About the Author
Chekhov (1860-1904) was a Russian writer born on 29 January 1860 in Taganrog, Rostov Voiviv. In 1879 he entered the Faculty of Medicine of Moscow Medical University, and after graduating in 1884, he practiced medicine in Zvenigorod and other places, where he had extensive contact with civilians and learned about life, which had a good influence on his literary creation.
His major works include The Victor (1883), Chameleon (1884), Prairie (1888), The Uninteresting Story (1889), Sakhalin Island (1893-1894), In Exile (1892), And the Third Ward (1892). Later, he began to write plays such as "Marriage" (1890), "Fool" (1888), "Proposal" (1888-1889), "An Involuntary Tragic Character" (1889-1890), "Ivanov" (1887-1889), "Cherry Orchard" (1903-1904) and so on.
The Man in the Condom is a short story by the Russian writer Anton Pavlovich Chekhov. In The Man in the Condom, Chekhov portrays a solitary, timid, fearful of change, and wanting to be a pure "law-abiding citizen" of the current system.
Belikov's worldview was one of fear of chaos, of changing everything that existed, but what he did objectively played the role of aiding and abetting the tsarist dictatorship. He controlled everyone, not by means of violence and other means, but by giving everyone a mental repression and making everyone "breathless." It can be said that the autocratic system poisoned his thoughts and hearts, made him afraid of all changes, stubborn and rigid, he was the defender of the tsarist autocracy, but he was even more a victim. Thus it can be said that Belikov became synonymous with those who feared the new, defended the old against change, and hindered the development of society.
Synopsis
Belikov, real life always makes him feel uneasy, makes him afraid, in order to isolate himself from the world, not to be affected by the outside world, he always wants to wrap himself a shell, to create a so-called safe condom for himself: even when he goes out on a sunny day, he always wears a set of shoes, with an umbrella, a umbrella, a pocket watch, a small folding knife that sharpens a pencil, and everything else that can be wrapped up is always in the sleeve, even his face seems to be in the sleeve, because he always hides his face in the erect collar, wearing black glasses. Cotton was stuffed in his ears, and when he sat in the rental carriage, he asked the coachman to immediately prop up the canopy. This is just an outward manifestation of his resistance to fear. On the other hand, everything that is forbidden makes him feel solid and clear in his heart, and he feels suspicious and afraid of everything that is not explicitly forbidden by the government. One of his mantras that hangs on his lips all the time is: "Don't make any trouble." In this not-so-long novel, this sentence appears nine times in different ways, almost like a spell that overwhelms people's breath. What is particularly intolerable is that he always visits every teacher's residence uninvited like a ghost, sits for an hour or two without saying a word, and then disappears like a ghost. Little by little, his fear spread like a cancer, spreading to everyone around him. He had been in the school for 15 years, and the whole school and even the whole city had been controlled by his emotions for 15 years, and no one had wanted to resist and say a word to him for such a long time. The people of the city are afraid of everything: they dare not speak loudly, they dare not send letters, make friends, read, they dare not help the poor, they dare not teach people to read, they dare not eat meat and play cards, they dare not engage in any entertainment activities, and people are curled up in their own sleeves like him.
And the most terrible thing is that gradually, all this has become a habit, a natural thing. Belikov died, a very dramatic death: a new historical teacher came to the school, from Ukraine, and with him his sister Valenka, whose arrival stirred up the dull life of the stagnant pool like a stone. The novel describes her like this: she is like a candied fruit, very lively, very lively, always singing the lyric songs of Little Russia, laughing loudly; she is like a Greek myth of love, the goddess of beauty drilled out of the waves; little Russian women can only cry or laugh, for them there is no mood not to cry or laugh... Such happiness even infected the "man in the set" Belikov, at the instigation of everyone, he even planned to propose to Huarenka, but it was only a plan: the obligations and responsibilities to be borne after marriage frightened him, especially the way of thinking and behavior of the Two Brothers of Valenka, who thought that they were a teacher and rode bicycles through the streets, and with Huarenka's lively temperament, he might cause some trouble in the future. So he went to Valenka's brother and told him that this shouldn't be that shouldn't be, this wasn't right, that wasn't right, and finally he was pushed down the stairs by the neck collar of this fiery brother, and this happened to be seen by Valenka. Belikov was afraid and ashamed, and after a month he died. Belikov died in such a dramatic way. The people at the school and in the city thought that they could enjoy the freedom of liberation, but sadly, this feeling of fear had penetrated into everyone's blood, and the good mood lasted for less than a week, and life returned to its old state, as before, still so depressed and dull.
