A Clockwork Orange book - quotes, plot, translation features

A Clockwork Orange is a cult novel by the English writer Anthony Burgess. The unquenchable popularity and relevance of the book is associated not only with its uniqueness and the problems raised in it, but also with a huge number of quotes living both in other works and in colloquial speech. This article provides citations from A Clockwork Orange.

Plot

The book (from which quotes will be presented below), A Clockwork Orange, was written by Anthony Burgess in 1962. The plot tells about the dystopian world of the future, where impunity and degradation reign, and the only educated people are often hooligans, thugs who can combine a love of reading and classical music with terrible acts - robbery, beatings and violence.

This is exactly how the main character, on behalf of whom the narrative is conducted, is the teenager Alex Delarge, the leader of a gang of hooligans, cruel and reckless. Alex is very well-read and educated, he loves classical music, and especially Beethoven’s symphony, which he calls “the good old Ludwig van”. High intelligence gives Alex a sense of self-superiority over other people, which allows the young man to commit crimes without remorse.

During the development of the plot, Alex ends up in prison, where he is invited to take part in an experiment - with the help of special events he develops a persistent aversion to violence, which is why he not only can not do bad things, but is not able to even defend himself during an attack. In the end, after an accident that saved the young man from “programming consciousness”, he realizes the importance of personal choice and corrects himself of his own free will.

Quote about choice

A Clockwork Orange is rich in various catchphrases - some of them are comical, some are thoughtful and serious. The core of the plot is the phrase that has become the most popular quote from the work:

When a person ceases to make a choice, he ceases to be a person.

She was told to Alex by the prison pastor, trying to dissuade the young man from forced correction. With her novel, Burgess is trying to convey to the reader precisely this truth - the choice, whatever he may be, is always better than coercion. A person who is unable to make a choice turns into a clockwork toy - a kind of “clockwork orange”.

Other quotes

It is a rare, it can be said, pleasure these days to meet a person who reads something.

This is reported by Alex to the man with books under his arm, who became the first victim of his gang in the pages of the novel. Alas - an evil irony, despite the fact that Delarge constantly complains about the lack of intelligent and intelligent people, he brutally attacks one of them with beatings and humiliations.

There is the same life as here - some cut, while others substitute the belly under the knife.

So Delarge answered his friend Theme, who suddenly asked how life on other planets is arranged.

Another famous quote is the cry of Alex’s gang, reporting that it’s time to run away:

Feet-Feet-Feet!

And a few more different quotes from Clockwork Orange.

If you expect the worst from a person, then he will not be able to bring you any disappointments.

A nightmare is, after all, in general, also just a movie that spins in your head, only this is such a movie in which you can enter and become its character.

Not for that, we came to this world to communicate with God.

People are (but rather pretend to be) good, because they like it (or profitably). And others like to be cruel, evil, merciless. In nature, there must also be predators and their victims, otherwise everything in the world will degenerate and die out.

In this scum world, everything counts. It must be borne in mind that always one catches and pulls the other.

Beethoven Quotes

A Clockwork Orange contains many references to the music of Ludwig van Beethoven - as mentioned above, he is a favorite composer of the protagonist.

On the envelope, there’s also a portrait - the gloomy, furiously brow-faced face of Ludwig van himself.

So Alex describes the cover of the long-awaited album with Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. And here is his description of "Odes of Joy" - the last part of the Ninth Symphony.

Here the cello spoke right from under the bed, speaking to the orchestra, and then a human voice came in, male, it called for joy, and then that blissful melody flowed, in which joy sparkled with a divine spark from heaven.

Beethoven later appears to Alex in a dream, accompanying the young man on his first prison night.

Here, like the sun, Ludwig van himself rose up with a thunderer face, with long hair and a waving scarf.

When Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony sounded in the middle of watching films that were part of the forced correction program, Alex was forced to utter words that also became a quote from A Clockwork Orange:

It is a sin to use Ludwig van in this way. He did no harm to anyone. Beethoven just wrote music.

Natsat

One of the main features of the novel is the teenage slang invented by Anthony Burgess, referred to as “natsat” - from the Russian word-formation “eleven”. That is, this language is used by those who are from eleven to nineteen. Shortly before the creation of the novel, Anthony Burgess traveled to Leningrad, where he was struck by the active use of Englishism in the speech of Soviet teenagers - those who at that time were called "punks" and "dudes". Words like "gerla", "shuzy", "khaer" and other similar borrowings inspired the writer to create a reverse version of such slang for his heroes using "Rusisms". Many Russian words (most of them with speech distortions) were contextually inscribed in the Latin alphabet, without any explanation.

The Russian reader was more fortunate than everyone else: if you read the book in the translation of Vladimir Boshniak (namely, in this version all the quotes from this article are presented), the Russian words written in Latin, which he left unchanged in the text, sound completely understandable and very funny . Below is a list of selected words from "natsat" with explanations that have become quotes from "Clockwork Orange" on both sides of the ocean.

• Dratsing - [Dratching] - a fight.
• Gulliver - [gulliver] - the head.
• Korova - [cow] - the name of the dairy bar.
• Baldiozh - [baldezh] - as in Russian slang - baldezh, buzz and the like.
• Ruker - [ruker] - a hand, in the plural sounds like "rukers".
• Kisy - [pussycats] - girls.
• Glazzja - [eyes] - eyes.
• Stari kashka or just kashka - [old porridge] - "old man", an old man.
• Poni - [pony] - understood, in the context: "I immediately all poni."
• Kritsh - [scream] - scream.