Only the Animals

Only the Animals

by

Ceridwen Dovey

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Only the Animals: Plautus: A Memoir of My Years on Earth and Last Days in Space: Soul of Tortoise Summary & Analysis

Summary
Analysis
One spring morning in 1913, the tortoise Plautus wakes from her winter sleep. She decides to run away from her owner, the hermit Oleg, and present herself to the Tolstoy family next door. It takes three months for Plautus to reach the Tolstoys’ steps. Plautus is exhausted and hopes that Leo Tolstoy will want to keep her as a pet. At this point she’s in her early middle age, and her shell is still gorgeous.
Just as the mussels in the previous story could take control of their lives and move across the country, Plautus does much the same thing when she decides to head for the Tolstoys’ house.
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As Plautus waits, she regrets leaving Oleg. He lives in a house nestled in the next-door noble family’s gardens. For 50 years, he’s been their “ornamental hermit.” The family believed he was old when they hired him, but he was only 30. Per his contract, he’s not supposed to wash or cut his hair or nails and can only say one Latin phrase: Vir sapit qui pauca loquitur, or, It is a wise man who speaks little. He’s supposed to walk the grounds when the family has guests, looking melancholy. In return, he gets food and free lodging. Now, 50 years later, the man is still there—and he’s completely insane. The family doesn’t see the irony in their ornamental hermit having become the real thing. They threaten to kick him out often, but he just replies with his Latin phrase.
This Latin phrase suggests that animals—who, in general, don’t speak—are perhaps the wisest beings of all. Indeed, Plautus makes the case in this passage that the noble family that hired Oleg, at least, is far from wise. Rather, they’re willing to possibly take advantage of a young man if it means they can make themselves look better. And it’s worth noting that they do this in part by paying Oleg with food, which is a symbol that reappears throughout the book. Food isn’t just something that people can use to manipulate other animals—they can use it to manipulate people, too.
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In private, Oleg isn’t so wise. He copes with his solitude by reading and talking to Plautus, but his reading is arbitrary. This means that he leaps from interest to interest without internalizing anything. Early on, he becomes obsessed with the Ancient Greeks and Romans. He names Plautus about this time, after the Roman playwright. Oleg builds himself a lyre out of an old tortoise shell he found and pretends he’s Orpheus entrancing the beast (Plautus) with his playing.
Oleg is clearly suffering from his solitude, and Plautus doesn’t seem to be quite enough to keep him company, given that she notes how he is mad and prone to flights of fancy. This might suggest that there’s a limit to how beneficial animals can be to people, at least when people are limited to only having contact with animals.
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Then, Oleg moves on to the argument that Aesop wasn’t Greek at all and was, instead, an Ethiopian slave. His tales, in this system, are adapted from African tales. Oleg puts coal dust on his face and tells Plautus Aesop’s tales about the tortoise. Plautus learns she has a shell because her ancestors didn’t go to Zeus’s wedding supper, so Zeus made the tortoise carry his home on his back forever. Eagles like to drop tortoises from great heights and then eat them because a tortoise long ago asked an eagle to teach him to fly.
The particulars of Aesop’s stories show that he (and other ancient storytellers) was trying to explain why the world is the way it is. He’s trying to figure out how animals came to be the way they are—which is something that, on the whole, Only the Animals does too.
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Oleg enters a Far Eastern phase. He uses the tortoise shell for the Chinese art of divining. Rather than the shell’s cracks telling him the future, though, the shell completely breaks in half. Plautus watches warily, afraid for her life. But lucky for her, Oleg latches onto the ancient Chinese belief that the universe sits on a tortoise’s back. Even better, the Chinese believe that the tortoise is a divine animal. Next, Oleg finds Darwin. He thinks of Plautus as a living fossil and proof of evolution. Tortoises, according to Darwin, evolved a shell to protect themselves and eventually, it fused to the tortoises’ backbones.
