Center for European Studies

Gender and Cosmic Dreaming in Young People’s Letters to Early Cosmonauts

Roshanna Sylvester, University of Colorado Boulder

Keene-Flint 005

How did young people in the Soviet Union understand and experience the cosmic craze of the early 1960s? What did it mean to them to witness the pioneering space voyages of the first man and woman to orbit planet Earth? How did gender inflect their senses of self and life possibilities? Dr. Roshanna P. Sylvester answers those questions through examination of letters written by children and youth to the early cosmonauts Yuri Gagarin and Valentina Tereshkova.