The Fatal Eggs and Other Soviet Satire

Mirra Ginsburg, Mirra Ginsburg, Mirra Ginsburg

• Publisher: Grove Press
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9780802195876
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Collezioni letterarie europee

The classic collection of wildly inventive and bitingly satirical tales of post-revolutionary Russia: "amusing and excellent reading" (Isaac Bashevis Singer). This famous collection of Soviet satire from 1918 to 1963 devastatingly lampoons the social, economic, and cultural changes wrought by the Russian Revolution. Among the seventeen boldly outspoken writers represented here are Mikhail Bulgakov, Ilya Ilf, Yevgeny Petrov, Mikhail Zoshchenko, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Valentin Katayev, and Yury Kazakov. Whether the stories and novellas collected here take the form of allegory, fantasy, or science fiction, the results are ingenious, critical, and hilariously timeless. "The stories in this collection tell the reader more about Soviet life than a dozen sociological or political tracts." —Isaac Bashevis Singer "An altogether admirable collection... by the highly talented translator Mirra Ginsburg... Many of these stories and sketches are delicious, even—a miracle!—funny, and full of subtlety and intelligence." — The New Leader "Hilarious entertainment. Beyond this it illuminates with the cruel light of satire the reality behind the pretentious façade of the Soviet state." — Sunday Sun

Mikhail Bulgakov (1891 – 1940)

Born in Kiev, Bulgakov graduated from the Medical College of Kiev University, but very soon abandoned medical practice for writing. His first major novel, The White Guard, serialized in a magazine in 1924, was a study of the disintegration of a noble family under the impact of the Revolution. Because it did not castigate the Whites, it was never published in Russia in book form during the author’s lifetime. Bulgakov’s dramatization of the novel, presented as The Days of the Turbins (1926), was shown with great success, but before long it too was banned. The ban was eventually lifted, but was later reimposed, again and again.

Bulgakov was also a brilliant satirist of great verve and imagination. Bold and original, he was under constant attack from hostile Party critics and censors, who began to hound him long before the general campaign against all independent writers. By 1930, he could no longer publish his work, and he found refuge with the Moscow Art Theatre, mostly in the capacity of a literary consultant. He wrote a number of brilliant plays (which usually brought him into conflict with the censors who banned them, either before or shortly after they opened), dramatized the novels of other writers, and wrote opera librettos.

His death was not reported in the Literary Gazette, and his name was omitted from literary histories.

In 1963, in a belated gesture of “rehabilitation” and recognition, the magazine Moskva published several of his unpublished early stories. The introduction calls him “a writer with a great and original talent,” whose works are directly linked with Russian classical literature, with Gogol and Chekhov. Two volumes of plays, and several novels, including The Life of Monsieur de Molière and The Master and Margarita, were published in the 1960’s.

“The Fatal Eggs,” which prophesied such dire events for 1928, was published in 1925.

The Fatal Eggs
by Mikhail Bulgakov

CHAPTER 1 Professor Persikov

On the evening of April 16, 1928, Vladimir Ipatievich Persikov, professor of zoology at the Fourth State University and director of the Zoological Institute in Moscow, entered his office at the Zoological Institute on Herzen Street. The professor switched on the frosted overhead lamp and looked around.

The beginning of the frightful catastrophe must be traced precisely to that ill-fated evening, and the prime cause of this catastrophe can be laid to none other than Professor Persikov himself.

He was exactly fifty-eight years old. His head was remarkable, shaped like a pestle, bald, with tufts of yellowish hair standing up at the sides. His face was smooth-shaven, with a protruding lower lip, which lent Persikov’s face a permanently pouting expression. His red nose was surmounted by old-fashioned tiny spectacles in a silver frame. His eyes were small and shiny. He was tall, with a slight stoop, and he spoke in a high, croaking voice. Among his other peculiarities was his habit, whenever he spoke of anything emphatically and with assurance, of screwing up his eyes and holding up the forefinger of his right hand, curled into a hook. And since he always spoke with assurance, his erudition in his field being phenomenal, the hook appeared very often before the eyes of Professor Persikov’s listeners. As for any subjects outside his field, which included zoology, embryology, anatomy, botany, and geography, Professor Persikov had little interest in them and scarcely ever troubled to speak about them.

The professor read no newspapers and never went to the theater. His wife had run away from him in 1913 with a tenor from the Zimin Opera, leaving him the following note: “Your frogs make me shudder with intolerable loathing. I shall be miserable for the rest of my life remembering them.”

The professor never remarried and had no children. He was extremely short-tempered, but cooled quickly; he was fond of tea with raspberries; and he lived on Prechistenka, in a five-room apartment. One of the rooms was occupied by his housekeeper, Marya Stepanovna, a shriveled little old woman who looked after the professor like a nurse after a child.

In 1919 the government requisitioned three of his five rooms, and he declared to Marya Stepanovna, “If they don’t stop these outrages, Marya Stepanovna, I shall emigrate abroad.”