When Plautus sees Oleg research multiple philosophies that all somehow reference tortoises, it speaks to how intertwined tortoises have been with people throughout history. Indeed, the belief that the universe rests on a tortoise’s back elevates tortoises to a revered position—that of the creature that makes the universe what it is. Taken alongside the rest of the collection, this suggests that animals make the world what it is.
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Then, a few years before Plautus runs away, Oleg discovers Christianity. He takes everything literally, so he’s disturbed to discover that tortoises are unclean and symbolize ignorance and evil. They move slowly because they carry a huge burden of sin on their backs. Plautus goes to sleep that fall and when she wakes in the spring, Oleg is still reading his Bible. She vows to head for the Tolstoys’.
Different belief systems view tortoises differently. But when Plautus sees Oleg seemingly becoming too interested in Christianity—a faith that, in her understanding, isn’t friendly to tortoises—she shows she has the power to take her fate into her own hands. She can choose to move and find someone who will appreciate her.
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Unfortunately, when Plautus arrives at the Tolstoys’ house, Leo Tolstoy is already dead. Tolstoy’s wife, however, decides to give Plautus to her daughter, Countess Alexandra, who took to her bed to grieve. A servant comes up with a terrarium so Plautus can live in Alexandra’s bedroom, and the maid keeps the terrarium wonderfully clean and warm. Alexandra doesn’t care much about Plautus at first. She spends her days in bed, reading—and the whole first summer that Plautus is there, Alexandra doesn’t wash or brush her hair. It cleans itself every week.
The fact that Alexandra doesn’t care much about Plautus at first shows that just as with people, it can take time for animals and their human caregivers to warm up to each other. Then, Plautus’s insistence that Alexandra’s hair “cleans itself” on a weekly basis harkens back to the dog’s assertion that he knew who Krishna and Arjuna were: vegetarians. Animals might be smarter than they usually get credit for being, but they still have very limited perspectives—Alexandra is, no doubt, washing her hair out of Plautus’s sight weekly (or having a maid wash it for her).
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Rather than being dismayed that she ended up with another hermit, Plautus is fascinated. Alexandra’s “female solitude” is so different from Oleg’s. For the first time, Plautus starts to think of her gender (Oleg believed she was male, and for her own amusement she’d occasionally mount rocks to make him feel better about not having sex himself). It takes a long time, but eventually, Plautus decides that Alexandra’s solitude is “a political solitude.” Oleg suffered from isolation, and Alexandra suffers too. But she suffers differently, and choosing to be alone can be blissful. Alexandra takes no visitors, so many people leave her flowers, believing she’s ill. But she reads voraciously and gives all her energy to her books.
As Plautus observes and thinks about Alexandra’s solitude, she shows that she, as a tortoise, is just as interested in intellectual pursuits as any person might be. However, it’s worth considering that Plautus also thinks of Alexandra and Oleg as both being totally alone—when really, they had her around. This implies that neither the people nor Plautus herself think that she counts as a companion. While the story often aims to show how animals and humans are similar, this passage suggests that animals occupy a very different space than people, where they’re both lesser but have certain privileges (like being able to live with a hermit).
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One day, curious about what Alexandra is so interested in reading, Plautus climbs up onto the bed with her. Alexandra doesn’t jump when she sees Plautus on the bed, and she even laughs when Plautus tries to read the books’ titles. She picks the tortoise up, nestles her in the pillows, and starts to read aloud. Plautus eats what she can of Alexandra’s lunch when it arrives and listens intently. They’re reading Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and through her, Plautus learns why Alexandra chose her period of solitude. Plautus notes that most people aren’t interested in other people’s literary epiphanies, just like people don’t want to hear about each other’s vacations. These days, people feel like authors are speaking to them and them alone. But at the time that Alexandra read with Plautus, everyone shared in books’ magic.
Alexandra no doubt laughs at Plautus trying to read the titles because she believes Plautus can’t read the titles. It may seem humorously person-like for Plautus to do that, rather than like a legitimate attempt to learn. But in the rest of the passage, Plautus makes it clear that she’s just as intelligent as any person.
