About the product
The story "Planet of Men" by de Saint-Exupéry was written in 1939. The book is a collection of reports, each chapter is a complete, complete narrative. The author dedicated the autobiographical story, written in the first person, to his colleague, pilot Henri Guillaume.
We recommend reading online a summary of “Planet of Humans” chapter by chapter; this will be useful for your reading diary and preparation for a literature lesson.
The material was prepared jointly with a teacher of the highest category, Kuchmina Nadezhda Vladimirovna.
Experience as a teacher of Russian language and literature - 27 years.
First job
From the very first lines it becomes clear that the prototype of the main character is Exupery himself. “Planet of the People” (the summary illustrates this perfectly) describes the life of a pilot who, like the author, began his flying career by working for an airline. Here he was supposed to deliver mail.
The professionals avoided the newcomers, being cold and distant, but sometimes they began to talk about flying. And despite the meager colors and poverty of style, in their stories one could see the fabulous worlds of mountain ranges, where one could easily fall into the trap of failures and whirlwinds. All the young people bowed before these “old men,” and when one of the experienced ones did not return, the reverence only intensified.
The summary of “Planet of Humans” tells about the pilot’s first real task. The main character, in anticipation of the future, felt like a ruler, a person who would be responsible for delivering mail. People next to him talked about their petty worries, illnesses, and money problems. And he felt how they voluntarily imprisoned themselves in the cage of philistinism; they would never know the joys of real life. The pilot finds himself alone with nature itself, he has to fight thunderstorms and winds, risk himself, that is, feel all the joy of human existence.
Summary
Chapter 1. Line
In 1926, the young Exupéry got a job as an “airline pilot”, which established a connection between Toulouse and Dakar. Like many newcomers, he underwent an internship, without which no aspiring pilot would be entrusted with mail.
Experienced pilots were gloomy and withdrawn. With a fair amount of condescension, they told the newcomers amazing stories from their flying practice.
Finally, it was Exupery’s turn to go on an independent flight. He was entrusted with “passengers and African mail,” but on the last night before departure, the young pilot began to be tormented by doubts: whether he would be able to pilot the plane along dangerous air routes. Exupery’s self-doubt in his own abilities quickly dissipated after communicating with his friend Guillaume, who once again studied the upcoming route with him.
Exupery listened to the conversation of his passengers - they “talked about illnesses, about money, and confided boring household chores to each other.” The young man could not understand why people voluntarily imprisoned themselves in this sad prison.
At that time, Exupery had to withstand a serious test in heavy fog. The fuel was rapidly decreasing, and the hope for rescue was fading just as quickly, but at the last moment the pilot managed to land the plane safely.
Chapter 2. Comrades
1
Among Exupery's comrades, the pilot Jean Mermoz, one of the founders of the Casablanca-Dakar airline, especially stood out. He had to experience many difficult moments thanks to his profession: captivity among the Moors, a forced landing on a sheer cliff, dangerous flights over the desert. For twelve years he worked hard, conquering new air routes, until he found his final refuge at the bottom of the ocean.
2
Having thoroughly scouted the road over the Andes, Mermoz “entrusted this section of the route to his comrade Guillaume.” One day, during one of the flights, Guillaume disappeared, and there was no news from him for seven days: most likely, he died in a fall or from extreme cold. His shoes “no longer fit his frostbitten, swollen feet,” but he persistently walked through the snowy desert because he knew that they were waiting for him.
Chapter 3. Airplane
“An airplane is not a goal, it is just a tool,” with the help of which a person was able to fully enjoy the beauty of the planet. Mechanisms brought to perfection allow you to think about lofty things, and not think about “what’s rotating in the motor.”
Chapter 4. The plane and the planet
1–4
The invention of the airplane gave humanity a chance to see the “true face of the Earth,” get rid of age-old misconceptions and boldly face the truth.
Our Earth is a wandering planet, and thanks to the airplane we can learn something new about its past. Volcanic eruptions frozen in stone, sands with a thousand-year history, but “among the eternal strata of dead matter, human thought” is the most important miracle.
Chapter 5. Oasis
Another wonderful thing about the airplane is that “it instantly transports you into the heart of the unknown.” Once Exupery made a forced stop in Argentina, in the middle of a field. He was sheltered by a married couple who were raising two daughters. The girls grew up as savages and were more like fairies who lived in complete harmony with the surrounding nature. Their hearts are a real “wild garden”, although people prefer “clipped lawns”. What happened to them now, how do they live?
Chapter 6. In the desert
1–4
In the desert you won’t find such “oases: gardens, young girls - it’s just a fairy tale!” During three years of flights over the Sahara, Exupery tasted loneliness. It seemed to him that among the stones and sand not only his youth was extinguishing, but “there, in the distance, the whole world was growing old.”
The Sahara became even more hostile with the rise of the rebels. When one day Exupéry, Guillaume and Riegel suffered an accident near a military post in Mauritania, the old sergeant began to cry when he met them. The pilots turned out to be dear guests, with whom the old warrior was able to speak his native language for the first time in six months.
In the Sahara, the pilots “faced unruly tribes,” whose representatives they tried to tame at least a little. Sometimes the pilots “took some influential leader into the air and showed him the world from the plane.”
5–7
Exupery knew many black slaves who served their Moorish masters. One of them made a particularly strong impression on Exupery, and with the help of his friends from France, he managed to ransom him and give him freedom.
Chapter 7. In the heart of the desert
1–3
Once Exupery managed to look into the very heart of the desert. In 1935, he flew to Indochina, but got stuck “in the sand, like in tar, and waited for death.” Together with his assistant, mechanic Prevost, Exupery was flying over the silent night desert when the plane unexpectedly crashed.
