Here’s a brief review of a strange little space odyssey prompted by BBC4’s excellent documentary Cosmonauts: How Russia Won the Space Race, still available at the time of writing on the iPlayer.
Set in the decaying Soviet Union of the 1970s, Victor Pelevin’s novella Omon Ra tells the story of Omon Krivomazov, a young stargazer who seeks to escape the prospect of a life of terrestrial mediocrity by joining the space program. He symbolises those interstellar aspirations by giving himself the secret surname ‘Ra’, alluding to the Egyptian Sun god, part human, part falcon. And his hopes seem to move towards improbably swift realisation when he is fast tracked to join a team of cosmonauts undertaking the first Soviet moon mission.
But dreams swiftly mutate into nightmare when, in the first of one of Pelevin’s many dark twists, the team members, locked in a high-security military base, are told that the space agency doesn’t have the technology to engineer a return journey: this will be a one-way mission, the young pioneers required to sacrifice their life in exchange for the glory of serving the motherland. The space agency can’t afford the technology necessary to automate tasks such as rocket separation and space vehicle course correction, so the cosmonauts will have to execute every stage of the journey manually. Once each pilot has carried out their respective task the segment of the lunar rocket they occupy will disengage, leaving them floating in the void, with no means of returning to Earth.
Omon’s assignment is to drive the mission’s Lunokhod space buggy along a valley on the dark side of the moon to a spot where he will place and activate a radio beacon. He will then shoot himself before his oxygen runs out. The mission will of course be broadcast for propaganda purposes, but the outside world won’t even know the trip was manned: officially, this is an automated flight that will demonstrate conclusively the USSR’s ability to keep up with the Americans.
The story is told with the pitch black humour one might expect from a writer who lived through the last years of the Soviet regime (the book was published in 1992). Its surface intention is to satirise the pretensions of that exhausted, rusting state. But its deeper purpose is to explore our common desire to transcend the bounds of earthly life. The young Omon’s inarticulate ambitions become clear to him on seeing a photo of a spacewalker at a military exhibition:
The glass of his helmet was black, and the only bright spot on it was a triangular highlight, but I knew he could see me. He could have been dead for centuries. His arms were stretched out confidently towards the stars, and his legs were so obviously not in need of any support that I realised once and for ever that only weightlessness could give man genuine freedom… I realised that peace and freedom were unattainable on earth, my spirit aspired aloft, and everything that my chosen path required ceased to conflict with my conscience, because my conscience was calling me out into space and was not much interested in what was happening on earth.
He remembers that image when he himself is in space – or at least believes himself to be – and finds that he is so encumbered by the physical difficulty of executing the pressing tasks at hand that he no energy or opportunity for philosophical contemplation of a sense of absolute freedom. The limitations of the human condition, it would seem, weigh as much upon us in the starry void as they do on earthly soil.