Letture del ‘cosmo’ sovietico fra parola e immagine

On the basis of the interpretative suggestions of reading as a cultural field with no prescriptive praxis and of the body as a point of view on the world, the essay offers some indications of the meta-reading of the perspectives on the Soviet space, as they were construed in the last lustrum of that world’slife. At the center of the critical investigation are two texts representing the cosmos, in the dual reading of the infinite cosmos, destination and object of astronautic explorations, and the Soviet cosmos, an ‘alien’, ‘eterotopic’ territory at the same time true and unreal. The first one is Ilya Kabakov’s Chelokev, uletevshii v kosmos iz svoei komnaty, (The Man who Flew into Space from His Apartment, 1985-1988); the second is Viktor Pelevin’s novel Omon Ra (1991-1992). In the overlapping of readings of the events, the questions made by the search of open spaces remain unsolved. When, within a short time, the entire Soviet state construction will collapse, Russian citizens will have to decide along with Omon Ra «where to go», they will find in the absent body of Kabakov’s cosmonaut an opportunity to realize that being able to be what has not been lived yet, is included in a nonknowable present.