Many of us from childhood remember lines from rhymed stories about various animals. The author of these works, Ivan Andreevich Krylov, is a famous Russian fabulist whose fame about poems has long gone beyond the borders of his homeland. It’s not a secret to anyone that by ridiculing the actions of animals, this author revealed various vices of people, for which he was repeatedly condemned by critics, and the fable “The Mirror and the Monkey” is just such a work. Let's take a closer look at this fascinating story and try to understand its meaning.
Summary of the work
The fable “The Mirror and the Monkey” has a fascinating plot, the action of which begins with the fact that the monkey accidentally notices himself in the mirror and stops his gaze. The poem very accurately describes all the emotions that she experiences at the same time: contempt and disgust, because the monkey does not realize that she is looking at her. Along the way, pushing a bear sitting next to it, the main character of the plot begins to share his thoughts with him about the person who looks at her from a reflection, calling her a mollusk and comparing it with her gum girlfriends, to which the bear did not explain to the monkey that that side is looked at by her own face, but only hinted at this fact, which remained a completely unclear monkey.
“The Mirror and the Monkey” - Krylov’s fable making fun of mean people
A comparison of a man with a monkey is given in this work for a reason. An example of such an animal shows the behavior of vile people who notice the flaws of others, but do not want to see their own flaws. The main moral of the fable “The Mirror and the Monkey” is concentrated in the last lines of the work, and it was there that an exact analogy of a monkey with a man was drawn. Krylov even indicated his name. This poem must have made those people who like to collect gossip excited because they were literally compared with an ordinary monkey, and only a child can not notice such an allegory.
The heavy meaning of poems that is not studied by schoolchildren
The most interesting thing is that in the disclosure of morality, the author indicated a direct situation - bribery, which has been widely used since the days of Krylov. The fable “The Mirror and the Monkey” was written by Ivan Andreevich, as they say, for the sorrow of the day, so it began to be actively discussed by the inhabitants of Russia immediately after publication.
Today, rhyming stories of this author are studied by schoolchildren from 3-5 grades, nevertheless, their hidden meaning is not accessible to every student. That is why teachers prefer to focus on a simpler interpretation of the semantic load, rather than deepen. In his fables, Ivan Krylov surprisingly combined instructive meaning for children and deep morality, which for the most part focused on the power holders: unclean officials and illiterate managers, among whom the author constantly revolved. The fable “Mirror and the Monkey” has become some kind of slap in the face to some of them.