Creative background
Chekhov lived at the end of the 19th century, a very dark period in Russian history, "at this time, although Russia was still feudal and autocratic in politics, economic and social life had entered capitalist society, and the development of capitalist economy accelerated the demise of feudalism." Under these circumstances, the reactionary rule of the Tsar and the current of the times were struggling to the death, the system of book and periodical censorship was increased, and the secret police were closely watching people's every move. The Tsarist regime did not allow any opposition to it, fearing that the flames of revolution would spread, and therefore increased their control over people's thoughts and actions. Those who opposed tsarist rule or tried to propagate the revolution were severely suppressed, and many progressives and intellectuals were imprisoned, exiled, or executed. In such a suffocating atmosphere, people will maintain a high degree of vigilance in every move. Most people are eager to change the status quo, but because they cannot fight against the arrogance of powerful authoritarian rule, they endure all this and live carefully every day. Chekhov lived in such an environment, on the one hand, he deeply disliked the brutal and reactionary tsarist rule, and on the other hand, he was grieved by the numbness and subordination of the Russian people at that time. He wanted to awaken people's consciousness and did not want to see feudal despotism stifle the good side of people's nature. Thus the exaggerated use of such a character image as Belikov, through this character image, the author magnified the image of people stubbornly conservative, timid, afraid of things, stuck in their own ways.
Biography
Belikov
Belikov is a typical representative of many "people in a suit", a symbol symbol of conformism, fear of the tail, afraid of change: "The man in the suit "Belikov" always wears a set of shoes, an umbrella, and must wear a warm cotton coat" even if the weather is good; he puts everything he carries with him in one "condom" after another; he hides his face "in the collar that stands up"; he "wears black sunglasses, wears a woolen sweater, and covers his ears with cotton"; he rides in a carriage and "must command the coachman to support the canopy". 。 In short, he always wanted to "wrap himself in a shell and make himself a so-called condom so that he could be isolated from the outside world." Not only that, but he also regarded interacting with people as a boring thing, and the school he went to, which was crowded with people, clearly made him full of fear and hatred, and walking with "I" (Bürkin) was obviously a hardship for a person with a lonely temperament. In the absence of physical appearance, Chekhov showed in detail and accurately The state of Belikov's state of mind, i.e., fear. Belikov is a wretched creature with a condom on his hands and minds, a figure of a vitriolous, neurasthenic, extremely nervous and alert man. His so-called "solitude of temperament" is actually "escaping" from the outside world.' Human life must always move forward in order for civilization to progress.
What he was afraid of was such development and progress, so he fled from life, comforted himself with the present and the past, and even sang the praises of Dong Liang, which had never existed, which showed how vain he had become. Chekhov, through the vivid image of the "man in the set", satirizes and lashes out at the belikovs and the like and the reactionary era that gave rise to their deformed personalities.
Kovalenko
Kovalenko was a bold, lively intellectual, and he hated Belikov very much. The teachers and principals of the school were a little afraid of Belikov, but he dared to refute the old system and oppose the new things. He called Belikov a "spider" and a "man who carries out rumors behind his back." He also dared to criticize the education in Russia at that time: "The air here is suffocating, not clean! ...... Your place is not a school, but a door that teaches people to keep to themselves, and there is the putrid smell of the patrol station. He said he would rather go to the countryside to catch lobsters and teach children than stay in this lifeless environment. Obviously he was a man of new ideas and a love of freedom.
Burkin
Burgin appears in the work as the narrator of the story, and he is another type of intellectual figure. He was dissatisfied with reality and longed for freedom. He hated Belikov, but he lacked courage, did not dare to fight against Byrikov, was prone to compromise with the old forces, and lived a condom life with a stubborn voice. These embody the characteristics of the Russian bourgeois intellectuals of the time. Chekhov, while sympathetic to such intellectuals, also criticized their bourgeois philosophy. “...... You endure insults and grievances, you dare not openly say that you are on the side of upright and free people, you yourself are fake, and you laugh slightly, you do this only to mix a mouthful of food, get a warm corner, and be a worthless little official. This conversation by Ivanich, the veterinarian in the work, shows Chekhov's condemnation of intellectuals like Burkin.