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Alexandra reads electrifying passages, such as one from Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s speech to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee in 1892. The speech was titled “The Solitude of Self,” and in it, she suggested that women are like Robinson Crusoe on an island. Alexandra isn’t sure what Stanton means, but she decides that it’s impossible to ignore that women are alone. If women can develop their mind’s resources in solitude, they’ll never be alienated from themselves.  Since Alexandra grew up exposed to many different ways of thinking, this is reassuring. Plautus thinks Alexandra withdraws into solitude to test herself.
While before Plautus seemed to suggest that people withdraw into solitude by choice or for money (as with Oleg), here she’s introduced to the idea that every being on the planet is, to some degree, alone. And this is especially true for women at this point in history (around 1913; Tolstoy died in 1910), when women didn’t have the rights that they generally do today.
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However, Alexandra also tells Plautus that Tolstoy had gone back and forth between engaging and detaching from other people. Before his death, he’d renounced all his possessions, including his literary copyrights, and Alexandra had helped him leave home secretly. She had no idea he’d die of pneumonia days later. Even worse, Alexandra now keeps her father’s archive, since her mother made sure that Tolstoy couldn’t give up his copyright. This left Alexandra with a dilemma. Her father had wanted to abandon the world, and so Alexandra chose the only kind of solitude she could, as a woman: she pretends to be sick so she can be alone. When her mother knocks on the door, Alexandra mutters to herself that she has to run away.
Plautus touches again on the fact that women in 1913 didn’t have much power—here, for instance, pretending to be sick was the only way Alexandra could conceivably be alone. In this way, Plautus aligns women in this time period with animals more broadly, given that they don’t always have agency over their own lives. But again, Plautus’s ability to choose to leave Oleg and come live with the Tolstoys, for instance, suggests that animals at least have more power than Plautus might think.
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Fall approaches. Plautus feels herself slowing down and one day, Alexandra puts Plautus in her hibernation box. The tortoise burrows down and falls asleep until March. At that point, Plautus returns to Alexandra’s room. Alexandra cleans Plautus’s body and clips her claws, but something is wrong. Her hair is clean and braided, and now she smells of soaps and perfumes. She also no longer spends her days in bed and instead, goes outside and reads letters. Plautus confirms that Alexandra is done hibernating when the maid takes Plautus outside to join Alexandra at a party. Plautus watches Alexandra eat through cakes next to a smitten young man. Later, Plautus learns that this young man helped Alexandra remember Tolstoy’s commitment to helping needy people—and reminded her that her solitude must lead to engagement.
It’s difficult to detect any betrayal or upset in Plautus’s tone. She seems to accept that, as an animal, she can’t always make people do the things she wants them to do. However, Alexandra also models good animal care when, despite her transformation, she still attends to Plautus’s needs and makes a point to care for her. Plautus depends on Alexandra for her livelihood, and so Alexandra demonstrates here how to properly care for a pet as one’s own life changes.
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There’s a war going on, and Alexandra knows she needs to emulate Tolstoy’s devotion to nonviolence, social reform, and service. By the end of the summer, Alexandra elopes with her lover. She works in hospitals when he’s sent to the front and leaves Plautus to live comfortably in the Tolstoy home for the next decade. Plautus passes the years happily until 1929, when she wakes in horrible pain. She’s in a box addressed to Virginia Woolf in England.
This passage spans several conflicts; Russia joined World War I in 1914, which is presumably when Alexandra is working as a nurse. Then, Plautus seems to live quietly through Josef Stalin’s rise until 1929, as Stalin began to amass power and take control of the then Soviet Union. She, like many animals, couldn’t escape being affected by conflict.
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Virginia Woolf knows Plautus is in pain the moment she opens the box. She bathes Plautus in warm salt baths and feeds her fresh food. Virginia understands that a tortoise’s shell is alive and sensitive, so she’s horrified that someone carved words in Plautus’s shell. In the box with Plautus, Virginia finds a copy of one of Tolstoy’s short stories in Russian. When a friend translates it, it turns out to be Alexandra’s prison diary—she’d been imprisoned during the Russian Revolution and asked her husband to smuggle her diary out of the country. Under Plautus’s infected shell is a note from Alexandra to Virginia, begging Virginia to care for Plautus and the diary and complimenting Virginia’s writing.
