vysotsky:
“I was the first to measure life backwards. I will be impartial and truthful: First the skin shot out afterwards And smoked, discharging the pores. I lurched and hushed and isomerized. I thought I was back. To the soullessness of airless barochambers And into the closed loops of centrifuges. Now I am immovable and weighty
And immersed in silence, but in the meantime. The mechs and horns of all the newspaper cousins Blow it up for the ages”.
In Vysotsky’s works, the cosmonaut must have been impressed by people’s patriotism, as opposed to the officialdom of the party, which Gagarin accepted, of course, but grew weary of. The poems and songs of the famous bard added fresh life to the heap of slogans, giving them a meaningful sound, and revealing the continuity of generations in the struggle for a better world order.
Naturally, the Soviet newspapers never reported Gagarin’s acquaintance with Vysotsky: the bard’s work was under a “gentle” ban, just as, for example, the work of Yesenin before him, because it did not fit into the Procrustean bed of ideological guidelines. But the fact of the cosmonaut’s meeting with Mikhail Sholokhov was advertised in every possible way. In June 1967 Yuri Gagarin and the participants of the International Seminar of Young Writers visited the village Vyoshenskaya, where the classic of the Soviet literature lived. The meeting was agreed upon beforehand, the local party management, headed by the First Secretary of the Regional Committee Pyotr Ivanovich Mayatsky, made all the arrangements for the solemn meetings, even patched up potholes in the roads and hung a Japanese air conditioner in Sholokhov’s house.
The writers arrived in Rostov-on-Don on June 11, and two days later they were joined by a cosmonaut. First the guests of the city went for a cruise on the river, then there was a feast with ukha at one of the recreation centers. They spent the night in “Rostov” hotel, and early on June 13, they flew with two Czech Let L-200 Morava and one Il-16 to Vyoshenskaya, near which there was a small airfield in the village of Bazkovskaya. Gagarin asked the pilot of his “Morava” to let him fly and for a few minutes before landing he performed dashing pirouettes in the air, which pretty much scared Sergey Pavlovich Pavlov, the First Secretary of Komsomol Central Committee, who was in the same plane. The meeting with the cosmonaut was to be held in the conference hall of the Vyoshensky District Party Committee. They were greeted with applause, but Sholokhov immediately suggested that we go to the countryside, the summer weather being favorable for this. Gagarin got behind the wheel of the writer’s Gazelle (GAZ-69) and everybody wished to go to Sholokhov’s favorite place – the sandy spit between the villages of Elanskaya and Bukanovskaya. The writer Valeriy Nikolaevich Ganichev, who headed the publishing house “Molodaya Gvardiya” at that time, recollected (I quote from Georgiy Vasilievich Gubanov’s book “Gagarin on the Don”, 2011):
“Yuri Alekseyevich asked to see Vyoshenskaya. He came quietly, thoughtful: he was preparing to speak in the evening in front of the village inhabitants. Mikhail Alexandrovich with jokes, kind words relieved stiffness, unnatural for a cosmonaut. On the shore of the Don, Yura (as we all called him at the time) made a real whirlwind. He started competing in jumps, played volleyball, did handstands. And then, with a cheerful shriek, he threw himself into the river and swam quickly, taking the others with him. However, most soon fell behind confusedly and only a few reached the other shore. On the way back Gagarin swam even faster – we could not do it anymore. “Well, Yura, Cossack,” laughed Sholokhov. – Don’t you push the writers on me here”. When everybody was seated at the tablecloth with refreshments spread right on the grass, literary talk began. There, Gagarin and Sholokhov had a remarkable exchange of opinions, which was recorded by the ubiquitous journalists and later reproduced many times in various sources (I quote from Valery Zharkov’s biographical essay He Called Us All to Space, 1986):
“About what and how to write, Sholokhov pondered aloud, everyone decides for himself, but there is an indispensable condition – one must write the truth. The writer’s first adviser is his conscience; the chief judge is the people.