Had the professor realized his plan, he could easily have obtained the chair of zoology at any university in the world, since he was a truly outstanding scientist. With the exception of the professors William Weccle of Cambridge and Giacomo Bartolommeo Beccari of Rome, he had no equals in the field bearing in one way or another on the amphibians. Professor Persikov was able to lecture in four languages in addition to Russian, and he spoke French and German as fluently as Russian. But his intention to emigrate was never carried out, and 1920 proved to be even worse than 1919. Events succeeded one another. First, Great Nikitskaya was renamed Herzen Street. Then the clock on the building at the corner of Herzen and Gorokhovaya stopped at a quarter past eleven. And finally, the terraria at the Zoological Institute became the scenes of wholesale deaths: the first to die, unable to endure the perturbations of that famous year, were eight splendid examples of the tree frog; then fifteen ordinary toads gave up the ghost, followed, finally, by a most remarkable specimen of the Surinam toad.

Directly after the toads, whose deaths decimated the population of that first order of amphibians which is justly known as tailless, the Institute’s watchman, old Vlas, who did not belong to the class of amphibians, moved on into the better world. The cause of his demise, however, was the same as that of the poor beasts, and Persikov diagnosed it at once: “Lack of feed.”

The scientist was perfectly right: Vlas had to be fed with flour, and the toads with mealworms, but since the former had disappeared, the latter had also vanished. Persikov thought of shifting the remaining twenty examples of the tree frog to a diet of cockroaches, but the cockroaches had also disappeared somewhere, demonstrating their malicious enmity toward War Communism. And so, the last examples also had to be thrown out into the garbage pits in the Institute’s backyard.

The effect of the deaths, especially that of the Surinam toad, upon Persikov defies description. He put the entire blame for the misfortune upon the current People’s Commissar of Education.

Standing in his hat and galoshes in the corridor of the chilly Institute, Persikov spoke to his assistant, Ivanov, a most elegant gentleman with a pointed blond beard. “Killing him is not enough for this, Pyotr Stepanovich! What are they doing? They will ruin the Institute! Eh? A magnificent male, an extraordinary example of Pipa americana, thirteen centimeters long!”

As time went on, things went from bad to worse. After Vlas died, the windows of the Institute froze over altogether, and the inner surface of the glass became encrusted with patterned ice. The rabbits died, then the foxes, the wolves, the fish, and all the grass snakes. Persikov went about in silence all day. Then he caught pneumonia, but did not die. After recovering, he came to Institute to lecture twice a week in the amphitheater, where the temperature for some reason remained a constant five degrees below freezing regardless of the weather outside. Standing in his galoshes, in a hat with earflaps, and a woolen muffler, exhaling clouds of white steam, he lectured to eight students on “The Reptilia of the Torrid Zone.” The rest of the time Persikov spent at home. Covered with a plaid shawl, he lay on the sofa in his room, which was crammed to the ceiling with books, coughed, stared into the open maw of the fiery stove that Marya Stepanovna was feeding with gilded chairs, and thought about the Surinam toad.

But everything in the world comes to an end; 1920 ended, giving way to 1921. And the latter year witnessed the beginning of a certain reverse trend. First, Pankrat appeared, to replace the late Vlas. He was still young, but he showed great promise as a zoo-keeper and janitor. The Institute building was now beginning to be heated. And in the summer, Persikov managed, with Pankrat’s help, to catch fourteen examples of the Bufo vulgaris, or common toad, in the Klyazma River. The terraria once again teemed with life.

In 1923 Persikov was already lecturing eight times a week-three times at the Institute and five at the university. In 1924 he lectured thirteen times a week, as well as at workers’ universities. And in 1925 he gained notoriety by flunking seventy-six students, all of them on the subject of the amphibians.

“You do not know how the amphibians differ from the reptiles?” Persikov would ask. “It is simply ridiculous, young man. The amphibians have no pelvic buds. None. Yes, you ought to be ashamed. You are probably a Marxist?”

“I am,” the flunked student would answer, wilting.

“Very well, come back for reexamination in the fall, please,” Persikov would say politely. Then he would turn briskly to Pankrat: “Next!”

Just as amphibians revive after the first heavy rain following a long drought, so Professor Persikov revived in 1926, when the united Russo-American Company built fifteen fifteen-story houses in the center of Moscow, starting at the corner of Gazetny Lane and Tverskaya, and three hundred eight-family cottages for workers on the outskirts of town, ending once and for all the frightful and absurd housing crisis which had caused the residents of Moscow so much hardship from 1919 to 1925.

In general, it was a splendid summer in Persikov’s life, and he often rubbed his hands with a quiet and contented chuckle, recalling how crowded he had been in two rooms with Marya Stepanovna. Now the professor had all his five rooms restored to him: he spread out, arranged his 2,500 books, his stuffed animals, diagrams, and specimens in their proper places, and lit the green-shaded lamp in his study.