Virginia Woolf was one of the most influential writers of the 20th century; it seems fitting that after trying to become Leo Tolstoy’s pet, Plautus finally ends up with a famous writer as her owner. This passage draws another parallel between animals and humans, suggesting that they both suffer in wartime. Plautus may survive her infected shell thanks to Woolf’s careful care, but so many men who suffered injuries during these conflicts died due to infection.
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Alexandra’s husband had no idea the carving would hurt; he thought carving Tolstoy’s words into Plautus’s shell would give Plautus notoriety and ensure her survival. In a way, he was right—Virginia adores Plautus and soon, all her friends stop by to meet Plautus and reads Tolstoy’s last words: I love many things, I love all people. When Virginia opens the box and discovers Plautus, she checks out as many books on tortoises as she can. She reads bits aloud to her husband, Leonard. He listens with good humor to passages about tortoise reproduction (female tortoises decide when and if to fertilize eggs, they can choose to reabsorb fertilized eggs, and they’re indifferent to male tortoises’ overtures).
It’s ironic that Alexandra’s husband carves these particular words into Plautus’s back. Carving words into a tortoise’s back—which causes the tortoise great pain—would suggest that a tortoise isn’t one of the things or people Tolstoy loves. Virginia’s attempt to figure out how to care for Plautus, then, stands in sharp contrast. Rather than show her love for Plautus by making uninformed choices about her care, she tries to learn as much as she can about the creature that now depends on her.
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In private, Leonard calls Virginia “Goat.” Virginia calls her sister “Dolphin,” and Virginia’s friends are all delighted when they receive an animal nickname. Virginia has always loved animals—her first published writing was an obituary for the family dog. When Plautus arrives in Virginia’s life, Virginia is working on a biography about Flush, a cocker spaniel owned by Elizabeth Barrett. Virginia often reads bits of the book aloud to Plautus and senses that Plautus doesn’t appreciate the ironic style most people use to write in animals’ voices. The book is cheeky, but it’s still moving. Plautus is very impressed by the passages in which Virginia tries to understand how dogs experience the world through smell.
Plautus doesn’t appreciate the “ironic” style Woolf seems to play with when writing about Flush, but several stories in Only the Animals employ an ironic voice, too. And this collection is also filled with instances in which Dovey dives into how animals experience things, just as Woolf does in her Flush biography.
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When Virginia finishes the book a few years later, she takes Plautus with her to her readings and lectures. She always starts by mentioning her favorite Russian authors (Gogol and Tolstoy), and then says that the two authors both dared to write from an animal’s perspective. She then tells the crowd about Plautus, mentions that Alexandra is now in America, and wonders what stories Plautus could tell about Tolstoy. (She clearly doesn’t know that Plautus missed Tolstoy by a few years.) Then, she’d read from Flush: A Biography without it seeming ridiculous. After a glance at Plautus, Virginia always reads Plautus’s favorite passage in the book. In it, she shows that Elizabeth and Flush are equally unable to understand the other—but are still connected.
It’s notable that Woolf mentions that both Gogol and Tolstoy wrote about animals from the animal’s perspective. This situates Only the Animals in a long history of authors writing about animals, from animals’ perspectives. And later in the passage, when Plautus talks about the passage that Virginia reads from the Flush biography, it suggests that people will never truly be able to understand how animals see the world.
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Quotes
Plautus is grateful to be Virginia’s pet tortoise and not someone else’s. In London in the 1930s, people want tortoises—and it’s a brutal trade. Tortoises arrive from North Africa with broken limbs and shells, and most tortoises who’ve made the journey don’t survive for more than a week. People make their tortoises race in pubs, and the authorities discover one wealthy person’s tortoise—its shell encrusted with emeralds and rubies—abandoned on a flight. But for Plautus, life is good. Virginia bans tortoiseshell objects and welcomes guests’ poems about tortoises. And the entire time, Plautus watches Woolf write, just as Flush watched Elizabeth Barrett.
