V. V. Lebedev

DIARY OF A COSMONAUT

When I became acquainted with Lebedev’s diaries, I was astonished: how little we, the people of Earth, know about the life and work of cosmonauts! Yes, it sounds paradoxical: for more than a quarter of a century we have been reporting on the penetration into space, 23 years have passed since Yuri Gagarin’s launch, and there are countless books, films, and articles about the workers of space. But it turns out that a cosmonaut always told about his flight after landing, when the most important thing — his own sensations and experiences — was already in the past, and he either didn’t want to return to them or subsequent events had erased them from memory. Valentin Lebedev, during his record-setting 211-day flight with Anatoly Berezovoy, kept daily notes. For him, the diary became yet another thread connecting the cosmonaut to the Earth, to his home, friends, loved ones, and finally to his past — “life before the flight,” which from up there, in space, looked different.

This diary was not intended for publication. It was kept for himself; it was a conversation with himself, and therefore the diary cannot help but strike the reader with its nakedness of feelings, emotions, sensations — it is a deeply human document. Of course, during the flight or during the launch — and even in those seconds Valentin was making entries! — he did not think about style. The entries suffer from fragmentation, haste, which is not only entirely natural but also turns out to be a clear mark of the author’s spontaneity and candor.

The cosmonaut’s main job is to fully carry out the flight program, and the scientific report, incomparably larger than the personal diary, is today, for specialists, indisputably the chief value. But time will pass, new experiments will appear, space technology will become different, more complex, and only the cosmonaut’s diary will never lose its value. Because the diary tells about a person — about his joys and pains, courage and weakness — about everything that has moved people always and everywhere.

Vladimir GUBAREV,

laureate of the USSR State Prize.