“Fatal Eggs” (1924) is a story written by M. A. Bulgakov during a special period in the cultural life of the country. Then many works were created only to motivate a wide range of the population to perform tasks necessary for the country’s survival in critical conditions. Therefore, many different one-day authors appeared, whose creations did not linger in the memory of readers. Not only art, but also science was put on stream. Then all advanced inventions went to the service of industry and agriculture, increasing their efficiency. But scientific thought on the part of the Soviet government was subject to ideological control, which (among other things) was ridiculed by Bulgakov in “Fatal Eggs.”
The story was created in 1924, and the events in it unfold in 1928. The first publication took place in the magazine “Nedra” (No. 6, 1925). The work had different names - first “Ray of Life”, in addition, there was another one - “Professor Persikov’s Eggs” (the meaning of this name was to preserve the satirical tone of the story), but for ethical reasons this name had to be changed.
The central figure of the story, Professor Persikov, remotely contains some features of real prototypes - the Pokrovsky brothers-doctors, Bulgakov's relatives, one of whom lived and worked on Prechistenka.
In addition, the text mentions the Smolensk province, in which the events of “Fatal Eggs” unfold, for a reason: Bulgakov worked there as a doctor and briefly visited the Pokrovskys in their Moscow apartment. The situation of the Soviet country during the period of war communism also comes from real life: then there were food shortages due to the unstable socio-political situation, there were riots in management structures due to unprofessionalism, and the new government had not yet fully managed to control public life .
Bulgakov in “Fatal Eggs” ridicules both the cultural and socio-political situation of the country after the revolutionary coup.
Genre and direction
The genre of the work “Fatal Eggs” is a story. It is characterized by a minimal number of plot lines and, as a rule, a relatively small volume of narration (relative to the novel).
Direction - modernism. Although the events outlined by Bulgakov are fantastic, the action takes place in a real place, the characters (not only Professor Persikov, but everyone else) are also quite viable citizens of the new country. And a scientific discovery is not fabulous, it only has fantastic consequences. But on the whole the story is realistic, although some of its elements are colored grotesquely and satirically.
This combination of fantasy, realism and satire is characteristic of modernism, when the author makes bold experiments on a literary work, bypassing established classical norms and canons.
The modernist movement itself appeared in special conditions of social and cultural life, when previous genres and trends began to become obsolete, and art required new forms, new ideas and ways of expression. “Fatal Eggs” is just such a work that meets modernist requirements.
About what?
“Fatal Eggs” is a story about the brilliant discovery of a scientist - professor of zoology Persikov, which ended in tears, both for those around him and for the scientist himself. The hero in his laboratory discovers a beam that can only be obtained with a special combination of mirror glass with beams of light. This ray affects living organisms so that they increase in size and begin to multiply at supernatural speed. Professor Persikov and his assistant Ivanov are in no hurry to release their discovery “to the world” and believe that they still need to work on it and conduct additional experiments, since the consequences may be unexpected and even dangerous. However, sensational information about the “ray of life” quickly penetrates the press, recorded by the semi-literate but lively journalist Bronsky, and, filled with false, unverified facts, spreads throughout society.
A discovery becomes known against the will of the scientist. Persikov is pestered by journalists on the streets of Moscow, demanding to tell him about his invention. It becomes impossible to work in the laboratory due to a barrage of press employees; even a spy comes who, for five thousand rubles, tries to find out the secret of the ray from the professor.
After this, Persikov’s house and laboratory are guarded by the NKVD, not allowing journalists in and thus providing the professor with a quiet working environment. But soon an epidemic of chicken infection occurs in the country, because of which people are strictly forbidden to eat chickens, eggs, or trade in live chickens and chicken meat. Even an emergency commission has been created to combat chicken plague. But in circumvention of the law, someone still sells chicken and eggs, and soon an ambulance comes to pick up the buyers of these products.
The country is excited. On the occasion of the epidemic, topical works are created that respond to the current mood of the public. When it begins to subside, the head of a demonstration state farm named Rokk comes to Professor Persikov with a special document from the Kremlin, who, with the help of the “ray of life,” intends to resume chicken breeding.
The document from the Kremlin turns out to be an order to advise Rokk on the use of the “life ray”, and immediately a call comes from the Kremlin. Persikov is categorically against using the beam, which has not yet been fully studied, in chicken farming, but he has to give Rokk cameras with which he can achieve the desired effect. The hero takes the cameras to a state farm in the Smolensk province and orders chicken eggs.
Soon, three boxes of unusual-looking, spotted eggs arrive in a foreign package. Rokk places the resulting eggs under the beam and tells the watchman to watch them so that no one steals the hatched chickens. The next day, egg shells are found, but no chicks. The caretaker blames the watchman for everything, although he swears that he carefully watched the process.
In the last chamber, the eggs are still intact, and Rokk hopes that at least chickens will hatch from them. He decided to take a break and goes with his wife Manya to swim in the pond. On the shore of the pond, he notices a strange calm, and then a huge snake rushes at Manya and swallows her right in front of her husband. This causes him to turn gray and almost fall into madness.
Strange news reaches the GPU that something strange is happening in the Smolensk province. Two GPU agents, Shchukin and Polaitis, go to the state farm and find there a distraught Rokk, who cannot really explain anything.
Agents examine the state farm building - the former estate of Sheremetev, and find in the greenhouse cameras with a reddish beam and hordes of huge snakes, reptiles and ostriches. Shchukin and Polaitis die in a fight with monsters.
Newspaper editors receive strange messages from the Smolensk province about strange birds the size of horses, huge reptiles and snakes, and Professor Persikov receives boxes of chicken eggs. At the same time, the scientist and his assistant see a sheet with an emergency message about anacondas in the Smolensk province. It immediately turns out that the orders of Rokka and Persikov were mixed up: the supply manager received snake and ostrich ones, and the inventor received chicken ones.
By that time, Persikov was inventing a special poison for killing toads, which was then useful for fighting huge snakes and ostriches.
Red Army troops, armed with gas, are fighting this scourge, but Moscow is still alarmed, and many are planning to flee the city.
Maddened people break into the institute where the professor works, destroy his laboratory, blaming him for all the troubles and thinking that it was he who released the huge snakes, kill his watchman Pankrat, housekeeper Marya Stepanovna and himself. They then set the institute on fire.
In August 1928, a frost suddenly sets in, killing the last snakes and crocodiles that were not finished off by special forces. After epidemics that were caused by the rotting corpses of snakes and people suffering from the invasion of reptiles, by 1929 a normal spring began.
The beam discovered by the late Persikov can no longer be obtained by anyone, not even by his former assistant Ivanov, now an ordinary professor.
The main characters and their characteristics
- Vladimir Ipatievich Persikov- a brilliant scientist, professor of zoology, who discovered a unique ray. The hero opposes the use of the ray because its discovery has not yet been verified and researched. He is careful, does not like unnecessary fuss and believes that any invention requires many years of testing before the time comes for its operation. Because of interference in his activities, his life's work perishes with him. The image of Persikov symbolizes humanism and the ethics of scientific thinking, which were destined to die under the Soviet dictatorship. A lonely talent is contrasted with an unenlightened and driven crowd that does not have its own opinion, drawing it from newspapers. According to Bulgakov, it is impossible to build a developed and fair state without an intellectual and cultural elite, which was expelled from the USSR by stupid and cruel people who had neither the knowledge nor the talent to build a country on their own.
- Pyotr Stepanovich Ivanov- Assistant to Professor Persikov, who helps him in his experiments and admires his new discovery. However, he is not such a talented scientist, so he fails to receive the “life ray” after the death of the professor. This is the image of an opportunist who is always ready to appropriate the achievements of a truly significant person, even if he has to step over his corpse.
- Alfred Arkadievich Bronsky- an omnipresent, fast, dexterous journalist, a semi-literate employee of many Soviet magazines and newspapers. He is the first to enter Persikov’s apartment and learn about his unusual discovery, then spreads this news everywhere against the will of the professor, embellishing and distorting the facts.
- Alexander Semenovich Rokk- a former revolutionary, and now the head of the Red Ray state farm. An uneducated, rude, but cunning person. He attends Professor Persikov’s report, where he talks about the “ray of life” he discovered, and he comes up with the idea of restoring the chicken population after the epidemic using this invention. Rokk, due to illiteracy, does not realize the full danger of such an innovation. This is a symbol of a new type of people, tailored according to the standards of the new government. A dependent, stupid, cowardly, but, as they say, “punchy” citizen who plays only by the rules of the Soviet state: runs through the authorities, seeks permission, tries by hook or by crook to adapt to new requirements.
Themes
- The central theme is the carelessness of people in handling new scientific inventions and lack of understanding of the dangers of the consequences of such handling. People like Rokk are narrow-minded and want to achieve their goals by any means necessary. They don’t care what happens after, they are only interested in the immediate benefit of what could turn into collapse tomorrow.
- The second theme is social: confusion in management structures, due to which any disaster can occur. After all, if the uneducated Rokk had not been allowed to manage the state farm, the disaster would not have happened.
- The third theme is impunity and the enormous influence of the media, irresponsible in the pursuit of sensations.
- The fourth theme is ignorance, which resulted in many people not understanding the cause-and-effect relationship and unwillingness to understand it (they blame Professor Persikov for the disaster, although in fact Rokk and the authorities who assisted him are to blame).
Issues
- The problem of authoritarian power and its destructive influence on all spheres of society. Science should be separated from the state, but this was impossible under Soviet rule: distorted and simplified science, suppressed by ideology, was demonstrated to all people through newspapers, magazines and other media.
- In addition, “Fatal Eggs” discusses a social problem, which lies in the unsuccessful attempt of the Soviet system to combine the scientific intelligentsia and other segments of the population who are far from science in general. It is not for nothing that the story shows how an NKVD employee (in fact, a representative of the authorities), protecting Persikov from journalists and spies, finds a common language with the simple and illiterate watchman Pankrat. The author implies that they are on the same intellectual level with him: the only difference is that one has a special badge under the collar of his jacket, and the other does not. The author hints at how imperfect such power is, where insufficiently educated people try to control what they themselves do not really understand.
- An important problem of the story is the irresponsibility of totalitarian power to society, which is symbolized by Rokk’s careless handling of the “ray of life”, where Rokk himself is power, the “ray of life” is the ways the state influences people (ideology, propaganda, control), and reptiles, reptiles and ostriches hatched from eggs - society itself, whose consciousness is distorted and damaged. A completely different, more reasonable and rational way of managing society is symbolized by Professor Persikov and his scientific experiments, which require caution, taking into account all the subtleties and attentiveness. However, it is precisely this method that is eradicated and disappears altogether, because the crowd is led and does not want to independently understand the intricacies of politics.
Meaning
“Fatal Eggs” is a kind of satire on Soviet power, on its imperfections due to its novelty. The USSR is like one big, untested invention, and therefore dangerous for society, which no one knows how to handle yet, which is why various malfunctions, failures and disasters occur. Society in "Fatal Eggs" is experimental animals in a laboratory, subjected to irresponsible and unscrupulous experiments that clearly serve to harm rather than benefit. Uneducated people are allowed to manage this laboratory; they are entrusted with serious tasks that they are unable to perform due to their inability to navigate social, scientific and other spheres of life. As a result, experimental citizens may turn into moral monsters, which will lead to irreversible catastrophic consequences for the country. At the same time, the unenlightened crowd mercilessly attacks those who can really help them overcome difficulties, who know how to use an invention on a national scale. The intellectual elite is being exterminated, but there is no one to replace it. It is very symbolic that after Persikov’s death no one can restore the invention lost with him.