Here, Plautus underscores that she’s lucky to have such a competent caretaker. Indeed, as she explains, tortoises are popular pets, and this creates a situation ripe for animal abuse. As she describes the way that other people manage their pet tortoises, she also suggests that these owners don’t think of their tortoises as living beings. They seem to be more like status symbols than animals deserving of care and kindness.
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This all comes to an end with the London Blitz. One moment Plautus is sunning herself; the next, she’s buried in rubble. Plautus hides in her shell, calm and assured that rescuers will find her (the Woolfs have a card pinned to the door, saying a tortoise lives there). She thinks of the rescue dogs that Virginia was so interested in and imagines them digging for her. She knows that Virginia will be desperate to get Plautus back. Somehow, the parrot next door ends up near Plautus. It’s still in its cage, alive, and repeats “This is my night out!” until it dies. Plautus remembers Virginia saying that the Nazis burn swastikas into tortoises’ backs, and her own carved shell aches.
Because of the strong relationship that Plautus has with Virginia Woolf, she feels certain that she’ll be rescued. While Oleg suggested earlier that her shell was a handicap or a punishment, now it’s her saving grace—she survives in part because she has her shell to protect her. And though Plautus survives this experience, the fact that the parrot doesn’t points to the notion that many animals didn’t survive the Blitz. Human conflicts like World War II, the story suggests, aren’t just human conflicts, since they affect animals and the natural world, too.
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Trapped in the rubble, Plautus thinks of Virginia feeding her flower petals according to her mood and what the flowers mean. Roses mean love, for instance, and columbines represent sadness. She remembers Virginia reading Bataille’s essay in which he said “love smells like death.” Remembering this, Plautus mentally says goodbye to Virginia. She doesn’t mourn five months later, when Virginia drowns herself—though she watches Virginia compose her final love note to Leonard.
In real life, Woolf’s mental health declined following losing her home in the Blitz; Leonard also joined the Home Guard at this point, which Woolf didn’t appreciate. As Plautus watches Woolf inch closer to taking her own life, she realizes that neither she nor the other people in Woolf’s life can inspire in Woolf the will to live. All Plautus can do is bear witness—and tell readers her story.
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In her will, Virginia dictates that Plautus should go to Eric Blair, better known as George Orwell. She heard that he has a small menagerie on his family’s farm and hoped Plautus would be welcome. But unfortunately, George and Plautus don’t like each other. The menagerie turns out to be two animals: a rooster named Henry Ford and a poodle named Marx, which fight constantly. Though George is one of the first to understand the evils of fascism, he’s not good company.
Though Virginia left Plautus to George Orwell with the best of intentions, this passage shows that good intentions aren’t always enough to ensure an animal’s good treatment. The strained dynamic between Plautus and George provides a sharp contrast from the relationship of mutual respect that Plautus and Virginia (and Plautus and Alexandra)  shared. The best relationships between humans and animals, the book shows, are marked by this reciprocity and respect.
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Now, Plautus tries to be proud that she saw George working on Animal Farm, but at the time, she’s depressed and doesn’t care. What she remembers most is the smell of potato blossoms, as George spends his time helping the Women’s Land Army girls dig potatoes. George briefly tries to train young men, but ends up wounding two trainees. To make things worse, publishers refuse to print Animal Farm, a thinly veiled critique of Stalinism. Right after the war ends, Animal Farm is published, George’s wife dies, and George decides to take Plautus “tramping.” Despite publishing Down and Out in Paris and London years ago, George still goes slumming regularly.
The Women’s Land Army was a real-life military organization comprised of British women, who worked on farms to keep food production up while British men were fighting in continental Europe. Orwell wrote his book Down and Out in Paris and London after spending time posing as a tramp so he could learn how the poor lived.
