Historical Analogies

• Children are fond of adventure stories.
• While sharing the characters’ challenges and adversities, young readers learn through the characters’ experiences.
• Today ‘s older generation may have enjoyed Les Enfants du capitaine Grant (The Children of Captain Grant), a novel by Jules Verne.
• In 1936 there was a popular Russian children’s film of the same name.
• The film begins with a bottle found in the ocean. The bottle contains a note from the lost-at-sea expedition. A lot of courage and wit is used to decipher the location of those missing and to find the captain.

Key Concepts

The human soul (that of a woman in this case) can be represented symbolically as a kind of bottle with a text sealed inside. Love, patience, and courage are required to understand the message.

Like Le Reve this painting illustrates the stream of consciousness that shapes us. Thus, the current of water streaming down the narrow neck determines the shape of the bottle.