A man is half of what he is, and half of he wants to be, said Oscar
Wilde. If that is the case, then the Soviet children of the sixties and
seventies were all half-cosmonauts. I know this for sure, since myself, at
the age of seven-eight years I was such a half-cosmonaut. It is strange, but
already then I surmised, that this is all a child's delirium that will pass
with the years. At the same time, I told myself: "I know, everyone wants to
be a cosmonaut. But this is completely different for me! I actually want to
become one, for real! And if this passes for others, please! Not for me!?
I think that many of my peers, dreaming of flying into space,
penetrated the same depths of self-reflection. A few even held the oath - a
few cosmonauts, after all, actually existed. However that may be: at that
time, we all, from young to old, lived with one foot in the cosmos. The
cosmos was everywhere. In school books, on the walls of houses and on the
mosaics in the Moscow metro: a snub-nosed cosmonaut, behind the glass of his
helmet- aquarium, was doing some symbolic work - planting a small green
sprout into a dimple on Mars, or reaching a satellite to the stars. In the
fumes of the cities he was always and everywhere, so he became to some