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Disguised as the tramp Burton, George takes Plautus to a lecture by the philosopher Bertrand Russell. He sits near the front with Plautus next to him—and his stench means no one sits nearby. Plautus is embarrassed, but becomes entranced as Mr. Russell talks about the moon orbiting the earth and the earth orbiting the sun. At the end of the lecture, George stands and insists it’s fake—the earth is held up by a massive tortoise. Mr. Russell has clearly heard this before and asks what the tortoise is standing on. George insists it’s “tortoises all the way down.” With a sigh, Mr. Russell dismisses the audience. Plautus is ashamed, but after this lecture, she dreams of seeing space.
Orwell’s insistence that it’s “tortoises all the way down” refers back to the beginning of the story, when Oleg studied different philosophies and came across this one. Though this part of the story takes place decades later, Orwell shows that people are still asking the same questions—and he also shows that animals still play a major role in people’s understanding of the world and how it works. Bertrand Russell, however, introduces Plautus to a more scientific way of thinking about the world, reinforcing her intelligence and her ability to think critically.
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Soon after this, Plautus runs away from George. She spends a number of years slumming and even spends 10 years at a wildlife park. The staff paints numbers on tortoises, but they don’t paint one on Plautus. The food is decent and Plautus lays a few eggs, but she knows her destiny is waiting. One day, she hears the park staff discussing the Cold War and the space race between the Soviets and the Americans. They’re trying to put humans on the moon. And the first “proxy astronauts” are none other than animals like dogs, fruit flies, and mice. Plautus knows she needs to get in front of the Americans or the Soviets; either would be fine, as long as they’ll send her to space.
For Plautus, being a “proxy astronaut” would allow her to explore her newfound love of space and the stars in the ultimate way. In reality, these missions were extremely dangerous, and many of these early animal astronauts died. As in other sections of the book, here animals are used as tools to further humans’ goals.
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Plautus heads for the theater district in London, where she knows she’ll at least find communists. A British playwright named Tom Stoppard adopts her. He’s working on a play about a philosopher who steps on his pet tortoise and kills him, while the philosopher’s wife watches two British astronauts land on the moon. Stoppard recognizes the carving in Plautus’s shell as Tolstoy’s last words, so he takes her to parties with him. Plautus makes a point to meet people in black turtlenecks (they’re usually communists or Americans), and one of Stoppard’s friends notices this. He also notices how intently Plautus listens to Stoppard talk about his fake television scenes. This friend successfully convinces another friend to take Plautus back to the USSR with him and present her to the Soviet Space Program. He thinks the Soviets have a better chance of winning the race.
Two of Tom Stoppard’s plays, Arcadia and Jumper, inspire Plautus’s story, and Plautus takes her name from a tortoise character in Arcadia. This passage suggests that Tom is working on what will become Jumper when he adopts Plautus in the story.
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The Soviets send animals into space constantly, but most of the animals die. The Soviets are desperate to beat the Americans and get a man on the moon. They’ve heard that the Americans sent black mice to space that returned gray—a fate that would be undesirable for humans. Plautus starts her training with the space biomedical expert, Dr. Yazdovsky. She’s pleased to be around Russians again and quickly becomes Dr. Yazdovsky’s favorite. He nicknames her Bert after an American cartoon character named Bert the Turtle. It’s a nasty cartoon—but the nickname means that Dr. Yazdovsky can sing the Bert the Turtle song whenever he sees Plautus.
This passage implicitly criticizes humans for treating animals as disposable—they’re used as tools to further each country’s own advancements rather than treated as living beings. (Though Dr. Yazdovsky’s choice to nickname Plautus does complicate this.) And though Plautus clearly wants to go to space, the passage subtly raises the question if the other animals did, too.
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Plautus hopes that Dr. Yazdovsky’s singing will get her sent to space sooner, but during the early and mid-1960s the Soviets are more interested in dogs. The American send monkeys to space, but Dr. Yazdovsky prefers small, white, female dogs. Most of the dogs tolerate the training well, though most of them also run away just before takeoff. It’s like they sense they’re going to be shot into space. Plautus watches one dog run away right before her launch. Dr. Yazdovsky panics—he’s afraid the wolves nearby will eat her, and he’s a kind man. But when the dog returns, Dr. Yazdovsky lets her lick his face and shoots her and another dog into low orbit. Later, they find the dogs dead in their capsule.
