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Orhan Pamuk:
This is one of those boxes in which I focus on a simile.
When telling me about his heartache, Kemal sometimes said he felt as lonely as an astronaut dog sent into outer space. In 1957, in the midst of the Cold War, the Soviet Union put a dog named Laika, pictured here, onto the spacecraft Sputnik 2, sending it to space – and of course to its death – purely for propaganda purposes. For people like Kemal – upper class men with certain metaphysical obsessions like death, the meaning of life, and eternity, and with a tendency to fall head over heels in love – Laika is a reminder of their fear of loneliness.