ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the story of the homeless dog Laika, the first living creature sent into orbit, in a Soviet satellite called Sputnik 2 in 1957. Laika has immediately become a sort of an icon insofar as her story lends itself well to represent the fate of all animals used for scientific experiments: those animals are presented as heroes who almost intentionally sacrifice their lives, as is shown in the Monument of Space Conquerors in Moscow (1964). At first, the chapter proposes a critical assessment of some recent historical accounts that engage in multilateral narratives of the history of the Space Race. In a second step, I move to two Polish poems dealing with Laika’s story: Zbigniew Herbert’s First the Dog (1957), and Adam Włodek’s Epitaph (1968). Both works exhibit the reassuring rhetoric employed by propaganda and stage the dog’s subjectivity. Finally, the chapter compares the two poems to a graphic novel by Nick Abadzis entitled Laika (2007). The poems and the graphic novel succeed in foregrounding Laika’s subjectivity, while simultaneously exposing both the inherent difficulties in representing animals’ minds in their own terms, and the strength of the comforting narratives that aim to set human conscience at rest.