This passage confirms that not all the animals in the space program think it’s such an honor to go space the way Plautus. These dogs, for instance, seem to know that being launched into space puts them in grave danger, and many of them choose to run away—and possibly be eaten by wolves—seeing that as the lesser of the two evils. It’s significant that Plautus still expresses very little compassion for the dogs—instead, she praises Dr. Yazdovsky for his compassion for the animals while they’re still on the ground. This mirrors the way the dog in “Hundstage” spoke of Himmler being kind because he advocated for animals’ rights, not understanding what other terrible things Himmler did.
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Plautus wishes she’d met Laika, the first animal to orbit the earth. She was a stray whom Dr. Yazdovsky put into Sputnik II in 1957. She was happy in space for a few hours, but then the capsule overheated and she died. Most of the dogs, like Laika, are one-way passengers. Plautus talks to the dogs who return whenever she gets the chance. She’s fascinated by solitude after spending her life with Oleg, Alexandra, Virginia, and even George—and space, to her, represents a chance to be truly alone.
Plautus doesn’t express any sadness for the animals who die in space, only admiration for the ones who lived. In this way, Plautus’s attitude is fairly humanlike—the cost of space exploration doesn’t much bother her, so long as space exploration can be increasingly successful. And her quest to explore solitude by going to space also reads as a fairly human endeavor, showing again how similar animals and people can be.
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Plautus offers a transcript of an interview she did with two dogs, Veterok and Ugolyok, who survived 22 days in space. Veterok says she planned to think about her work once she was in space, but she couldn’t think clearly. Ugolyok concurs; she couldn’t control her thoughts and even began to hallucinate. Veterok adds that while she was in space, she learned to empathize with Enos, the American monkey who went to space. Supposedly he went to space and did everything he was supposed to—but due to mechanical trouble, the electric pads on his feet shocked him. In the photos after he returned to Earth, Enos is angry. In space, Veterok wanted to bite someone’s face off at the thought of being punished for doing the right thing.
Veterok and Ugolyok confirm that going to space is a painful and unsettling experience for the animals—and unlike human astronauts, they don’t get to opt in or out. But like their human counterparts, the dogs also show that they’re dedicated to their work. When Veterok includes the anecdote about Enos, what makes her angry is presumably being faced with the reality of people’s power over her and other animals. Animals, she realizes, can do everything right and do everything humans tell them to and still be at risk of dying or being abused because they don’t have the ability to advocate for themselves.
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Quotes
Plautus asks if the dogs got along in space. They didn’t; they became territorial and selfish. Then, Plautus asks if the beginning or the end of the trip was the hardest. Veterok says the middle was the worst. It was monotonous, and she was enraged. Ugolyok confirms they started to irritate each other. She doubted why she was there, and even now she struggles to take life seriously after seeing the earth looking like a colorful ball. She thought going to space would be liberating, but now everything seems like a sick joke. Finally, Plautus asks for advice for other dogs set to go to space. Veterok encourages others to think of the other dog first and to be adaptable. Ugolyok tells others to get physically and psychologically fit. Going to space won’t solve one’s personal problems, and will only make them worse.
The fact that Ugolyok has such a hard time taking anything seriously once she gets back to earth is a condemnation of the people who sent her to space without her consent. She had no way of knowing that she’d experience these effects—just as Plautus clearly has no idea what going to space actually entails, given that the dogs answer her questions in ways she doesn’t seem to expect.
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In 1968, the engineers start to consider sending animals other than dogs to space. They decide to send a spaceship into orbit around the moon—and they decide that Plautus will go. She’s a better choice than dogs because she eats less, and Dr. Yazdovsky hopes she’ll hibernate. Plautus vows not to hibernate—she’s going to space, after all. So on September 15, 1968, Plautus takes her place in the cabin with some mealworms, two spiders, seeds, and some plants. She settles next to the porthole and feels good after her bath in iodine.