“And you, Yura, what do you think?” – suddenly he turns to Gagarin. Gagarin smiles, shakes his hands in embarrassment: “I do not feel comfortable, an ordinary reader, professional writers to advise … I confess, I sometimes put off the book with annoyance. I feel that the author sins against the truth: plots are taken from a finger or taken from the ceiling. And this is not a writer’s job, but rather a scribbler. Such a book – it’s like flying without purpose. I am for those books that help people see more, know more, make them stronger and, like a banner in battle, lead the way”. Mikhail Alexandrovich raises his hands: “So much for the average reader”.
The next day the cosmonaut left for the Komsomolsk-on-Amur city festival, and the glade on the banks of the Don, where he met with the writers, is still called “Gagarin’s”.
Yuri Alexeyevich’s effective answer to Sholokhov’s question looks like a sincere wish of a reader who grew up on classics and social realism, and therefore eschews literary experiments. At the same time, Gagarin’s principle, applied in practice, makes it easy to distinguish “literary”, which is not always justified. At the same time, the cosmonaut is very careful in his statement: the fact is that three years before the seminar in Stanitsa Vyoshenskaya, he learned a lesson from the first time. In the spring of 1963 Yuri Gagarin was involved in the political persecution of the poet Yevgeny Aleksandrovich Yevtushenko. He managed to publish an essay in a Western European periodical, “The Premature Autobiography of a Young Man” (1962), in which he laid out his views on the negative aspects of Soviet reality, including the denial of creative freedom. I will quote a small fragment necessary to understand Gagarin’s claims:
“I used to go with my mother and father to demonstrations and asked my father to lift me higher. I wanted to see Stalin. And when, elevated above the crowd in my father’s arms, I waved a red flag, it seemed to me that Stalin also saw me. And I was terribly jealous of those of my age who had the honor of bringing bunches of flowers to Stalin and whom he stroked affectionately on their heads, smiling his famous mustache with his famous smile. To explain Stalin’s cult of personality only through violent imposition is primitive, to say the least. There is no doubt that Stalin had a hypnotic charm. Many Bolsheviks arrested at the time refused to believe that it happened with his knowledge, and sometimes even at his personal direction. They wrote him letters. Some of them, after being tortured, wrote with their blood on the walls of their prison cells, “Long live Stalin. Did the people understand what was really going on? I think the general masses didn’t. They instinctively felt something, but they did not want to believe what their heart was telling them. It would have been too scary. The people preferred not to analyze, but to work. With a heroic tenacity unprecedented in history, they built power plant after power plant, factory after factory. He worked fiercely, drowning out the groans coming from behind the barbed wire of the Siberian concentration camps with the roar of machines, tractors and bulldozers. Still, it was impossible not to think at all. The greatest danger in the history of every nation was looming: the discrepancy between life outside and inside. This was evident to us children as well. We were carefully guarded by our parents from understanding this discrepancy, but by doing so we emphasized it all the more. ‘…’ My mother wanted me to study and study and study. And I studied remarkably poorly. I was incapable of some subjects – physics, for example. By the way, I still can’t understand what electricity is and where it comes from. I always got bad marks in oral Russian. I wrote almost without mistakes, and it seemed to me pointless to memorize grammatical rules if I wrote correctly anyway. Already at school, of course, the differentiation of my generation was only in its incipient form. At my school desk sat little truth-seekers, little heroes, little cynics, and little dogmatists. Even back then I did not like idle cynics, ironically mocking everyone and everything, but I also detested the hard-working quiet people who took everything for granted. By modern standards, the text is not too sharp, but the condemnation by party and literary circles was obviously not so much about the text as about the fact that it was published abroad”.
Yuri Gagarin was persistently asked to speak out, and on April 12, 1963, he published an article in Literaturnaya Rossiya “Word to Writers,” in which there are such lines: “What can be said about Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s autobiography, given by him to a bourgeois weekly? Disgraceful! Unforgivable irresponsibility!”