Appreciation of works
Theme of the work
The French thinker Pascal said, "Man is just a reed, the most fragile thing in the universe." But man is a reed of thought." Human life is fragile, and anything in the universe can put people to death, but man has become the master of all things, precisely because man has a soul that can think, and man is noble because of his thoughts. Yet when man's mind is locked in a cage and loses the freedom to fly, is man still "man"? And there is no essential difference between Belikov in the novel and his middle school colleagues and the whole city who constantly ridicule and tease him; it is precisely because they are commonly afraid and tolerant that they are "afraid of everything" and "dare not speak loudly, do not dare to write letters, do not dare to make friends, do not dare to read books, do not dare to go to the poor, do not dare to teach people to read and write", Belikov is actually just a person with a vague face, Chekhov described his clothes and objects in detail, such as his shoes, umbrellas, glasses, hats and room decorations. But there is no facial description of Belikov, which is naturally not ignored by the master, but should be where the ingenuity lies, and only his "pale face" appears several times in the text, this pale face, pale life, pale personality of Belikov is not a person, this vitriolic, neurasthenic, extremely nervous and alert image, just like Lu Xun's Ah Q dragging a thin braid is by no means "this one" but "every", is a group. It is these Belikovs that make the town a "desperate backwater, and the breeze can't blow even a little bit."
The emergence of Valenka has made waves in this ditch of desperate backwater, Ukraine is the south of Russia, where the climate is pleasant, always sunny, and the character of the people there is also affected by that geographical environment, bold, happy, lively, this is very clearly reflected in Valenka. There is no doubt that this girl who dares to sing loudly and laugh recklessly is the real outsider in this small town, and the so-called love between Belikov and Valenka is also the only attempt to break the condom in Belikov's life, and it should be the climax of his life. Of course, the purpose of the men who tried every means to match the two of them was obviously not to save Belikov from his sleeve and let him learn to be a man, but to be a spectator and to gain some pleasure in this doomed love. Just as those bored idlers in LuZhen appreciated Xiang Lin's sorrow and were satisfied from there. It is precisely because of such a dark background that there is no bright color in Belikov's love, love is originally beautiful, and in Belikov, he sees only mocking eyes from the side of love, so a small cartoon, for people who are immersed in love, should be just a kind joke, an interesting tidbit, a humorous interlude, but for Belikov, who has been squeezed by life, a small piece of paper is enough to make him uncertain and trembling. In the eyes of those in the small town, he seems to be a ruler, but in fact, as a small person in the sandwich class, he is just a clown who has been wrongly pushed to the foreground, and this clown has seen the audience as the protagonist because of a pinch of white on the tip of his nose. There is no stage or offstage, and every spectator may be that character, and every spectator thinks he is awake, but completely forgets that there is that ridiculous mark on the tip of their nose when they laugh wildly at the clown and throw garbage at the whistle. Here, only the white is the most striking, and here, all the faces are blurred. The real protagonist is hiding behind the scenes, watching the drama he directed with a sinister smile.
The sadness of Belikov is also that he tried his best to hide himself, using layer by layer of condoms, but he did not think that these concealments of his own would instead expose him conspicuously to the people, and when he had been alienated into a condom, the condom seemed to become the white, making him an alien in the eyes of others, squeezed and rejected by the people around him, until he finally went to the grave - an eternal condom.
Belikov walked home in Valenka's laughter and embarked on the road of no return in life, in fact, Valenka's laughter was not the slightest bit hostile, just like a small child who saw something interesting and could not help but laugh. And in Belikov's view, the climax of the comedy that those people had long awaited finally appeared, and soon his embarrassing scene of rolling down the stairs would be completely exposed to the eyes of the people, drowned in endless ridicule, which was exactly what Belikov wanted to escape, and he really had no way to escape. In Kafka's Metamorphosis, Gregor, who was alienated into a beetle, still thinks warmly about everything in the world at the end of his life, he knows that his death is a relief for himself and his family, he still has an endless attachment to his relatives who abandoned him, but the end of Belikov's world is full of fear and despair. All that I had seen before was that Belikov, as a loyal lackey of the Tsar, suppressed the thoughts of the people around him, but ignored that the hostility and sneering of these people around him to Belikov were also the cause of Belikov's death, just as the ridicule of Kong Yiji by the short-clothed gang in Mr. Lu Xun's "Kong Yiji" finally pushed him to the miserable situation of death. Chekhov has a large number of short and medium stories and dramatic works that express the same theme: the historical roots and psychology of the emergence of servility and servility. He recognized that money, office, authority, and power were nothing more than external causes of slavery, and that the real tool of slavery was fear. Fear makes "The Man in the Condom" live a life of no one, and fear makes his colleagues dare to be angry. And the root of fear is the servility and indifference that permeate the bones of man. In the last years of his life, Chekhov wrote in his diary: "There is no place in the world like our Russia, where people are so oppressed by authority, russians who have been degraded by generations of slavery and fear freedom... We have been tortured so badly by slavery and hypocrisy. And the result of fear and fear is that people try their best to protect themselves, putting themselves in the "condom" they think is safe. Like Belikov, he conformed to the rules and tried his best to "make no trouble."