Here, the story veers further away from historical fact (Veterok and Ugolyok were real dogs who went to space, as was Laika) by sending Plautus to space by herself. The first tortoise in space was actually one of a pair and survived the journey. Changing the story in this way makes it seem even more tragic that Plautus dies—something readers can reasonably assume is coming, given that every animal narrator has died at the end of their chapter. She dies thinking she’s doing this for herself, but in reality, she also dies to advance science for people who are willing to let her die.
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As the rocket propels the capsule, Plautus thinks of Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s words and is grateful to have her own thoughts to keep her company in space. Her vision dims and she blacks out. When she comes to, she no longer feels secure. Instead, she feels like she’s been banished. She feels like the “original scapegoat” of the Bible, who carried the sins of Israel on its back. Plautus’s shell feels heavy, like she’s carrying “the weight of all human sin.” She wonders what demon is waiting for her behind the moon. 
The original scapegoat was an actual goat. It’s telling that Plautus feels now like the tortoise in Christian imagery, that carries a burden of sin on its shell. The experience of actually going to space, this shows, is unsettling enough to totally upend Plautus’s personal philosophy. Where she once looked forward to going, she now feels like people are abusing her.
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Once the main engine cuts off, Plautus knows she’s not going to fall back to earth. She’s nearly at orbital speed, and microgravity feels awesome. She hallucinates music, vomits, and feels her blood pooling in her head and along the top of her shell. She wonders why humans see so many animals in the stars, and who joined up the first dots. For a while, Plautus doesn’t think. When she thinks again, she wonders for a long time—perhaps days—if she’s blind. She sees flashing lights, which she knows means she’s passing through radiation belts. Plautus can see the earth below, looking like a marble. There’s no tortoise underneath it.
Humans see animals in constellations in part because animals have been important figures in human progress throughout the ages. Dogs and cats, for instance, have been domesticated and a part of human civilization for thousands of years, while people have been hunting wild animals for even longer. The stars, then, emerge as a symbol for the enduring relationship between people and animals. To humans, animals are friends, food, and in Plautus’s case, research subjects.
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Plautus watches a spider squeeze out of the capsule and into space. She feels like she and the spiders are just like the first humans to sail on the ocean and leave land behind. Someday, when humans arrive on Titan, they’ll find pairs of animals and one ancient Russian tortoise. The curse of Earth’s creatures, Plautus thinks, is to spread life around, and leave it behind, all while making a mess. Outside, she can smell ice. She thinks of the escaped spider and then of Darwin, noticing a tiny exotic spider hitching a ride on the Beagle. He didn’t know how hungry it was to rule a new world. Plautus watches the remaining spider spin a web.
Titan is Saturn’s second-largest moon. Plautus’ mention of sailing and finding pairs of animals and one tortoise seems like a biblical allusion to the story of Noah’s ark, where Noah gathered pairs of animals to rescue them from the flood and secured them in his ark. Plautus seems to suggest that pairs of animals will colonize space in the same way that Noah’s animals went on to eventually fill the earth to the brim with animals.
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Suddenly, Plautus feels “the solitude of death” upon her. She doesn’t know how to die, but she remembers Virginia reciting de Montaigne’s words that nature will take over and help a person die. Plautus thinks that she’s spent her life with writers who found perfect solitude in various ways. They all recognized in her the same contradictory desire: to always be left alone, but to never be let go. But she thinks that after being born, every creature on earth is homeless. As the spider’s threads thicken, Plautus thinks of Charles Lindbergh’s flight across the Atlantic. He’d had a fly in the cockpit with him and it gave him solace to know there was something else alive with him. Plautus and the spider circle the moon.
Once again, Plautus returns to the idea that every being on earth is alone, no matter how many connections they forge with people or animals. This idea, it seems, comforts her when she feels “the solitude of death” approaching. But like Charles Lindbergh and the fly, Plautus isn’t technically alone—she has the spider for company.
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