On May 7, the cosmonaut delivered a speech at the All-Union Meeting of Young Writers in which he nailed Yevtushenko, among other things, for his illiteracy (I quote from a recording of the speech, published in the newspaper Literaturnaya Rossiya on May 10, 1963):
“I don’t understand you, Yevgeny Yevtushenko… You are a writer, a poet, they say, talented. And you published in the foreign press such things about our country and our people that I become ashamed of you. Could it be that the sense of pride and patriotism, without which I can’t imagine poetic inspiration, has left you as soon as you crossed the border of your homeland? And without these feelings, a man becomes poor in spirit, loses himself, and robs his creativity. ‘…’ I am sure: in order to see new things, you have to know a lot. After all, neither for us cosmonauts nor for you, writers, have not yet lost their topicality the words of the old naval commander Admiral Makarov: “The breadth of the horizon is determined by the height of the observer’s eye”. Well said, isn’t it? And what is the height of the observer’s eye? It’s primarily the height of your knowledge, the height of your ideological self-awareness. And here in his unkind memory “Autobiography” Yevgeny Yevtushenko brags that he, he says, never studied electrical engineering and knows nothing about electricity. He found something to brag about! Since when is ignorance elevated to a certain virtue? If we, cosmonauts, need a poetic branch of lilac on the road, then – I am sure – you, writers, cannot do without a large and serious knowledge of modernity, and above all without a deep ideology”.
Later, Yury Alekseevich realized that he went too far in his efforts to please the party leaders, and even apologized to Yevtushenko. Wishing to correct the discomfort, the cosmonaut invited the disgraced poet to speak on April 12, 1964 at a concert in Star City. Yevtushenko himself later recounted how it happened (I quote from his book Wolf Passport, 2015):
“And suddenly Gagarin called me. A year ago, he had read a speech written by someone at the Meeting of Young Writers, which said that it was inappropriate for Yevtushenko to boast in his autobiography about his lack of understanding of the origin of electricity. I was told that one of our oldest physicists, [Peter Leonidovich] Kapitsa, when he met Gagarin at a scientific conference, said to him with a sly look in his eyes:
“Yuri Alekseyevich, you would share with mankind your discovery of the origin of electricity. And I’ve been struggling with this problem for so many years and not a whimper… By the way, you scolded Yevtushenko not too timely…
Gagarin asked me not to be offended and invited me to perform in Star City on April 12 [1964], the Day of Cosmonautics. Gagarin wanted to help me – after all, the concert was broadcast all over the country. I was very nervous and went back and forth backstage, repeating lines from the chapter “The ABC of the Revolution” that I was about to read. This glimpse of me backstage was noticed by General [Nikolai Romanovich] Mironov, who held a big post in the army and in the Central Committee.
“Who invited Yevtushenko?” – he asked Gagarin. “I”. “By what right?” – The general growled. “As commander of the cosmonaut squadron”. “You’re the boss in space, not on the ground,” the general put him in his place.
The general went to the announcer, the famous announcer Yuri [Borisovich] Levitan, whose thunderous voice announced the capture of cities in the Great Patriotic War, showed him his red booklet and demanded that I be excluded from the concert. Levitan gave in and muttered to me inaudibly that my performance was canceled. Feeling deeply insulted, I rushed out of the Star City Club, got behind the wheel, and drove my tattered Moskvich through the pouring rain, almost unable to see anything because of the rain and my own tears. It’s a miracle he didn’t crash. Gagarin rushed after me, but didn’t make it in time. “Find him, find him anywhere…” – he said to the two young cosmonauts. They found me in the “anteroom” of the CDL [Central House of Writers], where I was drinking vodka with glasses, convulsively clutching unread typewritten sheets… The plane with the Soviet government delegation, which included General Mironov, crashed a month later [actually in October] on the Yugoslav Mount Avala, and I never saw Gagarin again and deeply felt his tragic death”.
By virtue of his status, Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin was obliged to participate in social and political activities, but was not always willing to do so, especially when it came to demonstrative struggle with specific people. And it was not a matter of softness of character (after all, Gagarin became the first cosmonaut largely due to his strong-willed qualities), but a subtle intuitive understanding that he personally could not point out others to be wrong if he did not know for sure whether they were wrong or not. No doubt his endless respect for education, which entitles him to much, including independence of judgment, played a role here.
Remaining a party man, Gagarin gave up the career of a politician (and literary critic) to pursue the main business of his life – astronautics. And here he achieved considerable success, which was not limited to a single orbital flight.
