The smartest guys in the room book summary

#The smartest guys in the room book summary how to

Catherine goes below to fasten up the doors, and Louka shows Raina how to fasten the shutters if there is any shooting and then leaves to help bolt the rest of the house. Raina is annoyed that the fugitives must be killed, but she is immediately corrected - in war, everyone can be killed. Thus, the doors must be secured since there might be fighting and shooting in the street below. They are interrupted by the entry of Louka, a handsome and proud peasant girl, who announces that the Serbs have been routed and have scattered throughout the town and that some of the fugitives have been chased into the neighborhood. Real life, as she knows, is quite different. She wonders if heroes such as Sergius esteem such heroic ideas because they have read too much Byron and Pushkin. Raina wonders if such a popular hero will care any longer for her little affections, but she is nonetheless delighted about the news. She describes how Sergius boldly led a cavalry charge into the midst of the Serbs, scattering them in all directions. As the play begins, Catherine is excited over the news that the Bulgarian forces have just won a splendid battle at Slivnitza against the Serbians, and the 'hero of the hour, the idol of the regiment' who led them to victory is Raina's fiancГ©, Sergius Saranoff. Raina's mother, Catherine Petkoff, is a woman who could easily pass for a splendid specimen of the wife of a mountain fanner, but is determined to be a Viennese lady. Just inside, conspicuously visible, is a box of chocolate creams, which will play an important part later in this act and which will ultimately become a symbol of the type of war which Shaw will satirize.

On the balcony, standing and staring at the romantic beauty of the night, 'intensely conscious that her own youth and beauty are a part of it,' is young Raina Petkoff. But the room is furnished with only cheap bits of Viennese things the other pieces of furniture come from the Turkish Ottoman Empire, reflecting the long occupation by the Turks of the Balkan peninsula. The room is decorated in the worst possible taste, a taste reflected in the mistress' (Catherine Petkoff's) desire to seem as cultured and as Viennese as possible.

The play opens at night in a lady's bedchamber in a small Bulgarian town in 1885, the year of the Serbo-Bulgarian war.

The smartest guys in the room book summary