Overview

Space is the ultimate canvas for the imagination, and in the 1950s and ’60s, as part of the space race with the United States, the solar system was the blank page upon which the Soviet Union etched a narrative of exploration and conquest. In Picturing the Cosmos, drawing on a comprehensive corpus of rarely seen photographs and other visual phenomena, Iina Kohonen maps the complex relationship between visual propaganda and censorship during the Cold War. Kohonen ably examines each image, elucidating how visual media helped to anchor otherwise abstract political and intellectual concepts of the future and modernization within the Soviet Union. The USSR mapped and named the cosmos, using new media to stake a claim to this new territory and incorporating it into the daily lives of its citizens. Soviet cosmonauts, meanwhile, were depicted as prototypes of the perfect Communist man, representing modernity, good taste, and the aesthetics of the everyday. Across five heavily illustrated chapters, Picturing the Cosmos navigates and critically examines these utopian narratives, highlighting the rhetorical tension between propaganda, censorship, art, and politics.

Full Product Details

9781783207428

Table of Contents

Reviews

The radical political and even metaphysical ambitions of the Soviet space effort generated contentious debates in Soviet visual culture between the 1950s and 80s, as is documented by Iina Kohonen in close and loving detail. --Times Literary Supplement The book examines how visual media served to construct an overarching heroic mythos of the conquering Soviet man, bravely exploring the depths of space, for the glory of the USSR and all mankind, and how that narrative was crafted to emphasize the values that Soviet leaders wanted to instill in their citizenry -- while hiding uncomfortable realities and preventing attitudes at odds with the official line. --Undark This beautifully illustrated book provides compelling insight into the construction of the cosmonauts as idealised heroes of the Soviet Union...and shows the role that cosmic images played in the making of modernity. --LSE Review of Books

The book examines how visual media served to construct an overarching heroic mythos of the conquering Soviet man, bravely exploring the depths of space, for the glory of the USSR and all mankind, and how that narrative was crafted to emphasize the values that Soviet leaders wanted to instill in their citizenry -- while hiding uncomfortable realities and preventing attitudes at odds with the official line. --Undark This beautifully illustrated book provides compelling insight into the construction of the cosmonauts as idealised heroes of the Soviet Union...and shows the role that cosmic images played in the making of modernity. --LSE Review of Books The radical political and even metaphysical ambitions of the Soviet space effort generated contentious debates in Soviet visual culture between the 1950s and 80s, as is documented by Iina Kohonen in close and loving detail. --Times Literary Supplement

'The book examines how visual media served to construct an overarching heroic mythos of the conquering Soviet man, bravely exploring the depths of space, for the glory of the USSR and all mankind, and how that narrative was crafted to emphasize the values that Soviet leaders wanted to instill in their citizenry - while hiding uncomfortable realities and preventing attitudes at odds with the official line.' -- Mark Wolverton, Undark 'Kohonen's Picturing the Cosmos: A Visual History of Early Soviet Space Endeavor uses Socialist Realist artwork as well as archival materials from the illustrated magazine (Ogonyok) to make her arguments. She focuses on the role of cosmic images in the making of propaganda, the construction of modernity, the grounding of political and ideological principles as well as technoutopic imaginaries. However, the bulk of the book - and in my opinion, the most interesting - has to do with how the highly polished media in the Soviet Union constructed idealised heroes out of the cosmonauts.' -- Taylor R. Genovese, LSE Review of Books 'The radical political and even metaphysical ambitions of the Soviet space effort generated contentious debates in Soviet visual culture between the 1950s and 80s, as is documented by Iina Kohonen in close and loving detail.' -- Robert Bird, Literary Times Supplement 'Kohonen situates artistic representations of the Soviet space age in the context of the changing sensibilities of post-Stalinist culture and the aesthetics of Socialist Realism, revealing how these images brought previously unknown and unimagined cosmic vistas into the Soviet imperial project and allowed for a more nuanced and less triumphant articulation of heroism. She shows how the conquest of space was accomplished with the help of photography and cartography, and how new technology provided access to previously inaccessible landscapes. Following Marshall Berman, who located a key contradiction of high modernism in the fact that technology enables and defines progress, but also has the capacity to destroy it, she helps us understand the contradictory dynamics of a history that celebrated the heroic, otherworldly and extraordinary, at the same time it honoured the commonplace, earthbound, and even quotidian.' -- Amy Nelson, The Russian Review

Author Information

Iina Kohonen is a researcher specializing in space-related visual propaganda and photojournalism in the Soviet Union.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available