Criticism
A. A. Platonov (Klimentov), considered this work as a symbol of the implementation of revolutionary processes. According to Platonov, Persikov is the creator of the revolutionary idea, his assistant Ivanov is the one who implements this idea, and Rokk is the one who decided, for his own benefit, to use the idea of revolution in a distorted form, and not as it should be (for the sake of the general benefit) - as a result, everyone suffered. The characters in “The Fatal Eggs” behave as Otto von Bismarck (1871 - 1898) once described: “The revolution is prepared by geniuses, carried out by fanatics, and the fruits of it are enjoyed by scoundrels.” Some critics believed that “Fatal Eggs” was written by Bulgakov for fun, but members of RAPP (Russian Association of Proletarian Writers) reacted negatively to the book, quickly considering the political background in this work.
Philologist Boris Sokolov (b. 1957) tried to find out what prototypes Professor Persikov had: it could be the Soviet biologist Alexander Gurvich, but if we proceed from the political meaning of the story, then it is Vladimir Lenin.
Interesting? Save it on your wall!ABSTRACT
“EXPERIMENT IN M.A. BULGAKOV’S STORIES “FATAL EGGS” AND “HEART OF A DOG”
INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………………………2
1. Life and time of creation of the stories “Fatal Eggs” and “Heart of a Dog”……. 3
2. Professor Persikov’s experiment in the story “Fatal Eggs”…………. 5
3. Professor Preobrazhensky’s experiment and its consequences in the story “Heart of a Dog”…………………………………………………………………………………. 8
4. Lessons learned from the analysis of the works “Fatal Eggs” and “Heart of a Dog”……………………………………………………………………………………………… 12
CONCLUSION………………………………………………………………………………… 13
List of sources used………………………………………………………. 14
INTRODUCTION
Bulgakov's work is the pinnacle phenomenon of Russian artistic culture of the twentieth century. Bulgakov's creativity is diverse. But a special place in it is occupied by the theme of scientific experiment, which is raised in the socio-philosophical stories of satirical fiction “Fatal Eggs” and “Heart of a Dog”, which have much in common.
This topic relevant and today, because Bulgakov’s satirical fiction warns society of impending dangers and cataclysms. We are talking about the tragic discrepancy between the achievements of science - man’s desire to change the world - and his contradictory, imperfect essence, inability to foresee the future, here he embodies his conviction in the preference of normal evolution over a violent, revolutionary method of invading life, about the responsibility of a scientist and a terrible, destructive force smug aggressive ignorance. These themes are eternal and they have not lost their significance even now.
Tasks of this essay are to analyze the plots in M.A. Bulgakov’s stories “Fatal Eggs” and “Heart of a Dog”, the place and influence of the scientific experiments of their main characters on the development of plots in the stories, and also draw conclusions about what the writer warned his contemporaries about in his works , And purpose of this essay to find out what impact it has on our modern life.
This work used materials from critical articles by literary critics of the work of the writer M.A. Bulgakov of the Soviet and modern periods, as well as independent conclusions on this topic.
The novelty of my work lies in proving the significance, relevance and “survivability” of M.A. Bulgakov’s literary heritage today, about the threat of any thoughtless experiment that contradicts human nature and its morality.
1. Life and time of creation of the stories “Fatal Eggs” and “Heart of a Dog”.
The story “Fatal Eggs” was written in 1924, and published in 1925, first in an abbreviated form in the magazine “Red Panorama” No. 19-22, 24, and in No. 19-21 it was called “Ray of Life” and only in No. 22.24 acquired the now well-known name “Fatal Eggs”. In the same year, the story was published in the almanac “Nedra”, in the sixth issue, and was included in Bulgakov’s collection “Diaboliada”, published in two editions in 1925 and 1926, and the publication of the collection in 1926 became Bulgakov’s last lifetime book in his homeland.
The author never saw the story “Heart of a Dog,” written in 1925; it was confiscated from the author along with his diaries by OGPU officers during a search on May 7, 1926. “Heart of a Dog” is Bulgakov’s last satirical story. She avoided the fate of her predecessors - she was not ridiculed and trampled upon by false critics of “Soviet literature”, because was published only in 1987 in the magazine “Znamya”.
The action of “Fatal Eggs” is timed to 1928; the realities of Soviet life in the first post-revolutionary years are easily recognized in the story. The most expressive in this regard is the reference to the notorious “housing issue,” which was supposedly resolved in 1926: “Just as amphibians come to life after a long drought, with the first heavy rain, Professor Persikov came to life in 1926, when the united American-Russian The company built, starting from the corner of Gazetny Lane and Tverskaya, in the center of Moscow 15 fifteen-story buildings, and on the outskirts of 300 workers' cottages, each with 8 apartments, once and for all putting an end to that terrible and funny housing crisis that so tormented Muscovites in the years 1919-1925 "
The hero of the story, Professor Preobrazhensky, came to Bulgakov’s story from Prechistenka, where the hereditary Moscow intelligentsia had long settled. A recent Muscovite, Bulgakov knew and loved this area. He settled in Obukhov (Chisty) Lane, where “Fatal Eggs” and “Heart of a Dog” were written. People who were close to him in spirit and culture lived here. The prototype of Professor Philip Filippovich Preobrazhensky is considered to be Bulgakov’s maternal relative, Professor N.M. Pokrovsky. But, in essence, it reflected the type of thinking and the best features of that layer of the Russian intelligentsia, which was called “Prechistinka” in Bulgakov’s circle.
Bulgakov considered it his duty to “persistently portray the Russian intelligentsia as the best layer in our country.” He treated his hero-scientist with respect and love; to some extent, Professor Preobrazhensky is the embodiment of the outgoing Russian culture, the culture of the spirit, aristocracy.
Since 1921 M.A. Bulgakov lived in Moscow, which, like the whole country, was transitioning to the era of NEPA - paradoxical, acute, contradictory. The harsh days of war communism were becoming a thing of the past. The era was seething. Bulgakov's pen was in a hurry to capture the rapidly flowing incredible, unique reality. It responded with satirical touches in essays and feuilletons, entire fantastic-satirical works, such as “Fatal Eggs” and “Heart of a Dog.”
2. Professor Persikov's experiment in the story "Fatal Eggs".
Bulgakov’s satirical story “The Fatal Eggs” is imbued with apocalyptic motifs, work on which, as well as on “Diaboliada”, was carried out during the writing of “The White Guard”.
The plot outline of the story “Fatal Eggs” is very simple and echoes the plots of many science fiction novels by H. Wells (which is directly indicated in the story). It amazes with the boldness of the author's imagination and the abundance of very risky private statements and satirical attacks.
At the center of the story is the traditional image of an eccentric scientist, a theorist, completely immersed in his scientific research, far from reality and not understanding it. Professor Vladimir Ignatievich Persikov was 58 years old, “his head is wonderful, bulging, bald, with a tuft of yellowish hair sticking out at the sides.”
The second most important image in the system of characters in the story is the image of A.S. Rokka. The very appearance of Rock is presented in the story as the personification of the era of military communism, a time absolutely alien and hostile to Bulgakov and personifying for him the essence of the proletarian revolution: “He was terribly old-fashioned. In 1919, this man would have been completely out of place on the streets of the capital, he would have been tolerable in 1924, at the beginning of it, but in 1928 he was strange. While the most backward part of the proletariat - the bakers - wore jackets, when the French was a rarity in Moscow - an old-fashioned suit, abandoned completely at the end of 1924, the one who entered was wearing a leather double-breasted jacket, green trousers, windings and boots on his feet, and on his side is a huge old-style Mauser pistol in a yellow broken holster.” It is curious that, according to the narrator, this man would have been tolerable precisely at the beginning of 1924. I think that we have Bulgakov’s unambiguous indication of the time of Lenin’s death, and, therefore, Rock personifies here the Leninist era, which, as it seems to the author, has gone into the irrevocable past.
The main event in the story is the discovery of the scientist Persikov. Outwardly, this event is nothing more than an artist’s joke. While setting up a microscope for work, Persikov accidentally discovered that when the mirror and lens move, some kind of red ray appears, which, as it soon turns out, has an amazing effect on living organisms: they become incredibly active, angry, multiply rapidly and grow to enormous sizes. But Persikov’s brilliant invention in the conditions of Bolshevik Russia leads to confusion and devilry, which is associated with the end of the world.
It all started with a domestic misunderstanding. “Eternal chaos, eternal disgrace, “some kind of indescribable disgrace,” as a result of which the addresses were mixed up with eggs: instead of snake eggs, the professor was brought “those chicken eggs,” and Rokka, instead of a pile of chicken eggs, was brought only three boxes of eggs.
Events are developing rapidly. When Persikov realized the terrible mistake, it was already too late: “something monstrous” was happening in the Smolensk region. Rokk bred snakes instead of chickens, and they produced the same phenomenal clutch as frogs.” The snakes moved towards Moscow. Nothing could stop them. Death threatened the entire state. Moscow became quiet, and then a mad panic began, fires and looting. As a result of the pogrom perpetrated by an angry, uncontrollable crowd, the Institute engaged in the laboratory breeding of “new life” is burned down, the chamber that generated the ill-fated red ray is broken, the experimenter himself, Professor Persikov, is killed and torn to pieces by the crowd, and with him Pankrat and the servant Marya Stepanovna. And only the traditional Russian frost, which miraculously broke out “on the night from August 19 to 20, 1928” (“a frosty god on a car,” Bulgakov ironizes in the title of Chapter XII of the story), saves Russia from a catastrophe of terrible proportions. Giant reptiles, like ancient dinosaurs of the Mesozoic era, froze to death on the approach to Moscow. “Were dead” were countless snake, crocodiles and ostrich eggs that covered the “forests, fields, vast swamps” of Soviet Russia.
The plot of “Fatal Eggs” contains many of the most incredible events and coincidences. This is the chicken pestilence that came out of nowhere, and the accidental discovery of Persikov, and the confusion with the eggs, and the eighteen-degree frost in August, and the fact that neither the chicken plague nor the invasion of reptiles for some reason spread outside the country, and much more. It’s as if the author deliberately stirs up such contingencies, without caring that they are in any way plausible. But behind the allegorical images and paintings, it is not difficult to discern real or at least quite possible events.
“Fatal Eggs” is not just a satire, but a warning against excessive enthusiasm for the long-established, essentially open red ray, or, in other words, revolutionary progress, revolutionary methods of building a new life. They do not always and not in everything go for the benefit of the people, the writer argued, but can be fraught with catastrophically grave consequences, because they awaken enormous energy in people who are not only thoughtful, honest and aware of their responsibility to the people, but also ignorant and disorderly. Sometimes this process lifts such people to enormous heights, and its further course depends a lot on them.
The most bitter thing was that Bulgakov was not mistaken even in the timing. It was in 1928 that a nationwide disaster began, which was called the general collectivization of agriculture and the elimination of the kulaks as a class, and caused enormous damage to the country.
An apocalypse actually occurred in Russia, which M.A. Bulgakov warned against in his satirical story “Fatal Eggs.”
3. The experiment of Professor Preobrazhensky and its consequences in the story “Heart of a Dog.”
The story is based on a great experiment. Professor Preobrazhensky, an elderly man, lives alone in a beautiful, comfortable apartment. the author admires the culture of his life, his appearance - Mikhail Afanasyevich himself loved aristocracy in everything, at one time he even wore a monocle.
The professor who transforms the dog into a human bears the name Preobrazhensky. And the action itself takes place on Christmas Eve. Meanwhile, by all possible means the writer points out the unnaturalness of what is happening, that this is an anti-creation, a parody of Christmas. And based on these signs, we can say that in “Heart of a Dog” the motives of Bulgakov’s last and best work - a novel about the devil - are already visible.
The proud and majestic Professor Preobrazhensky, who spouts ancient aphorisms, is a luminary of Moscow genetics, a brilliant surgeon engaged in profitable operations to rejuvenate aging ladies and lively elders: the author's irony is merciless - sarcasm in relation to the prosperous Nepmen.
But the professor plans to improve nature itself, he decides to compete with Life itself, to create a new person, and performs the main work of his life - a unique operation - an experiment, transplanting a human pituitary gland into the dog Sharik from a 28-year-old man who died a few hours before the operation. This man, Klim Petrovich Chugunkin, was sued three times. “Profession is playing the balalaika in taverns. Small in stature, poorly built. The liver is dilated (alcohol). The cause of death was a stab in the heart in a pub.”
As a result of a most complex operation, an ugly, primitive creature appeared - a non-human, who completely inherited the “proletarian” essence of his “ancestor”. The first words he uttered were swearing, the first distinct words: “bourgeois.” And then - the street words: “don’t push!” “scoundrel”, “get off the bandwagon”, etc. He was a disgusting man of short stature and unattractive appearance. The hair on his head grew coarse... His forehead was striking in its small height. Almost directly above the black threads of the eyebrows, a thick head brush began.” He “dressed up” in the same ugly and vulgar way.
The smile of life is that as soon as Sharikov stands on his hind legs, he is ready to oppress, drive into a corner the “father” who gave birth to him - the professor.
And this humanoid creature demands from the professor a document on residence, confident that the house committee, which “protects interests,” will help him with this.
Whose interests, may I ask?
It is known whose - labor element. Philip Philipovich rolled his eyes.
Why are you a hard worker?
Yes, we know, not a NEPman.
From this verbal duel, taking advantage of the professor’s confusion about his origin (“you are, so to speak, an unexpectedly appeared creature, a laboratory one”), the homunculus emerges victorious and demands that he be given the “hereditary” surname Sharikov, and he chooses the name for himself - Poligraf Poligrafovich. Sharikov is becoming more impudent every day. In addition, he finds an ally - theorist Shvonder. It is he, Shvonder, who demands the issuance of the document to Sharikov, claiming that the document is the most important thing in the world.
The scary thing is that the bureaucratic system does not need the science of a professor. It costs her nothing to appoint anyone as a person. Any nonentity, even an empty place, can be taken and appointed as a person. Well, of course, formalize it accordingly and reflect it, as expected, in the documents. By setting Sharikov against the professor, Shvonder does not understand that someone else could easily set Sharikov against Shvonder himself. A person with the heart of a dog just needs to point out anyone, say that he is an enemy, and Sharikov will humiliate him, destroy him, etc. How reminiscent this is of Soviet times and especially the thirties...
The finest hour for Poligraf Poligrafovich was his “service”.
He presents the stunned professor with a paper stating that Comrade Sharikov is the head of the department for clearing the city of stray animals. Of course, Shvonder arranged for him there. When asked why he smells so disgusting, the monster replies:
Well, well, it smells... well known: according to its specialty. Yesterday
cats were strangled - strangled...
So Bulgakov’s Sharik made a dizzying leap: from stray dogs to orderlies to cleanse the city of stray dogs (and cats, of course). Well, pursuing one’s own is a characteristic feature of all Sharikovs. They destroy their own, as if covering up traces of their own origin...
The last, final chord of Sharikov’s activity is a denunciation-libel against Professor Preobrazhensky.
It should be noted that it was then, in the thirties, that denunciation became one of the foundations of a “socialist” society, which would be more correctly called totalitarian. Because only a totalitarian regime can be based on denunciation.
Sharikov is alien to conscience, shame, and morality. He has no human qualities other than meanness, hatred, anger...
It’s good that on the pages of the story the sorcerer-professor managed to reverse the transformation of a man-monster into an animal, into a dog. It’s good that the professor understood that nature does not tolerate violence against itself. Alas, in real life the Sharikovs won, they turned out to be tenacious, crawling out of all the cracks. Self-confident, arrogant, confident in their sacred rights to everything, semi-literate lumpens brought our country to the deepest crisis, because the Bolshevik-Shvonder thesis of the “great leap of socialist revolution”, mocking disregard for the laws of evolution could only give birth to the Sharikovs.
4. Lessons learned from analyzing The Fatal Eggs and The Heart of a Dog.
Everything that was happening around and what was called the construction of socialism, was perceived by Bulgakov precisely as an experiment - huge in scale and more than dangerous. To attempts to create a new perfect society by revolutionary, i.e. methods that did not exclude violence, he was extremely skeptical about educating a new, free person using the same methods. For him, this was such an interference in the natural course of things, the consequences of which could be disastrous, including for the “experimenters” themselves. In M. Bulgakov’s diary (“Under Heel. My Diary”), there is a point of view of a witness, ironically observing from the sidelines a grandiose social experiment (“It would be interesting to know how long the “Union of Socialist Republics” will exist in this situation”), and prophetic eschatological intonations (“Yes, this will all end somehow. I believe...”). The author warns readers about this with his works.
The stories “Fatal Eggs” and “Heart of a Dog,” in my opinion, are distinguished by an extremely clear author’s idea. Briefly, it can be formulated as follows: for the first time, Bulgakov’s rejection of revolutionary changes definitely manifested itself, and the revolution that took place in Russia was not the result of the natural socio-economic and spiritual development of society, but an irresponsible and premature experiment; therefore it is necessary to return the country, if possible, to its former natural state.
CONCLUSION
In the story “Heart of a Dog,” the professor corrects his mistake - Sharikov turns into a dog again. He is happy with his fate and with himself. But in life such experiments are irreversible. And Bulgakov was able to warn about this at the very beginning of those destructive transformations that began in our country in 1917 after the revolution, when all the conditions were created for the appearance of a huge number of balls with dog hearts. The totalitarian system greatly contributes to this. Probably due to the fact that these monsters have penetrated into all areas of life, that they are still among us, Russia is now going through difficult times. The Sharikovs, with their truly canine vitality, no matter what, will go over the heads of others everywhere. The heart of a dog in alliance with the human mind is the main threat of our time.
In the course of the work, an attempt was made to prove that stories written at the beginning of the twentieth century remain relevant and today, serve as a warning to future generations. Today is so close to yesterday... At first glance, it seems that outwardly everything has changed, that the country has become different. But consciousness, stereotypes, the way of thinking of people will not change in either ten or twenty years - more than one generation will pass before the Sharikovs disappear from our lives, before people become different, before the vices described by Bulgakov in his immortal works disappear . How I want to believe that this time will come!...
These are sad thoughts about the consequences (on the one hand possible, on the other - accomplished) of the interaction of three forces: apolitical science, aggressive social rudeness and spiritual power reduced to the level of a house committee.
List of sources used.
1. Beznosov E.L. Lecture 4. The image of post-revolutionary Soviet reality in Bulgakov’s story “Fatal Eggs” and the images of “new” people in the satirical story “Heart of a Dog.” // “Literature. – 2004.- No. 38.
2. Bulgakov M.A. Under the Heel: My Diary // Ogonyok. – 1989. - No. 51.
3. Bulgakov M. Heart of a Dog: A Novel. Stories. Stories. –M.: ZAO Publishing House EKSMO – Press, 1999.
4. M.A. Bulgakov. Dog's heart. Reference materials. 11 cells/automatic state THEM. Mikhailova.-M.: Bustard, 1998.
5. Bulgakov M.A. Collection cit.: In 5 vols. M., 1989-1990. T.2.
6. Kamakhina T.V. Professor Preobrazhensky's experiment//Literature at school. – 2002. - No. 7.
7. Kireev Ruslan. Bulgakov. Last flight//Literature.-2004.- No. 32.
8. Petrov V.B. Mikhail Bulgakov looks to the future./ /Literature at school.-2002.- No. 7.
9. Chekalov P.K. Canine and human in M.A. Bulgakov’s story “Heart of a Dog”.//Literature.-2004.- No. 8.
10. Yablokov E.A. Motives of Mikhail Bulgakov's prose. M., 1997.
One of the sources for the plot of the story was the novel by the famous British science fiction writer H.G. Wells “Food of the Gods”. There we are talking about wonderful food that accelerates the growth of living organisms and the development of intellectual abilities in giant people, and the growth of the spiritual and physical capabilities of humanity leads in the novel to a more perfect world order and a collision of the world of the future and the world of the past - the world of giants with the world of pygmies. In Bulgakov, however, the giants turn out to be not intellectually advanced human individuals, but especially aggressive reptiles. “The Fatal Eggs” also reflected another of Wells’s novels, “The Struggle of the Worlds,” where the Martians who conquered the Earth suddenly die from terrestrial microbes. The same fate awaits the hordes of reptiles approaching Moscow, who fall victim to the fantastic August frosts.
Among the sources of the story there are also more exotic ones. Thus, the poet Maximilian Voloshin, who lived in Koktebel, Crimea, sent Bulgakov a clipping from a Feodosia newspaper in 1921, which said “about the appearance in the area of the Kara-Dag mountain of a huge reptile, which a company of Red Army soldiers was sent to capture.” The writer and literary critic Viktor Borisovich Shklovsky, who served as Shpolyansky’s prototype in the “White Guard,” in his book “Sentimental Journey” (1923), cites rumors that circulated in Kyiv at the beginning of 1919 and probably fed Bulgakov’s fantasy:
“They said that the French have a violet ray with which they can blind all the Bolsheviks, and Boris Mirsky wrote a feuilleton “Sick Beauty” about this ray. Beauty is an old world that needs to be treated with a violet ray. And never before had the Bolsheviks been so feared as at that time. They said that the British - people who were not sick told this - that the British had already landed herds of monkeys in Baku, trained in all the rules of the military system. They said that these monkeys cannot be propagated, that they go into attacks without fear, that they will defeat the Bolsheviks.
They showed with their hand the height of these monkeys a yard above the floor. They said that when one such monkey was killed during the capture of Baku, it was buried with an orchestra of Scottish military music and the Scots cried.
Because the instructors of the monkey legions were the Scots.
A black wind was blowing from Russia, the black spot of Russia was growing, the “sick beauty” was raving.”
In Bulgakov, the terrible violet ray is parodically turned into a red ray of life, which also caused a lot of trouble. Instead of miraculous fighting monkeys, supposedly brought from abroad, attacking the Bolsheviks, in Bulgakov, hordes of giant, ferocious reptiles, hatched from eggs sent from abroad, approach Moscow.
Please note that there was an original edition of the story that was different from the published one. On December 27, 1924, Bulgakov read “Fatal Eggs” at a meeting of writers at the cooperative publishing house “Nikitinsky Subbotniki”. On January 6, 1925, the Berlin newspaper “Days” responded to this event in the “Russian Literary News” section:
“The young writer Bulgakov recently read the adventurous story “Fatal Eggs.” Although it is literary insignificant, it is worth getting acquainted with its plot in order to get an idea of this side of Russian literary creativity.
The action takes place in the future. The professor invents a method for the unusually rapid reproduction of eggs using red sun rays... A Soviet worker, Semyon Borisovich Rokk, steals the professor's secret and orders boxes of chicken eggs from abroad. And so it happened that at the border the eggs of reptiles and chickens were confused, and Rokk received the eggs of bare-legged reptiles. He bred them in his Smolensk province (where all the action takes place), and boundless hordes of reptiles moved towards Moscow, besieged it and devoured it. The final picture is of dead Moscow and a huge snake entwined around the bell tower of Ivan the Great.”
It is unlikely that the reviews of visitors to the Nikitin Subbotniks, most of whom Bulgakov did not give a damn about, could force the writer to change the ending of the story. There is no doubt that the first, “pessimistic” end of the story existed. Bulgakov’s neighbor in the “bad apartment,” writer Vladimir Levshin (Manasevich), cites the same version of the ending, allegedly improvised by Bulgakov in a telephone conversation with the Nedra publishing house. At that time, the text of the finale was not yet ready, but Bulgakov, writing on the fly, pretended to read from what was written: “...The story ended with a grandiose picture of the evacuation of Moscow, which is approached by hordes of giant boa constrictors.” Let us note that, according to the recollections of the secretary of the editorial office of the almanac “Nedra” P.N. Zaitsev, Bulgakov immediately transferred “Fatal Eggs” here in finished form, and, most likely, Levshin’s memories of “telephone improvisation” are a memory error. By the way, an anonymous correspondent reported to Bulgakov about the existence of “Fatal Eggs” with a different ending in a letter on March 9, 1936. It is possible that a version of the ending was written down by someone present at the reading on December 27, 1924 and later ended up in samizdat.
It is interesting that the real “pessimistic” ending almost literally coincided with the one proposed by Maxim Gorky after the publication of the story, which was published in February 1925. On May 8, he wrote to the writer Mikhail Slonimsky: “I liked Bulgakov very much, very much, but he did not finish the story. The march of the reptiles to Moscow was not used, but think what a monstrously interesting picture this is!”
Probably, Bulgakov changed the ending of the story due to the obvious censorship unacceptability of the final version with the occupation of Moscow by hordes of giant reptiles.
By the way, “Fatal Eggs” passed censorship with difficulty. On October 18, 1924, Bulgakov wrote in his diary:
“I’m still struggling with ‘Gudok’. Today I spent the day trying to get 100 rubles from Nedra. There are big difficulties with my grotesque story “Fatal Eggs”. Angarsky highlighted 20 places that need to be changed for censorship reasons. Will it pass censorship? The end of the story is spoiled because I wrote it hastily.”
Fortunately for the writer, the censorship saw in the bastards’ campaign against Moscow only a parody of the intervention of 14 states against Soviet Russia during the Civil War (the bastards were foreign, since they hatched from foreign eggs). Therefore, the capture of the capital of the world proletariat by hordes of reptiles was perceived by censors only as a dangerous hint of the possible defeat of the USSR in a future war with the imperialists and the destruction of Moscow in this war. And the curial pestilence, against which neighboring states are establishing cordons, is the revolutionary ideas of the USSR, against which the Entente proclaimed the policy of a cordon sanitaire.
However, in fact, Bulgakov’s “insolence,” for which he was afraid of ending up in “places not so remote,” was something completely different. The main character of the story is Professor Vladimir Ipatievich Persikov, the inventor of the red “ray of life”, with the help of which monstrous reptiles are born. The red ray is a symbol of the socialist revolution in Russia, carried out under the slogan of building a better future, but which brought terror and dictatorship. The death of Persikov during a spontaneous riot of the crowd, excited by the threat of an invasion of Moscow by invincible giant reptiles, personifies the danger that was fraught with the experiment launched by Lenin and the Bolsheviks to spread the “red ray” first in Russia and then throughout the world.
Vladimir Ipatievich Persikov was born on April 16, 1870, because on the day the story begins in the imaginary future of 1928, April 16, he turns 58 years old. Thus, the main character is the same age as Lenin. April 16 is also not a random date. On this day (according to modern times) in 1917, the leader of the Bolsheviks returned to Petrograd from exile. And exactly eleven years later, Professor Persikov discovered a wonderful red ray (making Persikov’s birthday on April 22 would be too transparent). For Russia, such a ray of light was the arrival of Lenin, who the next day published the famous April Theses, with a call for the development of the “bourgeois-democratic” revolution into a socialist one.
Persikov’s portrait is reminiscent of Lenin’s portrait: “The head is wonderful, like a pusher, with tufts of yellowish hair sticking out on the sides... Persikov’s face always bore a somewhat capricious imprint. On his red nose are small, old-fashioned glasses with silver frames, shiny, small eyes, tall and stooped. He spoke in a creaky, thin, croaking voice and, among other oddities, had this: when he said something weightily and confidently, the index finger of his right hand turned into a hook and squinted his eyes. And since he always spoke confidently, because his erudition in his field was absolutely phenomenal, the hook very often appeared before the eyes of Professor Persikov’s interlocutors.”
From Lenin there is a characteristic bald head with reddish hair, an oratorical gesture, a manner of speaking, and finally, the famous squinting of the eyes, which became part of Lenin’s myth. The extensive erudition that Lenin undoubtedly had also coincides, and even Lenin and Persikov speak the same foreign languages, speaking fluently in French and German. In the first newspaper report about the discovery of the red ray, the professor's name was misrepresented by the reporter as Pevsikov, which clearly indicates the burr of Vladimir Ipatievich, like Vladimir Ilyich. By the way, Persikov is named Vladimir Ipatievich only on the first page of the story, and then everyone around him calls him Vladimir Ipatiech - almost Vladimir Ilyich. Finally, the time and place of completion of the story, indicated at the end of the text - “Moscow, 1924, October” - indicate, among other things, the place and year of death of the Bolshevik leader and the month forever associated with his name thanks to the October Revolution.
In the Leninist context of the image of Persikov, the German, judging by the inscriptions on the boxes, finds its explanation for the origin of the eggs of reptiles, which then, under the influence of a red ray, almost captured (and in the first edition even captured) Moscow. After all, after the February Revolution, Lenin and his comrades were transported from Switzerland to Russia through Germany in a sealed carriage (it is no coincidence that the eggs that arrived at Rokk, which he mistakes for chicken eggs, are covered with labels all around).
The likening of the Bolsheviks to giant reptiles marching on Moscow was made in a letter from a nameless, insightful Bulgakov reader on March 9, 1936: “... Among other reptiles, undoubtedly, the unfree press hatched from the fatal egg.”
Among Persikov's prototypes was the famous pathologist Alexey Ivanovich Abrikosov, whose surname is parodied in the surname of Vladimir Ipatich. Abrikosov had just dissected Lenin’s corpse and extracted his brain. In the story, this brain is, as it were, handed over to the scientist who extracted it, unlike the Bolsheviks, a gentle man, not a cruel one, and passionately passionate about zoology, and not the socialist revolution.
Bulgakov’s idea of a ray of life could have been prompted by his acquaintance with the discovery in 1921 by biologist Alexander Gavrilovich Gurvich of mitogenetic radiation, under the influence of which mitosis (cell division) occurs.
The Chicken Pestilence is a parody of the tragic famine of 1921 in the Volga region. Persikov is a comrade of the chairman of Dobrokur, an organization designed to help eliminate the consequences of the death of the chicken population in the USSR. Dobrokur's prototype was clearly the Famine Relief Committee, created in July 1921 by a group of public figures and scientists opposed to the Bolsheviks. The Committee was headed by former ministers of the Provisional Government S.N. Prokopovich, N.M. Kishkin and a prominent figure in the liberal movement E.D. Kuskova. The Soviet government used the names of the members of this organization to receive foreign aid, which, however, was often used not at all to help the starving, but for the needs of the party elite and the world revolution. Already at the end of August 1921, the Committee was abolished, and its leaders and many ordinary participants were arrested. It is interesting that Persikov also died in August. His death symbolizes, among other things, the collapse of the attempts of the non-party intelligentsia to establish civilized cooperation with the totalitarian government.
L.E. Belozerskaya believed that “describing the appearance and some habits of Professor Persikov, M.A. I started from the image of a living person, my relative, Evgeniy Nikitich Tarnovsky,” a professor of statistics, with whom they had to live at one time. The image of Persikov could also reflect some features of Bulgakov’s uncle on his mother’s side, the surgeon N.M. Pokrovsky.
In “Fatal Eggs,” Bulgakov, for the first time in his work, raised the problem of the responsibility of the scientist and the state for the use of a discovery that could harm humanity. The fruits of the discovery can be used by unenlightened and self-confident people, and even those with unlimited power. And then a catastrophe can happen much sooner than general prosperity.
Criticism after the release of “Fatal Eggs” quickly saw through the political hints hidden in the story. The Bulgakov archive contains a typewritten copy of an excerpt from an article by critic M. Lirov (Moisey Litvakov) about Bulgakov’s work, published in 1925 in issues 5–6 of the magazine “Print and Revolution”. Bulgakov emphasized here the most dangerous places for himself: “But the real record was broken by M. Bulgakov with his “story” “Fatal Eggs”. This is truly something remarkable for a “Soviet” almanac.” A typewritten copy of this article has been preserved in Bulgakov’s archive, where the writer underlined the phrase quoted above with a blue pencil, and with a red pencil the phrase Vladimir Ipatievich, used by Lirov seven times, of which only once with the surname Persikov.
M. Lirov continued:
“Professor Vladimir Ipatievich Persikov made an extraordinary discovery - he discovered a red ray of sunlight, under the influence of which the eggs of, say, frogs instantly turn into tadpoles, the tadpoles quickly grow into huge frogs, which immediately multiply and immediately begin mutual destruction. And the same applies to all living creatures. Such were the amazing properties of the red ray discovered by Vladimir Ipatievich. This discovery was quickly learned in Moscow, despite Vladimir Ipatievich’s conspiracy. The nimble Soviet press became very agitated (here is a picture of the morals of the Soviet press, lovingly copied from life... the worst tabloid press of Paris, London and New York). Now “gentle voices” from the Kremlin began to ring on the phone, and Soviet... confusion began.
And then a disaster struck the Soviet country: a devastating epidemic of chickens swept through it. How to get out of a difficult situation? But who usually brings the USSR out of all disasters? Of course, GPU agents. And then there was one security officer Rokk (Rock), who had a state farm at his disposal, and this Rokk decided to restore chicken breeding in his state farm with the help of the discovery of Vladimir Ipatievich.
The Kremlin received an order to Professor Persikov to provide his complex scientific apparatus for temporary use to Rokku for the needs of restoring chicken breeding. Persikov and his assistant, of course, are outraged and indignant. And really, how can such complex devices be provided to laymen?
After all, Rokk can cause disasters. But the “gentle voices” from the Kremlin are relentless. It’s okay, the security officer - he knows how to do everything.
Rokk received devices that operate using a red ray and began to operate on his state farm.
But a disaster ensued - and here's why: Vladimir Ipatievich prescribed reptile eggs for his experiments, and Rokk prescribed chicken eggs for his work. Soviet transport, naturally, mixed everything up, and instead of chicken eggs, Rokk received the “fatal eggs” of the bastards. Instead of chickens, Rokk bred huge reptiles that devoured him, his employees, the surrounding population and rushed in huge masses to the entire country, mainly to Moscow, destroying everything in their path. The country was declared under martial law, the Red Army was mobilized, whose troops died in heroic but fruitless battles. Danger was already threatening Moscow, but then a miracle happened: in August, terrible frosts suddenly struck, and all the reptiles died. Only this miracle saved Moscow and the entire USSR.
But a terrible riot occurred in Moscow, during which the “inventor” of the red ray himself, Vladimir Ipatievich, died. Crowds of people burst into his laboratory and shouted: “Beat him!” World villain! You have unleashed the reptiles!” - they tore him to pieces.
Everything fell into place. Although the assistant of the late Vladimir Ipatievich continued his experiments, he failed to open the red beam again.”
The critic persistently called Professor Persikov Vladimir Ipatievich, also emphasizing that he was the inventor of the red ray, i.e., as it were, the architect of the October Socialist Revolution. It was made clear to the powers that be that behind Vladimir Ipatievich Persikov the figure of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was visible, and “Fatal Eggs” was a libelous satire on the late leader and the communist idea as a whole. M. Lirov focused the attention of possible biased readers of the story on the fact that Persikov died during a popular revolt, that they were killing him with the words “world villain” and “you have dissolved the bastards.” Here one could see an allusion to Lenin as the proclaimed leader of the world revolution, as well as an association with the famous “Hydra of revolution”, as opponents of Soviet power expressed themselves (the Bolsheviks, in turn, spoke of the “Hydra of counter-revolution”). It is interesting that in the play “Running” ”, completed in the year when the action of “Fatal Eggs” takes place, the “eloquent” messenger Krapilin calls the hangman Khludov “the world’s beast.”
And the death of the “inventor of the red ray” at the hands of the indignant “crowds of the people” (Bulgakov does not have such an exalted expression) could hardly have pleased the communists in power. Lirov was afraid to openly declare that Lenin was parodied in the story (he himself could be prosecuted for such inappropriate associations), but he hinted at this, we repeat, very directly and transparently. Wells did not deceive him. The critic argued that “by mentioning the name of his ancestor Wells, as many are now inclined to do, Bulgakov’s literary face does not become any clearer. And what kind of Wells is this, really, when here the same boldness of fiction is accompanied by completely different attributes? The similarity is purely external...” Lirov, like other Bulgakov’s ill-wishers, sought, of course, to clarify not the literary, but the political face of the writer.
By the way, the mention of Wells in “Fatal Eggs” could also have a political meaning. The great science fiction writer, as you know, visited our country and wrote the book “Russia in the Dark” (1921), where, in particular, he spoke about his meetings with Lenin and called the Bolshevik leader, who spoke with inspiration about the future fruits of the GOELRO plan, “a Kremlin dreamer.” Bulgakov depicts Persikov as a “Kremlin dreamer”, detached from the world and immersed in his scientific plans. True, he does not sit in the Kremlin, but he constantly communicates with the Kremlin leaders during the course of the action.
The hopes that critics in the service of power, in contrast to thoughtful and sympathetic readers, would not perceive the anti-communist orientation of “Fatal Eggs” and would not understand who exactly was parodied in the image of the main character, did not materialize (although the purposes of disguise were supposed to serve and transferring the action to a fantastic future, and obvious borrowings from Wells’s novels “Food of the Gods” and “War of the Worlds”). Alert critics understood everything.
M. Lirov, skilled in literary denunciations (only literary ones?) and not knowing in the 1920s that he would perish during the great purge of 1937, sought to read and show “who should” even what in “Fatal Eggs” it was not, without stopping at direct fraud. The critic argued that Rokk, who played the main role in the tragedy that unfolded, was a security officer, an employee of the GPU. Thus, a hint was made that the story parodied real episodes of the struggle for power that unfolded in the last years of Lenin’s life and in the year of his death, where the security officer Rokk (or his prototype F.E. Dzerzhinsky) found himself at one with some “gentle voices” in the Kremlin and is leading the country to disaster with his inept actions.
In fact, Rokk is not a security officer at all, although he conducts his experiments in the “Red Ray” under the protection of GPU agents.
He is a participant in the Civil War and Revolution, into the abyss of which he throws himself, “having replaced the flute with the destructive Mauser,” and after the war “he edits a “huge newspaper” in Turkestan, having managed, as a member of the “high economic commission,” to become famous “for his amazing work on irrigating the Turkestan region "".
The obvious prototype of Rocca is the editor of the newspaper “Communist” and poet G.S. Astakhov, one of the main persecutors of Bulgakov in Vladikavkaz in 1920–1921, although similarities with F.E. Dzerzhinsky, who headed the Supreme Council of the National Economy of the country, can also be considered if desired. see. In “Notes on Cuffs” a portrait of Astakhov is given: “brave with an eagle face and a huge revolver on his belt.” Rokk, like Astakhov, walks around with a Mauser and edits a newspaper, only not in the Caucasus, but in the equally outlying Turkestan. Instead of the art of poetry, to which Astakhov considered himself involved, who reviled Pushkin and considered himself clearly above the “sun of Russian poetry,” Rock is committed to the art of music. Before the revolution, he was a professional flutist, and then the flute remained his main hobby. That is why he tries at the end, like an Indian fakir, to charm a giant anaconda by playing the flute, but without success.
If we accept that one of Rock’s prototypes could have been L.D. Trotsky, who actually lost the struggle for power in 1923–1924 (Bulgakov noted this in his diary), then one cannot help but marvel at completely mystical coincidences. Trotsky, like Rokk, played the most active role in the revolution and the Civil War, being the chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council. At the same time, he was also involved in economic affairs, in particular, restoring transport, but switched entirely to economic work after leaving the military department in January 1925. In particular, Trotsky briefly headed the main concession committee. Rokk arrived in Moscow and received a well-deserved rest in 1928. A similar thing happened to Trotsky almost at the same time. In the fall of 1927, he was removed from the Central Committee and expelled from the party, at the beginning of 1928 he was exiled to Alma-Ata, and literally a year later he was forced to leave the USSR forever, disappear from the country. Needless to say, all these events occurred after the creation of the “Fatal Eggs”. Lirov wrote his article in mid-1925, during a period of further aggravation of the internal party struggle, and, apparently, counting on the inattention of readers, he tried to attribute to Bulgakov its reflection in “Fatal Eggs,” written almost a year earlier.
Bulgakov's story did not go unnoticed by OPTU informants. One of them reported on February 22, 1928:
“The most implacable enemy of Soviet power is the author of “The Days of the Turbins” and “Zoyka’s Apartment” Mikhail. Afanasyevich Bulgakov, former Smenovekhovite. One can simply be amazed at the long-suffering and tolerance of the Soviet government, which still does not prevent the dissemination of Bulgakov’s book (ed. “Nedra”) “Fatal Eggs.” This book is a brazen and outrageous slander against the Red Power. She vividly describes how, under the influence of a red ray, reptiles gnawing each other were born and went to Moscow. There is a vile place there, an evil nod towards the late Comrade LENIN, that there lies a dead toad, which even after death remained with an evil expression on its face (here we mean a giant frog, bred by Persikov with the help of a red ray and killed with potassium cyanide due to her aggressiveness, and “there was an evil expression on her face even after death” - here Seksot saw an allusion to Lenin’s body, preserved in the mausoleum - B.S.). How this book of his is circulating freely is impossible to understand. They read it voraciously. Bulgakov enjoys the love of young people, he is popular. His earnings reach 30,000 rubles. in year. He paid 4,000 rubles in tax alone. Because he paid because he was going to go abroad.
These days he was met by Lerner (we are talking about the famous Pushkinist N.O. Lerner. - B.S.). Bulgakov is very offended by Soviet power and is very dissatisfied with the current situation. You can't work at all. Nothing is certain. We definitely need either war communism again, or complete freedom. The revolution, says Bulgakov, should be made by the peasant who finally speaks his real native language. In the end, there are not so many communists (and among them there are “those like them”), and there are tens of millions of offended and indignant peasants. Naturally, at the very first war, communism will be swept out of Russia, etc. Here they are, the thoughts and hopes that are swarming in the head of the author of “Fatal Eggs,” who is now preparing to take a walk abroad. It would be completely unpleasant to release such a “bird” abroad... By the way, in a conversation with Lerner, Bulgakov touched upon the contradictions in the policy of the Soviet government: - On the one hand they shout - save. On the other hand, if you start saving, you will be considered a bourgeois. Where is the logic?
Of course, one cannot vouch for the literal accuracy of the unknown agent’s transmission of Bulgakov’s conversation with Lerner. However, it is quite possible that it was the informer’s tendentious interpretation of the story that contributed to the fact that Bulgakov was never released abroad. In general, what the writer said to the Pushkin scholar agrees well with the thoughts captured in his diary “Under the Heel.” There, in particular, there are discussions about the likelihood of a new war and the inability of the Soviet government to withstand it. In an entry dated October 26, 1923, Bulgakov cited his conversation on this topic with a baker neighbor:
“The authorities consider the actions of the authorities to be fraudulent (bonds, etc.). He said that two Jewish commissars in the Krasnopresnensky Council were beaten by those who showed up for mobilization for insolence and threats with a revolver. I don't know if it's true. According to the baker, the mood of the mobilized is very unpleasant. He, a baker, complained that hooliganism was developing among young people in the villages. The guy has the same thing in his head as everyone else - in his own mind, he understands perfectly well that the Bolsheviks are swindlers, he doesn’t want to go to war, he has no idea about the international situation. We are wild, dark, unhappy people.”
Obviously, in the first edition of the story, the capture of Moscow by foreign reptiles symbolized the future defeat of the USSR in the war, which at that moment the writer considered inevitable. The invasion of reptiles also personified the ephemerality of the NEP prosperity, depicted in the fantastic year of 1928 rather parodically.
“Fatal Eggs” received interesting responses abroad as well. Bulgakov kept in his archive a typewritten copy of a TASS message dated January 24, 1926, entitled “Churchill is afraid of socialism.” It said that on January 22, British Chancellor of the Exchequer Winston Churchill, speaking in connection with labor strikes in Scotland, indicated that “the terrible conditions existing in Glasgow give rise to communism,” but “we do not want to see Moscow crocodile eggs on our table.” (emphasized by Bulgakov - B.S.). I am confident that the time will come when the Liberal Party will give every possible assistance to the Conservative Party to eradicate these doctrines. I am not afraid of the Bolshevik revolution in England, but I am afraid of the attempt of the socialist majority to arbitrarily introduce socialism. One tenth of the socialism that ruined Russia would have completely ruined England...” (It is difficult to doubt the validity of these words today, seventy years later.)
In “Fatal Eggs,” Bulgakov parodied V.E. Meyerhold, mentioning “the theater named after the late Vsevolod Meyerhold, who died, as is known, in 1927, during the production of Pushkin’s “Boris Godunov,” when the trapeze with naked boyars collapsed.” This phrase goes back to one humorous conversation in the editorial office of Gudok, which was relayed by the head of the “fourth page” of this newspaper, Ivan Semenovich Ovchinnikov:
“The beginning of the twenties... Bulgakov is sitting in the next room, but for some reason he brings his sheepskin coat to our hanger every morning. The sheepskin coat is one of a kind: it has no fasteners and no belt. Put your hands in the sleeves - and you can consider yourself dressed. Mikhail Afanasyevich himself certifies the sheepskin coat as follows - Russian awesome. Fashion of the late seventeenth century. The chronicle mentions it for the first time in 1377. Now Meyerhold’s Duma boyars are falling from the second floor in such obscenities. The injured actors and spectators are taken to the Sklifosovsky Institute. I recommend watching..."
Obviously, Bulgakov assumed that by 1927 - exactly 550 years after the first mention of the ohabnya in the chronicles, Meyerhold's creative evolution would reach the point where the actors playing the boyars would be stripped of the okhabnya and left in what their mother gave birth to, so that only direction and technique acting was replaced by all historical scenery. After all, Vsevolod Emilievich said at one of his lectures in February 1924 about the production of “Godunov”: “... Dmitry had to lie on the couch, certainly half naked... even his body would certainly be shown... by removing stockings, for example, from Godunov, we would force him to approach differently to the whole tragedy..."
It is curious that, as in the lost early story “The Green Serpent,” the motif of a snake, and even in combination with a woman, appears again in the writer in 1924 in the story “Fatal Eggs.” In this story, Bulgakov’s fantasy created the “Red Ray” state farm in the Smolensk province near Nikolskoye, where director Alexander Semenovich Rokk conducts a tragic experiment with the eggs of reptiles - and the hatched giant anaconda devours his wife Manya before his eyes. Maybe “The Green Serpent” was based on Bulgakov’s Smolensk impressions and he wrote the story itself back then.
By the way, Bulgakov’s acquaintance with M.M. Zoshchenko could also be reflected here. The fact is that Mikhail Mikhailovich in November 1918 worked as a poultry farmer (officially the position was called “instructor in rabbit breeding and chicken breeding”) at the Smolensk state farm “Mankovo” near the city of Krasny and restored the number of chickens there after the previous pestilence. Perhaps this circumstance prompted him to choose the Smolensk province, so familiar to Bulgakov as a zemstvo doctor, as the location for the experiment “to restore the number of chickens in the republic.” Zoshchenko and Bulgakov met no later than May 10, 1926, when they performed together in Leningrad at a literary evening. But it is quite possible that they met back in 1924.
Although Bulgakov and Zoshchenko were in different districts of the Smolensk province almost at the same time, the psychology of the peasants was the same everywhere. And hatred of the landowners was combined with the fear that they might still return.
But Bulgakov also saw the peasant revolt in Ukraine and knew that the naive darkness of the peasants was easily combined with incredible cruelty.
“First Color” in the name bears a certain echo with the Amphitheater “Fire Color”. It seems that a later edition of this early story could have been the famous 1924 story “Khan’s Fire.” It describes a fire that actually occurred on the Muravishniki estate on the eve of the February Revolution. True, in the story it is dated to the early 20s.
This same story, by the way, reflected one of Henryk Sienkiewicz’s heroes, the Tatar Asia from “Pan Volodyevsky,” the son of the Tatar leader, the real-life Tugai Bey, who died at Berestechko (Tugai Bey himself acts as a minor character in the first novel of the trilogy - “ Fire and sword"). Asia serves the Poles, but then betrays them and burns the place where the Tatar banner he leads stands. In Bulgakov’s story “Khan’s Fire,” the last representative of the princely family of Tugai-begs, like his literary prototype, obsessed with the thirst for destruction and revenge, burns his estate, turned into a museum, so that the rebellious people could not use it. Let us note that in 1929, one of the chapters of the first edition of “The Master and Margarita,” “Mania Furibunda,” submitted on May 8 for separate publication in the almanac “Nedra,” was signed by the author with the pseudonym “K. Tugai.”
The Yusupov estate served as the prototype for the estate in Khan's Fire, probably because Bulgakov was specifically interested in the story of the murder of Grigory Rasputin, in which Prince Felix Feliksovich Yusupov (the younger) played a prominent role. In 1921, Bulgakov was going to write a play about Rasputin and Nicholas II. In a letter to his mother in Kyiv on November 17, 1921, he asked to convey to his sister Nadya: “... We need all the material for the historical drama - everything that concerns Nikolai and Rasputin in the period of 16 and 17 (murder and coup). Newspapers, descriptions of the palace, memoirs, and most of all Purishkevich’s “Diary” (Vladimir Mitrofanovich Purishkevich, one of the leaders of the extreme right in the State Duma, monarchist, together with Prince F.F. Yusupov and Grand Duke Dmitry Pavlovich, organized the murder of G.E. Rasputin in December 1916, described in detail in a posthumously published diary. - B.S.) - to the extreme! Description of costumes, portraits, memories, etc. “I cherish the idea of creating a grandiose drama in 5 acts by the end of the 22nd year. Some sketches and plans are already ready. The thought captivates me madly... Of course, with the draining work that I do, I will never be able to write anything worthwhile, but at least the road is a dream and work on it. If the “Diary” falls into her (Nadya’s – B.S.) hands temporarily, I ask that everything about the murder with the gramophone be immediately copied verbatim from it (the gramophone was supposed to drown out the sound of the shots, and before that create the impression in Rasputin’s mind that that in the room next door there is F.F. Yusupov’s wife Irina Aleksandrovna Yusupova, the granddaughter of Alexander III and the niece of Nicholas II, whom the “elder” (Gregory. - B.S.) desired, the conspiracy of Felix and Purishkevich, Purishkevich’s reports to Nikolai, the personality of Nikolai Mikhailovich (we are talking about Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich (1859–1919), chairman of the Russian Historical Society, executed during the Red Terror. - B.S.), and send it to me in letters (I think it’s possible? Titled “Drama Material”? ) (Here is a hint at the widespread illustration of letters. - B.S.)". However, Bulgakov never wrote a play about Rasputin and Nicholas II. The writer’s very appeal to this topic speaks volumes about his disappointment in the monarchy. Due to the censorship conditions of that time in a work of any genre, Nicholas II and other representatives of the Romanov family could only be portrayed negatively. But Bulgakov himself had a rather negative attitude towards the overthrown dynasty in the early 20s. In a diary entry on April 15, 1924, he expressed himself rudely and directly in his heart: “Damn all the Romanovs!” There weren't enough of them." The unrealized concept of the historical play was obviously reflected in “Khan’s Fire.” There is a fairly strong anti-monarchist tendency here. Nicholas II in the photograph is described as “a nondescript man with a beard and mustache, looking like a regimental doctor.” In the portrait of Emperor Alexander I, “the bald head smiled insidiously in the smoke.” Nicholas I is the “white haired general”. His mistress was once an old princess, “inexhaustible in depraved invention, who throughout her life wore two glory - a dazzling beauty and a terrible Messalina.” She could well be among the outstanding libertines at Satan’s Great Ball, along with the dissolute wife of the Roman Emperor Claudius I, Valeria Messalina, who was executed in 48.”
Nicholas II is also satirically depicted in Bulgakov’s last play “Batum”. Closely connected by kinship with the imperial family, Prince Tugai-Beg is presented as a man doomed to extinction, leaving no offspring and dangerous to society with his willingness to destroy the family nest, so that it does not become the property of those whom the prince hates. If the devil did not take him, as Bulgakov wished for Romanov, then, of course, the devil brought him.
The prototype of Prince Anton Ivanovich Tugai-Beg could be the father and full namesake of the murderer Rasputin, Prince Felix Feliksovich Yusupov (the elder, born Count Sumarokov-Elston). In 1923, when the story takes place, he was 67 years old. The elder Yusupov’s wife, Zinaida Nikolaevna Yusupova, was also still alive at that time, but Bulgakov forced the wife of the hero of “Khan’s Fire” to die earlier in order to leave him completely alone, like Pontius Pilate and Woland later in “The Master and Margarita” (remember the words Woland on the Patriarchal: “Alone, alone, I am always alone”). The younger brother of Tugai-Beg, Pavel Ivanovich, mentioned in the story, who served in the horse grenadiers and died in the war with the Germans, has as his possible prototype his older brother F.F. Yusupov (younger) Count Nikolai Feliksovich Sumarokov-Elston, who was preparing to enter service in the Cavalry Corps , but killed in 1908 in a duel by Lieutenant of the Cavalry Regiment Count A.E. Manteuffel, who came from Baltic Germans.
But let's return to "Fatal Eggs". There are other parody sketches in the story. For example, the one where the fighters of the First Cavalry, at the head of which “in the same crimson hood as all the riders, rides the aging and gray-haired commander of the cavalry community who became legendary 10 years ago” - Semyon Mikhailovich Budyonny - set out on a campaign against the reptiles with thieves' song, sung in the manner of the Internationale:
Neither ace, nor queen, nor jack,
We will beat the bastards, without a doubt,
Four on the side - yours are not there...
Combining this song with the lines of “The Internationale”, we get a funny, but quite meaningful text:
Nobody will give us deliverance -
Neither ace, nor queen, nor jack.
We will achieve liberation
Four on the side - yours is not there.
A real case (or at least a widely spread rumor in Moscow) found its place here. On August 2, 1924, Bulgakov wrote in his diary a story from his friend writer Ilya Kremlev (Sven) that “the GPU regiment went to a demonstration with an orchestra that played “Everyone Adores These Girls.” The promise to “beat the bastards” in the story could, if desired, be attributed to the “red bastards” who captured Moscow, taking into account that, as Bulgakov thought, in the mid-20s, ordinary people were not at all eager to fight for the Bolsheviks. In the story, the GPU is replaced by the First Cavalry, and such forethought was not superfluous. The writer was undoubtedly familiar with evidence and rumors about the morals of the Budennovsky freemen, who were distinguished by violence and robberies. They were captured in the book of stories “Cavalry” by Isaac Babel (though in a somewhat softened form compared to the facts of his own cavalry diary).
It was quite appropriate to put a criminal song in the rhythm of the Internationale into the mouths of the Budennovites. The slang expression of professional cheaters “Four on the side - there are none of yours” is deciphered by Fima Zhiganets in the article “On the secret symbolism of one name in the novel “The Master and Margarita””: “...In the pre-revolutionary years, this proverb did not have a wide “circulation”, it was used only in a narrow circle of the criminal world. It was born among gamblers, from a situation in the game “point”. If a banker adds a nine or a ten to the ace he has in his hand (the only two cards that have four suit icons on each side; the nine has one more icon in the center, and the ten has two), this means his undoubted win. He immediately scores either 20 points or 21 (the value of an ace is 11 points). Even if the player has 20 points, a draw is interpreted in favor of the banker (“banker’s point”), and if the player immediately scored 21 points, this would mean that he automatically wins, and there is no point in buying cards for the banker. Thus, “four on the side” are four icons of a card suit, meaning the player’s inevitable loss. Later, the expression began to be used in a figurative sense to denote a hopeless situation, a loss.”
“Fatal Eggs” received critical and positive responses. Thus, Yu. Sobolev in “Dawn of the East” on March 11, 1925 assessed the story as the most significant publication in the 6th book of “Nedr”, arguing: “Only Bulgakov with his ironic-fantastic and satirical-utopian story “Fatal Eggs” unexpectedly falls out of the general, very well-intentioned and very decent tone.” The critic saw the “utopianism” of “Fatal Eggs” “in the very picture of Moscow in 1928, in which Professor Persikov again receives a “six-room apartment” and feels his entire life as it was... before October.” However, in general, Soviet criticism reacted negatively to the story as a phenomenon counteracting official ideology. Censorship became more vigilant towards the novice author, and Bulgakov’s next story, “The Heart of a Dog,” was never published during his lifetime.
“Fatal Eggs” enjoyed great reader success and even in 1930 remained one of the most requested works in libraries.
An analysis of the artistic motives of “Fatal Eggs” gives reason to speculate about how Bulgakov treated Lenin.
At first glance, this attitude of Bulgakov is quite benevolent, judging only by the image of Persikov and the censored essays discussed in the first volume of our book. The professor evokes obvious sympathy both for his tragic death, and for his genuine grief upon receiving the news of the death of his long-abandoned but still beloved wife, and for his commitment to strict scientific knowledge, and his reluctance to follow the political situation. But this is clearly not from the Leninist hypostasis of Persikov, but from two others - the Russian intellectual and the scientist-creator. Persikov had another prototype - Bulgakov's uncle, surgeon Nikolai Mikhailovich Pokrovsky. Hence, probably, Persikov’s tall stature, his bachelor lifestyle, and much more. Bulgakov, as we will now see, did not have a positive attitude towards Lenin.
The fact is that Bulgakov’s Leninism did not end with Persikov. Let's try to get ahead a little and find Lenin's traces in the novel “The Master and Margarita,” which the writer began in 1929, that is, five years after “The Fatal Eggs.” The new novel chronologically continued the story, because its action, as we will show later, also takes place in 1929 - which, as expected, came immediately after 1928 - that near future in which the events in the story unfold. Only in “The Master and Margarita” Bulgakov no longer describes the future, but the present.
To understand which hero of “The Master and Margarita” was based on Lenin, let us turn to the clipping from “Pravda” dated November 6–7, 1921, preserved in Bulgakov’s archive, with Alexander Shotman’s memoirs “Lenin in Underground.” It described how the leader of the Bolsheviks in the summer and autumn of 1917 was hiding from the Provisional Government, which declared him a German spy. Shotman, in particular, noted that “not only counterintelligence and criminal detectives were brought to their feet, but even dogs, including the famous sniffer dog Tref, were mobilized to capture Lenin” and they were helped by “hundreds of volunteer detectives among the bourgeois inhabitants” . These lines make us remember the episode of the novel when the famous police dog Tuzbuben unsuccessfully searches for Woland and his henchmen after a scandal in Variety. By the way, after February 1917, the police were officially renamed the police by the Provisional Government, so the bloodhound Tref, like Tuzbuben, is correctly called the police.
The events described by Shortman are very reminiscent in their atmosphere of the search for Woland and his retinue (after a session of black magic) and, to an even greater extent, the actions in the epilogue of the novel, when distraught ordinary people detain tens and hundreds of suspicious people and cats. The memoirist also quotes the words of Y.M. Sverdlov at the VI Party Congress that “although Lenin is deprived of the opportunity to personally attend the congress, he is invisibly present and leads it.” In exactly the same way, Woland, by his own admission to Berlioz and Bezdomny, was invisibly personally present at the trial of Yeshua, “but only secretly, incognito, so to speak,” and the writers in response suspected that their interlocutor was a German spy.
Shotman tells how, while hiding from enemies, Lenin and G.E. Zinoviev, who was with him in Razliv, changed their appearance: “Comrade. Lenin in a wig, without a mustache and beard was almost unrecognizable, but Comrade. By this time, Zinoviev’s mustache and beard had grown, his hair was cut, and he was completely unrecognizable.” Perhaps this is why Bulgakov’s professor Persikov and professor Woland both have shaved hair, and the cat Behemoth, Woland’s favorite jester, the closest to him from his entire retinue, suddenly takes on a resemblance to Zinoviev in The Master and Margarita. The plump, food-loving Zinoviev, with his mustache and beard, must have acquired something of a cat's appearance, and on a personal level he was indeed the closest to Lenin of all the Bolshevik leaders. By the way, Stalin, who replaced Lenin, treated Zinoviev as a buffoon, although later, in the 30s, he did not spare him.
Shotman, who was with Lenin both in Razliv and in Finland, recalled one of the conversations with the leader: “I very much regret that I did not study shorthand and did not write down everything that he said. But... I am convinced that Vladimir Ilyich foresaw much of what happened after the October Revolution.” In The Master and Margarita, Woland is endowed with a similar gift of foresight.
A.V. Shotman, who wrote the memoirs that fed Bulgakov’s creative imagination, was shot in 1937, and his memoirs were banned. Mikhail Afanasyevich, of course, remembered that Persikov’s prototype was identified quite easily at one time. True, then, after the death of Bulgakov, when “Fatal Eggs” was not republished for decades, even for people professionally involved in literature, the connection between the main character of the story and Lenin became far from obvious, and anyway could not be made public due to strict censorship . For the first time, as far as we know, such a connection was openly played out in the dramatization of “Fatal Eggs,” staged by E. Yelanskaya at the Moscow Sphere Theater in 1989. But Bulgakov’s contemporaries were much more directly interested in collecting incriminating evidence than their descendants, and the censorship was more vigilant. So Lenin’s endings in the novel had to be hidden more carefully, otherwise there was no way to seriously count on publication. Just likening Lenin to Satan was worth it!
The following literary source, in particular, served the purposes of camouflage: In 1923, Mikhail Zoshchenko’s story “The Dog Case” appeared. It was about an old professor conducting scientific experiments with the prostate gland in dogs (Professor Preobrazhensky also conducts similar experiments in “Heart of a Dog”), and the criminal bloodhound Trefka also appeared in the course of the action. The story was quite well known to contemporaries, and it is unlikely that anyone would compare Bulgakov’s dog Tuzbuben with it, and not with Shotman’s memoirs, which were never republished after 1921. So Bulgakov’s novel now has a kind of cover. And such a forced camouflage of one prototype by another became one of the “trademark” features of Bulgakov’s work.
The parody itself in Zoshchenko's story is based on the fact that the club is the official suit, which is why police (as well as police) dogs were often given a similar name. Before the revolution, the ace of diamonds was sewn onto the backs of criminals (Blok’s description of the revolutionaries from The Twelve immediately comes to mind: “You should have an ace of diamonds on your back”).
Of course, Woland can lay claim to the title of the most sympathetic devil in world literature, but he remains a devil. And any doubts about Bulgakov’s attitude towards Lenin completely disappear when the name of another character in “The Master and Margarita” is revealed, the prototype of which was also Ilyich.
Let us remember the dramatic artist who convinced the house manager Bosogo and other arrested people to voluntarily hand over currency and other valuables. In the final text he is called Savva Potapovich Kurolesov, but in the previous edition of 1937–1938 he was named much more transparently - Ilya Vladimirovich Akulinov (as an option - also Ilya Potapovich Burdasov). This is how this unattractive character is described: “The promised Burdasov did not hesitate to appear on stage and turned out to be elderly, shaven, in a tailcoat and white tie.
Without any preamble, he made a gloomy face, knitted his eyebrows and spoke in an unnatural voice, looking at the golden bell:
Like a young rake waiting for a date with some wicked libertine...
Further, Burdasov told a lot of bad things about himself. Nikanor Ivanovich, very gloomy, heard Burdasov admit that some unfortunate widow, howling, knelt before him in the rain, but did not touch the artist’s callous heart. Nikanor Ivanovich did not know the poet Pushkin at all before this incident, although he uttered, and often, the phrase: “Will Pushkin pay for the apartment?” - and now, having become acquainted with his work, he immediately became sad, thought and imagined a woman with children on their knees and involuntarily thought: “This bastard Burdasov!” And he, raising his voice, walked on and completely confused Nikanor Ivanovich, because he suddenly began to address someone who was not on stage, and for this absentee he himself He answered himself, and called himself now “sovereign,” now “baron,” now “father,” now “son,” now “you,” now “you.”
Nikanor Ivanovich understood only one thing: that the artist died an evil death, shouting: “Keys!” The keys are mine!“ - after that he fell to the floor, wheezing and tearing off his tie.
Having died, he stood up, shook off the dust from his tail-coat knees, bowed, smiling a false smile, and walked away amid thin applause, and the entertainer spoke like this.
Well, dear currency traders, you listened to Ilya Vladimirovich Akulinov’s wonderful performance of “The Stingy Knight.”
A woman with children, on her knees begging the “miserly knight” for a piece of bread, is not just a quote from Pushkin’s “The Stingy Knight,” but also an allusion to a famous episode from the life of Lenin. In all likelihood, Bulgakov was familiar with the contents of the article “Lenin in Power”, published in the popular Russian émigré Parisian magazine “Illustrated Russia” in 1933 by the author, hiding under the pseudonym “Chronicle” (perhaps it was the former secretary of the Organizing Bureau who fled to the West and Politburo Boris Georgievich Bazhanov). In this article we find the following interesting touch to the portrait of the Bolshevik leader:
“From the very beginning, he understood perfectly well that the peasantry would not, for the sake of the new order, not only make selfless sacrifices, but also voluntarily give up the fruits of their hard labor. And alone with his closest collaborators, Lenin, without hesitation, said exactly the opposite of what he had to say and write officially. When it was pointed out to him that even the children of the workers, that is, the very class for whose sake and in whose name the coup was carried out, were malnourished and even starving, Lenin retorted the claim with indignation:
The government cannot give them bread. Sitting here in St. Petersburg, you won’t get bread. You have to fight for bread with a rifle in your hands... If they fail to fight, they will die of hunger!..”
It is difficult to say whether the Bolshevik leader actually said this or whether we are dealing with another legend, but Lenin’s mood is reliably conveyed here.
Ilya Vladimirovich Akulinov is a parody of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Lenin). The correspondences here are obvious: Ilya Vladimirovich - Vladimir Ilyich, Ulyana - Akulina (the last two names are consistently paired in folklore). The names themselves, which form the basis of surnames, are also significant. Ulyana is a distorted Latin Juliana, that is, belonging to the Julian family, from which Julius Caesar came, whose nickname was adopted in a modified form by the Russian tsars. Akulina is a distorted Latin Aquilina, that is, eagle-like, and the eagle, as you know, is a symbol of the monarchy. Probably, Persikov’s middle name, Ipatievich, is in the same category. It appeared not only because of the consonance between Ipatich and Ilyich, but, most likely, also because in the house of engineer Ipatiev in Yekaterinburg in July 1918, on the orders of Lenin, the Romanov family was destroyed. Let us also remember that the first Romanov, before his coronation, found refuge in the Ipatiev Monastery.
Although in the early 20s Bulgakov was going to write a book about the royal family and G.E. Rasputin and was interested in all the sources related to this, he never wrote this drama, probably realizing the impossibility of adapting it to censorship conditions, which were satisfied only by frank fakes like “The Conspiracy of the Empress” by A.N. Tolstoy and P.E. Shchegolev. But Mikhail Afanasyevich was keenly interested in materials related to the fate of the last Russian Tsar.
Since the name Ilya Vladimirovich Akulinov would be too obvious a challenge to censorship, Bulgakov tried other names for this character that would make readers smile without scaring the censors. He was called, in particular, Ilya Potapovich Burdasov, which evoked associations with hunting dogs. In the end, Bulgakov named his hero Savva Potapovich Kurolesov. The character's name and patronymic are associated with the censor Savva Lukich from the play "Crimson Island" (one can also recall Lenin's popular nickname - Lukich). And the surname reminds us of the consequences for Russia of the activities of the Bolshevik leader and his comrades, who really “played the trick.” In the epilogue of the novel, the actor, like Lenin, dies an evil death - from a blow. The addresses that Akulinov-Kurolesov addresses to himself: “sovereign,” “father,” “son” are a hint both at the monarchical essence of Lenin’s power (the term “commissar power” was popular in the first years after the revolution among the anti-communist opposition), and at deification of the leader’s personality by Soviet propaganda (he is God the Son, God the Father, and God the Holy Spirit).
The fantastic story “Fatal Eggs” by Bulgakov was written in 1924 and published a year later in the magazine “Nedra”, and then in the writer’s collection “Diaboliad”. Bulgakov changed the original title, “Ray of Life,” already during the publication of the story, the plot of which develops in 1928.
For a reading diary, as well as to prepare for a literature lesson, we recommend reading online a summary of “Fatal Eggs” chapter by chapter.
Main characters
Vladimir Ipatievich Persikov- professor of zoology who discovered the “ray of life”.
Other characters
Ivanov– Persikov’s assistant, taking part in daring experiments.
Bronsky- a deft, ubiquitous journalist.
Alexander Semenovich Rokk- head of the state farm "Krasny Luch".
Chapter 1. Curriculum vitae of Professor Persikov
At 58 years old, having survived his wife’s betrayal, Vladimir Ipatievich lived a modest bachelor’s life. Like all representatives of the scientific community, food had to endure many trials in the post-revolutionary years. Not only all the experimental animals at the institute died from prolonged hunger, but even the “permanent guard of the institute, old man Vlas.” The professor had to give lectures at sub-zero temperatures in the room, and out of five rooms in his apartment, he was left with only two.
The professor threatened to go abroad, but did not keep his promise. By 1928, the situation began to improve noticeably, and Persikov perked up.
Chapter 2. Colored curl
The professor examines the results of his many experiments. Under a microscope, he observes the amoebas and notices a "colored curl like a woman's curl" - a colored beam of light indicating that the specimen is out of focus.
Persikov wants to adjust the lighting, but his hand freezes halfway - the professor's eye notices something amazing under the glass. In a state of extreme confusion, he draws the curtains, covers the microscope with a glass cover, and leaves the institute, muttering to himself: “After all, this promises God knows what!”
Chapter 3. Persikov caught
The professor finds out that under the influence of a thin red ray falling out of a colored curl, the amoebas multiplied rapidly, and then “furiously attacked each other and tore them to shreds and swallowed them.”
To repeat the unusual effect outside the microscope, Associate Professor Ivanov undertakes to build a special system of mirrors and lenses. The device is ready, and already two days after the first experiment on frog eggs, the institute is filled with thousands of huge croaking creatures. With great difficulty it is possible to “kill them with poisons” and clean the room.
Chapter 4. Drozdov's priest
Rumors about an extraordinary “ray of life” are spreading at rapid speed throughout Moscow. A fashionable journalist, Bronsky, with his ever-moving eyes, visits the professor.
Despite Persikov’s resistance, the lively journalist asks him questions and comes to the conclusion that his discovery “will cause a world revolution in animal husbandry.”
The article immediately goes to print, and the next day journalists begin to besiege the professor.
Chapter 5. Chicken story
Meanwhile, in the “county provincial town” of Steklovsk, trouble is happening - a terrible chicken pestilence begins, which wiped out all the chickens in the city in two days.
Professor Persikov continues to be harassed by journalists, and “it was simply impossible to work in such an environment.” Brought to the extreme of irritation, Vladimir Ipatievich calls the Lubyanka and asks to take action. They assure him that “no one will disturb him anymore, neither at the institute nor at home.”
Journalist Bronsky informs the professor, who does not read newspapers, about the chicken epidemic, and he joins in the fight against it.
Chapter 6. Moscow in June 1928
All of Moscow is covered with notices banning the consumption and sale of chicken eggs and chicken meat. You won’t find dishes with these products in simple canteens or expensive restaurants.
The “chicken” theme is becoming incredibly fashionable in the capital, and it is being played out in every manner not only in newspapers, but even in theaters and the circus.
Chapter 7. Rokk
Two weeks later, the chicken pestilence stops as unexpectedly as it began. During this time, “Professor Persikov became completely exhausted and worked too hard.” Having finally received the opportunity to study the amazing beam, they spend all night long “at the camera and microscope.”
On instructions from the government, Alexander Semenovich Rokk, director of the Krasny Luch state farm, comes to the professor. He takes the experimental beam chambers from the laboratory, leaving only one, the smallest one. Rokku needs the cameras to restore the chicken population.
Chapter 8. History at the state farm
Alexander Semenovich and his assistants are installing precious cameras in the former Sheremetev greenhouse. He carefully places eggs sent from abroad into them. The only thing that confuses Rok is that they are all surprisingly large and dirty.
Rokk cannot stop looking at the “spotted bright red eggs”, in which already on the third day one could feel the awakening of life. However, the director’s joy is darkened by the strange behavior of the animals: all the birds and frogs disappear from the surrounding area, and the dogs howl pitifully all night long.
The day passes "extremely excitedly" as Rokk finds neither whole eggs nor the long-awaited chicks in the chamber. Everyone goes in search of them, during which Rokk's wife is attacked by a huge snake and eats her.
Chapter 9. Live porridge
In front of the GPU agents is a “gray-haired shaking man” - this is Alexander Semenovich Rokk, before whose eyes his wife died a painful death.
The agents invite Rokku to go to the state farm for investigation, but the old man, in horror, asks to be taken to Moscow. It is decided that the director is a madman who was frightened by a boa constrictor that escaped from the circus.
The agents go to the “Red Ray” and a picturesque picture opens before their eyes. “The whole greenhouse lived like a wormy mess” - giant-sized snakes crawl along the floor, hiss and wrap themselves in balls.
The agents try to escape, but become victims of hellish creatures.
Chapter 10. Disaster
Moscow is full of extraordinary rumors about the invasion of giant snakes, ostriches and crocodiles. Professor Persikov, who, as you know, does not read newspapers, knows nothing about this. He is outraged by another circumstance - instead of a long-standing order for the supply of ostrich and anaconda eggs, he received a huge batch of ordinary chicken eggs.
The matter becomes clearer when a frightened Ivanov runs into the professor’s office with a newspaper in his hands: the professor’s “order for snake and ostrich eggs was sent to the state farm, and chicken eggs” to the institute. Realizing the scale of the tragedy, Persikov feels bad.
Chapter 11. Fight and death
A “mad electric night” is burning in Moscow: people are evacuating in panic, the cavalry army is unsuccessfully trying to stop the onslaught of huge reptiles.
A maddened crowd breaks into the institute, kills Professor Persikov and sets the building on fire.
Chapter 12. Frost god on a car
An unexpected salvation for Moscow and surrounding areas are unprecedented frosts that last for three days. “Only severe frost could stop the movements of the vile reptiles,” against which the army was powerless.
However, it takes a long time for the country to recover from Rocca’s terrible experiment: the rotting of “countless corpses of crocodiles and snakes” causes a wave of terrible epidemics. Only by the spring of next year will the situation finally stabilize.
A new building is being erected on the site of the destroyed institute, and Professor Ivanov becomes its director. He unsuccessfully tries to recreate cameras with a “ray of life”: this secret was taken to the grave by “the late professor Vladimir Ipatievich Persikov”.
Conclusion
In his work, Bulgakov raises the problem of the intervention of authoritarian power in the scientific world, which does not tolerate any violence. The consequences of the brutal pressure of ideology on science can be the most unpredictable, but always deplorable.
After reading the brief retelling of “Fatal Eggs,” we recommend reading Bulgakov’s story in its entirety.
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“Fatal Eggs,” written, according to M. Gorky, “witty and deft,” was not simply, as it might seem, a caustic satire on Soviet society of the NEP era. Bulgakov is making an attempt here to make an artistic diagnosis of the consequences of the gigantic experiment that was carried out on the “progressive part of humanity.” In particular, we are talking about the unpredictability of the invasion of reason and science into the endless world of nature and human nature itself. But wasn’t that what the wise Valery Bryusov spoke about a little earlier than Bulgakov, in the poem “The Riddle of the Sphinx” (1922)?
The World Wars under microscopes silently tell us about other universes.
But we are between them - elk calves in the forest,
And it’s easier for thoughts to sit under the windows...
There's a guinea pig in the same cage,
The same experience with chickens, with reptiles...
But before Oedipus is the solution to the Sphinx,
Prime numbers are not all solved.
It is the experience “with chickens, with reptiles,” when, under a miraculous red ray accidentally discovered by Professor Persikov, instead of elephant-like broilers, giant reptiles come to life, allows Bulgakov to show where the road paved with the best intentions leads. In fact, the result of Professor Persikov’s discovery is (in the words of Andrei Platonov) only “damage to nature.” However, what kind of discovery is this?
“The red stripe, and then the entire disk, became crowded, and an inevitable struggle began. The newly born furiously attacked each other and tore them to shreds and swallowed them. Among those born lay the corpses of those killed in the struggle for existence. The best and strongest won. And these best ones were terrible. Firstly, they were approximately twice the volume of ordinary amoebas, and secondly, they were distinguished by some special malice and agility.”
The red ray discovered by Persikov is a certain symbol that is repeated many times, say, in the names of Soviet magazines and newspapers (“Red Light”, “Red Pepper”, “Red Magazine”, “Red Searchlight”, “Red Evening Moscow” and even organ of the GPU “Red Raven”), whose employees are eager to glorify the professor’s feat, in the name of the state farm, where the decisive experiment is to be carried out. Bulgakov simultaneously parodies here the teachings of Marxism, which, barely touching something living, immediately evokes in it the boiling of class struggle, “anger and playfulness.” The experiment was doomed from the beginning and burst due to the will of predestination, fate, which in the story was personified in the person of the communist devotee and director of the Red Ray state farm, Rokka. The Red Army must enter into mortal combat with the reptiles creeping towards Moscow.
“- Mother... mother... - rolled through the rows. Packs of cigarettes jumped in the illuminated night air, and white teeth bared at the stunned people from their horses. A dull and heart-stirring chant flowed through the rows:
...Neither ace, nor queen, nor jack,
We will beat the bastards without a doubt,
Four on the side - yours are not there...
The buzzing peals of “hurray” floated over all this mess, because a rumor spread that in front of the ranks on a horse, wearing the same crimson cap as all the riders, was riding the aging and gray-haired commander of the cavalry who had become legendary 10 years ago.”
How much salt and hidden rage there is in this description, which certainly returns Bulgakov to painful memories of the lost Civil War and its victors! In passing he is an audacity unheard of in those conditions! - venomously mocks the holy of holies - the anthem of the world proletariat “The International”, with its “No one will give us deliverance, not God, not the king and not the hero...”. This story-pamphlet ends with the blow of a sudden frost in the middle of summer, which kills the reptiles, and the death of Professor Persikov, with whom the red ray is lost and extinguished forever.