(Her only child, a daughter, works at the Kremlin with her.) It is natural to wonder whether someone named, say, Kuznetsova-the Russian “Smith”-would have risen as high as Yuri Gagarin’s daughter. Our parents wanted us to follow our own interests.”Įlena worked her way up to become the curator of 18th century English drawings and engravings at Moscow’s Pushkin Museum. “My mother was a doctor, my sister an economist. “Each of us in our family followed a different path,” she says. “This is the role which is given to me by law: that all images of my father and stories of his life I should see.” Fine art, she says, is all that ever attracted her, even as her father was reaching for-and falling from-the heights of space exploration and fame. “There are good sculptures and bad sculptures, good stamps and bad stamps,” she says. Fluent in English, she is the custodian not only of Russia’s royal jewels but also of every Yuri Gagarin statue, every postal tribute, and every published encomium. When Barack and Michelle Obama visited Moscow in 2009, it was Elena who escorted the First Lady through the galleries. It is difficult to imagine a more elegant workplace, or a more elegant woman. Today, she is the director of the Kremlin State Museum, where she is the guardian of imperial robes, royal carriages, and Fabergé eggs. Elena Yurievna Gagarina was two years and two days old when her father lifted off from Baikonur in Kazakhstan, and not quite 10 when he died. She is telling me this in an office above one of the world’s great treasuries, the exhibition halls of the Moscow Kremlin, where czarist-and later, Communist-power presided over centuries of serfdom, socialism, and sacrifice. But his elder daughter seems more comfortable discussing his public persona, calling his flight “one of the main achievements that took place over the last 100 years, not only for this country but for mankind.” I am searching for the father and husband and friend behind the chiseled face on a statue or gleaming idol on a coin. He is one of history’s bravest and most tragic adventurers. It was April 12, 1961, when a dreamy boy born to poverty and flames on the Eastern Front of the Second World War flew weightless for nearly two hours in a capsule called Vostok-“the East.” Barely seven years later, when he was 34 years old, the spacefaring hero with the famous, easy smile was killed in a crash of his own MiG-15UTI jet, his hand still on the joystick when he and his instructor copilot hit the trees. They are his daughters and his widow, his nieces and cousins, his space-going peers, his former rivals, millions of us who knew him only from black-and-white newsreels as the first man in space, and a dwindling few who remember first-hand how far he had to rise to reach the stars. This month the heirs of Yuri Gagarin will celebrate the 50th anniversary of his flight into orbit.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |