Fatal Eggs

Bulgakov Mikhail

Description

Professor Persikov, an eccentric zoologist, stumbles upon a new light ray that accelerates growth and reproduction rates in living organisms. In the wake of a plague that has decimated the country's poultry stocks, Persikov's discovery is exploited as a means to correct the problem. As foreign agents, the state and the Soviet media all seize upon the red ray, matters get out of hand...Set in 1928 but written four years earlier, during Stalin's rise to power, The Fatal Eggs is both an early piece of science fiction reminiscent of H.G. Wells and a biting, brilliant satire on the consequences of the abuse of power and knowledge.

Informations

• Publié par: Alma Books
• Date de parution: 08 janvier 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781847493934
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

The Fatal Eggs
The Fatal Eggs
Mikhail Bulgakov
Translated by Roger Cockrell
ALMA CLASSICS
an imprint of
ALMA BOOKS LTD
3 Castle Yard
Richmond
Surrey TW10 6TF
United Kingdom
www.almaclassics.com
The Fatal Eggs first published in Russian as Rokovye yaitsa in 1925
First published by Alma Classics in 2011. Repr. 2012
This new edition first published by Alma Classics in 2014.
Reprinted 2019, 2020
Translation, introduction and notes © Roger Cockrell, 2011
Cover image © nathanburtondesign.com
Extra Material © Alma Books Ltd
Printed in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

ISBN : 978-1-84749-371-2
All the pictures in this volume are reprinted with permission or presumed to be in the public domain. Every effort has been made to ascertain and acknowledge their copyright status, but should there have been any unwitting oversight on our part, we would be happy to rectify the error in subsequent printings.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.
Contents
Introduction
The Fatal Eggs
Note on the Text
Notes
Extra Material
Mikhail Bulgakov’s Life
Mikhail Bulgakov’s Works
Select Bibliography
Mikhail Bulgakov (1891–1940)

Afanasy Ivanovich Bulgakov, Bulgakov’s father

Varvara Mikhailovna Bulgakova, Bulgakov’s mother

Lyubov Belozerskaya, Bulgakov’s second wife

Yelena Shilovskaya, Bulgakov’s third wife

Bulgakov’s residences on Bolshaya Sadovaya St.

Nashchokinsky Pereulok

an unfinished letter to Stalin

An autograph page from The Master and Margarita
Introduction
The Fatal Eggs , written in 1924 and published the following year, tells the story of a catastrophe caused by a combination of chance and human folly. The accidental discovery of a mysterious ray, able to enhance and accelerate vital reproductive processes, leads to a chain of events that spin rapidly out of control, bringing an entire country to the edge of an abyss. Caught up in the whirlwind is the story’s main protagonist, the eccentric and brilliant zoologist Professor Persikov. It is Persikov who, as the discoverer of the ray, is identified at the very beginning of the story as the catastrophe’s “prime cause”. The theme of the scientist whose experiments lead to dire consequences has a long literary heritage reaching back to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). There are, however, two stories in this genre, both by H.G. Wells, that have a particular bearing on The Fatal Eggs : The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) and The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth (1904). Although, in Chapter 3 of Bulgakov’s story, Persikov dismisses The Food of the Gods as just a “novel”, he has several points in common with Wells’s two protagonists, Bensington and Redwood – as, indeed, he has with Doctor Moreau. Driven by intellectual passion, all these men view their experiments in purely scientific terms, untroubled by ethical considerations. Persikov would have endorsed Doctor Moreau’s assessment of the unfortunate creature on which he is experimenting (in this case a cheetah) that “the thing you see before you is no longer an animal, a fellow creature, but a problem”. Yet there is a crucial difference: unlike Wells’s scientists, Persikov remains modest and circumspect about his discovery. He seeks, furthermore, to ensure that any further experiments take place under strictly controlled conditions. The shadowy world of the Kremlin and the power of the press, however, combine to render him powerless. Even his status as one of Russia’s most brilliant scientists cannot prevent him from becoming just one more victim of circumstance. By the end of the story, Persikov may even have become its most sympathetic character.
Sympathy generally, however, is in short supply in The Fatal Eggs , for throughout the story Bulgakov exposes the unattractive aspects of human nature and behaviour; few people or institutions escape his caustic appraisal. If Wells sets his sights on the self-satisfied apathy of bourgeois England, Bulgakov’s primary target is the bureaucracy and incompetence of the fledgling Soviet society. More widely, however, he undercuts the official ideal of Soviet man as the “enlightened proletariat” of a new age, allegedly “in control” of events. The arrogance of this world view was later to be expressed most succinctly in the opening chapter of Bulgakov’s masterpiece The Master and Margarita with the following exchange:
“If God does not exist, then who is in charge of human lives and generally everything that happens on earth?”
“Man himself is in charge.”
In his influential Literature and Revolution , written in the same year as The Fatal Eggs , Trotsky set out his vision of a world in which man will be free to adapt nature to his own wishes, to change the course of rivers, to reshape and remove mountains, and generally to reorganize the planet. Only a few years later, Maxim Gorky was to speak of the need for new suns to restore the “heavenly conditions of the Miocene era” to the polar ice cap. Yet far from being all-powerful, the new Bolshevik society, as portrayed in The Fatal Eggs , is helpless when confronted by the forces of nature: the chicken disease disappears as inexplicably as it appears, and the creatures are finally defeated, not by modern civilization’s formidable array of weapons – the cavalry, the aeroplanes and the gas-carrying armoured vehicles – but by a totally unexpected natural event. The “man-gods” (to use Dostoevsky’s phrase) are forced to bow down before the “God of Frost”.
The fact that man is capable of creating many modern wonders, including electronic advertisements on rooftops and all the sophisticated apparatus of newspaper publication and reporting, only serves to emphasize the thinness of the veneer of civilization. The mob that breaks into the Institute at the end of the story is, in its own way, as mindlessly destructive as the creatures that have been spawned in the “Red Ray” State Farm. As in The Island of Doctor Moreau , the distinction between animals and humans becomes blurred. The man who wields the fatal blow that fells Persikov to the ground possesses, we note, “bowed apelike legs”. At the end of Chapter 9 it is impossible to say whether the distant howling comes from dogs or humans.
This unsettling view of human nature is compounded by a narrative that hovers on the borderline between fact and fiction. The setting – the streets, restaurants and railway stations of Moscow and the Sheremetyev estate – seems real enough. Yet this is sleight of hand on Bulgakov’s part, for the reader’s perception of a stable reality is subverted on practically every page. At the time of writing, the story was set four years in the future. The severe frost that kills the creatures is such an unlikely occurrence in August that it borders on the surreal. The idyllic and conventional portrayal of rural existence is transformed into a grotesque nightmare.
But Bulgakov is not content to leave it there. Against this background he interweaves his fictional story with references to real-life figures; the two worlds intersect so seamlessly that the boundary between them falls away. In a further twist, the details of even these real-life figures themselves may be subject to distortion in a number of ways: the name of a historical figure can be used in an inapposite context; in Chapter 6 we learn of the apparent death of the famous theatre director Vladimir Meyerhold in somewhat grisly circumstances, although the real-life Meyerhold was not in fact to die until 1940; in the same chapter, the well-known writer and publicist Ilya Ehrenburg is disguised as Erendorg. The bewildering effect of all this may partly explain why the authorities allowed the story to be published despite its criticisms of the regime, both real and implied. For a more certain explanation we would need to look to the relatively relaxed circumstances that characterized the years of the New Economic Policy of the early to mid-1920s; by the time Stalin was in full control, only two years later, The Fatal Eggs would have shared the fate of Bulgakov’s other prose works and would have been published only many years after his death.
In the story’s final paragraph life is shown as returning to “normal”, with glittering, brash Moscow reasserting itself. But, just as in Nikolai Gogol’s story of St Petersburg, ‘Nevsky Prospect’ (1835), we now see the city from a more sober perspective. In the rhetorical conclusion to his novel The White Guard (1924–28) Bulgakov questions people’s stubborn refusal to understand the transitory nature of everything on earth. When all else has long since disappeared, the stars will remain. “Why, then,” he asks, “do we not wish to direct our gaze at them?” The image, at the end of The Fatal Eggs , of the slender crescent of the moon hanging “as if on a thread” above the Cathedral is a poignant, if unobtrusive symbol of the ephemeral nature of our existence.
– Roger Cockrell
The Fatal Eggs
Chapter 1
Professor Persikov’s Curriculum Vitae
O N THE EVENING OF 16th April 1928 Vladimir Ipatevich Persikov, Professor of Zoology at State University No. IV and director of the Moscow Zoological Institute, entered his office at the Institute on Herzen Street. He switched on the frosted overhead lamp and looked around the room.
It is this fateful evening that must be considered to mark the beginning of the horrifying catastrophe, just as Professor Persikov must be seen as its prime cause.
The professor was fifty-eight years old. He had a remarkable head, bald and elongated like a tortoise’s, with tu