Yes! There are several early explorations of space travel that crystallize in the belle epoque, but certainly since the fifteenth century (along with a nod to classical authors) there has been interest in space. Orlando Furioso, for example, features a trip to the moon, and Johannes Kepler writes a novel entitled Somnium, posthumously published in 1634, that allegorically explores Copernican doctrine. This is closely followed by Francis Godwin's The Man in the Moon. Voltaire writes a novel titled Micromegas, and by the mid-19th century Edgar Allan Poe writes the apocalyptic short story "The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion" and Jules Verne publishes From the Earth to the Moon. H.G. Well's War of the Worlds is published in 1898, and marks a highpoint of extraterrestrial science fiction.

Alexander Bogdanov's 1908 Red Star is one of the more serious examples of Russian extraterrestrial utopian fiction. In the Ocean of Stars and Dreams of Earth and Skies are other early examinations more directly related to spaceflight. Alexei Tolstoy's Aelita is published in 1923 (and followed by an excellent film of the same name) alongside a wide variety of aspirational science fiction on immortality and utopia. Asif Siddiqi's The Red Rockets' Glare: Spaceflight and the Soviet Imagination, 1857-1957 is an excellent, thorough exploration of pre-Space Race aspirations for space travel.

At the same time an eclectic, transhumanist philosophy emerged in the 1880s known as cosmism with Nikolai Fyodorov, Vladimir Vernadsky (who proposed something akin to the Anthropocene), and the engineer Nikolai Kibalchich. See Young for a discussion on what cosmism is and how it relates to (among other things) spaceflight.

Konstantin Tsiolkovsky wrote extensively on rocketry, along with Kibalchich, beginning in the 1890s, but his vision remained unfulfilled in his life time at least partly due to the Great Purge. Vadim Birstein's The Perversion of Knowledge is an excellent examination of the Soviet scientific system, while Nikolai Krementsov provides an accessible, broad examination centered more on genetics in Stalinist Science and Alexei Kojevnikov has several works exploring the same topic; there are several parallel narratives you can construct here.

However, WWII did improve the technical capabilities of the Soviet Union, and immediately succeeding the war many hundreds of German scientists were recruited, or 'imported,' into the USSR. In 1957, Sputnik 1 was launched, marking the start of the Space Race.

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Recommended Reading:

Bogdanov, Alexander. Red star: The first Bolshevik utopia. Indiana University Press, 1984.

Kojevnikov, Alexei. "The phenomenon of Soviet science." Osiris 23, no. 1 (2008): 115-135.

Mieczkowski, Yanek. Eisenhower's Sputnik moment: The race for space and world prestige. Cornell University Press, 2013.

Lytkin, Vladimir, Ben Finney, and Liudmila Alepko. "Tsiolkovsky-Russian cosmism and extraterrestrial intelligence." Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society 36 (1995): 369.

Young, George M. The Russian cosmists: The esoteric futurism of Nikolai Fedorov and his followers. Oxford University Press, 2012.