It was only by miracle that the comrades managed to survive, but they had no idea where they were, and they had less than a liter of water left. They can be found “in a week at best, and that’s already too late.”
4–7
As morning approached, Exupéry and Prevost decided to “move straight east, contrary to all logic.” They had already walked for five hours, but the landscape around them had not changed. It was decided to return to the plane. By that time they had already run out of water.
At dawn, the comrades “used a rag to collect some dew mixed with paint and oil from the surviving wing” and drank. The day before they had placed snares near the holes, but they were empty. Exupery decided to go on reconnaissance alone. His thirsty consciousness showed him mirages one after another. At night, when Prevost lit a fire, Exupery returned to the crashed plane.
The comrades set off again, and soon salvation awaited them in the person of a Bedouin.
Chapter 8. People
1–2
It seemed to Exupery that in the desert he was on the verge of death. But it was then, “having abandoned all hope,” that he found peace of mind and inner freedom.
Exupery remembered how he once visited the front near Madrid as a journalist. He met a sergeant who, in civilian life, was a humble accountant. He volunteered to go to war and in battle, standing shoulder to shoulder with his comrades, he felt like a man who had found the purpose of his life.
3–4
Exupery also recalled his railway journey, when in third-class carriages he saw “hundreds of Polish workers” returning to their homeland. “The whole people, immersed in a heavy sleep, returned to bitter poverty,” having lost their human appearance. And in the midst of this shapeless mass, more like lumps of clay, Exupery saw a sleeping baby. He was “just like the little prince from a fairy tale.” This little Mozart could live up to great expectations, but he, like hundreds of other children, was doomed to go through the merciless stamping press and turn into an ordinary adult enjoying the "vile music of low-grade taverns" ...
Tales of the Sahara
The next chapter in the writer’s work is called “In the Desert.” It begins with a story about the feeling of loneliness in the Sahara, where you will not find any farmhouses or beautiful girls.
One day the author and his crew had an accident in the Sahara near Fort Nouakchott . The sergeant of the fort cordially received them - he was very happy to see the French. All his soldiers were Senegalese; only once every six months did the French deliver supplies to him. The sergeant was glad of any opportunity to talk with his compatriots.
Another story is about Fort Etienne, located in the heart of the desert. The captain of the fort misses France so much that they sent him three boxes of soil, on which he built a small garden, carefully protected from the hot desert wind. When preparing to fly, Exupery predicted the approach of a hurricane before dawn due to the appearance of two dragonflies near his room, which flew to Port-Etienne to hide from the approaching storm.
Exupery talks about the Moorish nomads from unconquered tribes living in the Sahara. Sometimes pilots took influential leaders on board the plane to show them the Earth from the air. The three leaders were even taken to France, after which these Arabs decided that they had entered the paradise promised to them in the Koran. For the leaders from the desert, a real miracle was the waterfall they saw in Savoy - they could not believe their eyes that the water, which is worth its weight in gold in the Sahara, has been pouring in a continuous stream for thousands of years.
The next story tells of the French captain Bonnafou, who brings fear to all the Moors in the desert. They fear and respect him, everyone dreams of fighting this worthy opponent. The author understands that the Moors will miss such a strong rival when Bonnafou returns to France .
The author tells how, at the Cap Jubi fort, he ransomed a black slave named Mohammed ben Lausin from the Moors - it was this man who attracted the attention of Exupery, because, unlike other slaves, he did not give up and maintained human dignity, hoping that the French would help him to gain freedom.
The chapter “In the Heart of the Desert” tells how, after a difficult flight over the Mediterranean Sea in the rain, Exupery witnesses an accident at the Tunis airport - two cars collided. He had a bad feeling, and it did not let the pilot down - that night he went off course, heading to Cairo, and crashed in the desert.
Exupery and the mechanic Prevost had only a liter of water left between them. They used a rag to collect morning dew from the plane's body in order to survive. At night we spread parachute fabric on the sand to collect some dew and tried to hunt sand foxes, but in vain. They lit fires at night to signal search aircraft.
The pilot decided to trust his intuition and go east through the desert, contrary to logical reasoning. Later it turned out that it was this decision that saved their lives. For two days, Exupéry and Prevost walked through the desert with almost no water. The heat caused them to hallucinate. Already on the verge of death, the French met a caravan, a Bedouin saved their lives.
Arabs
The author talks not only about sky and pilots in the novel “Planet of People”. The chapter summaries provide an excellent description of the desert inhabitants.
Many Arabs have had the opportunity to visit France. Most of all, the Bedouins were struck by the generosity of the local god, who sent rain so abundantly to his followers. For some, this even became a reason to doubt the truth of their own faith and a reason to submit to the French. But not everyone agreed with this state of affairs; there were those who were ready to do anything to return the lost greatness to their people. Former warriors who became shepherds could not forget about the battles they won. The author once talked with such an Arab. He realized that the barbarian was not defending his wealth or freedom, but the world that he had created for himself.
The Bedouins revered the French captain Bonnafous, who carried out constant raids on them. The Arabs believed that there was no greater joy than having the opportunity to kill such a valiant enemy in battle. When the captain left the Sahara, it seemed to be empty. However, the Arabs believe that he will return. Then their eternal confrontation will continue.
The author pays a lot of attention to the description of the life of the Arabs, which is confirmed by the summary of “Planet of People”. The work tells about the morals and laws of these people. Slavery was common among them. All slaves had the same name - Bark. And only those who could earn the respect of the Arabs were given names.
