First Man in Space 50th Anniversary (12 April 1961)

To the rest of the planet, he was a pioneer, a hero of galactic proportions and the ultimate propaganda weapon. But to his family, Yuri Gagarin was a poetic soul with a passion for Pushkin and Saint-Exupéry who wrote his wife a letter telling her not to remain alone in the very likely event that he never returned from the epochal flight he made 50 years ago .

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/sts1/gagarin_anniversary.html