“I wonder if anyone who sees a photograph of the moon-walker in the newspapers will imagine that inside this steel saucepan, which exists for the sole purpose of crawling seventy kilometres across the moon and then halting for eternity, there is a human being gazing out through two glass lenses? But what does it matter?” (p. 69)
Omon Ra by Russian author, Victor Pelevin is a dark science fiction novel about a young Russian who wants to be a cosmonaut and discovers that the Russian space program is a sham and that supposedly automated moon exploration robots actually have young men like him in them (who never come back.) And there’s more. I’m not sure if it is science fiction or surreal anti-science fiction.
I found the full text of a different translation into English at Lib.ru, see Victor Pelevin. Omon Ra. There is a menu which lets you get a text file version.
Here is a quote,
My youthful dreams of the future were born from the gentle sadness of these evenings, far removed from the rest of life, when you lie in the grass beside the remains of someone else’s campfire, with your bicycle beside you, watching the purple stripes left in the western sky by the sun that has just set, and you can see the first starts in the east. (p. 122)
Victor Pelevin Omon Ra New York: New Directions, 1994. Translated by Andrew Bromfield. Thanks to Alexandre Sevigny for recommending this book.