Belikov's final destination is the grave, which should be an eternal "condom" for him, where he can escape from all that he hates and fears in the world, and who can also make the crowds who hate him and think that he dominates their pleasures relax for a while, in fact, when they turn away from the grave in a kind of illusory joy that has finally been freed from the imprisonment, another Of them Berikov has been pushed to the foreground, and the drama has begun again.
The novel raises a thought-provoking question through the portrayal of this "man in the set" Belikov. Belikov was not a noble man in the Palace, he did not have a prominent position and power, but an ordinary secondary school teacher, he was an insignificant figure in life, how could he "rule the whole middle school for fifteen years, but what did the light control of the middle school count?" The whole city suffered from his control..." The people of the whole city lived trembling for ten to fifteen years, afraid of anything. They did not dare to speak loudly, did not dare to write letters, did not dare to make friends, did not dare to read books, did not dare to help the poor, did not dare to teach people to read and write... The article also said that Belikov's death was a very happy thing, but after a week life returned to its old appearance, because "really, although we buried Belikov, there may be many such people in the sleeve, and I don't know how many there will be in the future!" In the author's pen, Belikov is no longer a single person, but "such a person", as a typical example of intellectuals and society, a loyal defender of the old system, the old procedures, the old ideas, and people are afraid of him, but in fact they are overwhelmed by the dark and filthy political air. In Russia at that time, Alexander III practiced a reign of terror, spied on the Russian land, and the wind of whistle-blowing and framing was prevalent, and there were indeed many Belikov-like figures in society. Through the character of Belikov, the work points the sharp edge of criticism directly to the tsarist autocracy of the secret agent agency. Through Belikov, the author paints an ugly picture of social life at that time.
Artistic features
In the structure of the novel "The Man in the Set", the author adopts the structure of the story set story. The main storyline is narrated in the form of memories of the characters in the work. Chekhov described Belikov's actions and contents in concise and vivid language, clearly defined and orderly. The novel begins with the chat of two hunting friends on the night of a month, they were originally talking in the sea and the sky, but they did not know the story of Belikov, which aroused their emotions and deep thoughts. The initial light-hearted tranquility contrasts with the dreary atmosphere of Belikov's story, which then leads to a depiction of a bright and idyllic moon. This is in contrast to the story of Doctor Cove: nature is quiet and beautiful, and real life is so dark and dirty. So on that night, Burkin and Ivan Ivanich both thought about the various condoms of life. The work thus writes that Ivan Ivanitch could no longer sleep, he got up, sat down outside the door, and lit a pipe. Perhaps he thought that he could no longer live like this, and that this ending of the novel was intriguing. The whole novel is naturally structured and ingenious.
Chekhov's creation is basically inclined to critical realism, he is good at revealing typical social themes through ordinary daily life, in order to achieve this goal, he often uses humor as an artistic technique to mock the ugly social reality, forming a style of his creation: humorous irony. The novel "The Man in the Set", this novel adopts a humorous and ironic approach throughout to show Belikov's character. The novel begins with this description of Belikov's portrait and habits: "He is famous because he wears rain boots, an umbrella, and a warm cotton coat even on a clear day." His umbrella was always wrapped in a condom, the watch was wrapped in a gray deerskin condom, and even the small folding knife for sharpening the pencil was in the condom." Write about Belikov's ugliness and say Berikov's "that little face is like the face of a weasel." He also "ruled the entire middle school for fifteen years" and so on. These descriptions are almost exaggerated, but Chekhov used this humorous tone to carve such a despicable means of stalking and informing in order to stifle all new things, so that the whole city was afraid of his villain image and called on people to rise up and change this society.
Works of influence
"The Man in the Sleeve" occupies an important place in Chekhov's creation, and the image of Belikov in the work becomes a typical example of conformism and fear of new things. The novel was excerpted and included in the standard experimental textbook of the new curriculum for high school Chinese language teachers.