The Institute was also unrecognizable: it had been given a coat of ivory paint, a special pipeline had been installed to carry water to the reptiles’ room, and all ordinary glass was replaced by plate glass. The Institute was also provided with five new microscopes, glass-topped dissecting tables, 2,000-watt lamps with indirect lighting, reflectors, and cases for the museum specimens.

Persikov revived, and the whole world learned about it in December, 1926, when he published his pamphlet entitled “More on the Problem of the Propagation of the Gastropods.”

And the summer of 1927 saw the appearance of his major opus, 350 pages long, later translated into six languages, including Japanese, The Embryology of the Pipidae, Spadefoot Toads, and Frogs, State Publishing House—price, three rubles.

But in the summer of 1928 came those incredible, frightful events….

CHAPTER 2 The Colored Spiral

And so, the professor turned on the light and looked around. He switched on the reflector on the long experiment table, put on a white smock, and tinkled with some instruments.

Many of the thirty thousand mechanical carriages which sped through Moscow in 1928 swished past the Institute along the smooth paving stones of Herzen Street, and every other minute a trolley, marked Route 16 or 22 or 48 or 53, rolled, grinding and clattering, from Herzen Street toward Mokhovaya. Reflections of varicolored lights flashed through the plate-glass windows of the room, and far and high above, next to the dark, heavy cap of the Cathedral of Christ, hung the misty, pale crescent of the moon.

But neither the moon nor the noise of Moscow in the springtime was of the slightest interest to the professor. He sat on a three-legged revolving stool and with tobacco-stained fingers turned the adjustment screw of the magnificent Zeiss microscope, examining an ordinary undyed preparation of fresh amoebas.

As Persikov was shifting the magnifier from five to ten thousand, the door opened slightly, affording a view of a pointed goatee and a leather bib, and the professor’s assistant called, “Vladimir Ipatievich, I have set up a mesentery. Would you like to see it?”

Persikov nimbly slid off the stool, leaving the knob halfway, and, slowly turning a cigarette in his hands, he walked to his assistant’s room. There, on the glass table, a frog, half-dead with fear and pain, was crucified on a cork plate, its translucent viscera pulled out of its bloody abdomen into the microscope.

“Very good,” said Persikov, bending over the eyepiece.

Evidently, he could see something very interesting in the frog’s mesentery, where living blood corpuscles ran briskly along the rivers of the vessels. Persikov forgot his amoebas and for the next hour and a half took turns with Ivanov at the microscope lens. As they looked, the two scientists kept up an exchange of animated comments, incomprehensible to ordinary mortals.

Finally, Persikov leaned back from the microscope, announcing, “The blood is clotting, that’s that.”

The frog moved its head heavily, and its dimming eyes were clearly saying, You’re rotten scoundrels, that’s what you are.

Stretching his numbed legs, Persikov rose, returned to his laboratory, yawned, rubbed his fingers over his permanently inflamed eyelids, and, sitting down on the stool, glanced into his microscope. He put his fingers on the knob, intending to turn it down. But he did not turn it. With his right eye, Persikov saw a blurred white disk, and in it, a number of faint, pale amoebas. But in the center of the disk there was a colored spiral resembling a woman’s curl. Persikov himself and hundreds of his students had seen this spiral many times, and no one had ever taken any interest in it. Indeed, there was no reason to be interested. The multicolored swirl of light merely interfered with observation and showed that the microscope was not in focus. It was therefore ruthlessly eliminated with a single turn of the knob, bringing an even white light to the entire field of vision.

The zoologist’s long fingers had already taken a firm grasp on the knob, when suddenly they quivered and withdrew. The reason for this lay in Persikov’s right eye, which had in turn become intent, astonished, and then widened with something like alarm. No, this was not some wretched mediocrity at the microscope. It was Professor Persikov! His whole mind, his whole life, was now concentrated in his right eye. For some five minutes the higher creature observed the lower one, tormenting and straining his eye over the preparation outside the field of focus. Everything around was silent. Pankrat was already asleep in his room off the vestibule. For a single moment the glass doors of the cabinets rang musically and delicately in the distance: Ivanov was locking his study before leaving. The front door groaned after him. And it was only later that the professor’s voice was heard. He was asking, no one knows whom, “What is this? I do not understand.”

A truck rolled down Herzen Street, shaking the old walls of the Institute. The flat glass bowl with the forceps tinkled on the table. The professor went pale and raised his hands over the microscope like a mother over an infant threatened with some danger. There was no longer any question of turning the knob. No, he was afraid that some outside force might push what he had seen out of the field of vision.

It was bright morning, with a strip of gold slanting across the ivory entrance of the Institute, when the professor left the microscope and walked on his numb feet to the window. With trembling fingers he pressed a button, and the thick black shades shut out the morning, returning the wise, learned night to the study. Sallow and inspired, Persikov stood with his feet spread wide apart, staring at the parquet with tearing eyes. “But how can this be? But it is monstrous! … It is monstrous, gentlemen,” he repeated, addressing the toads in the terrarium. But the toads slept and did not answer.

He was silent for a moment, then he raised the shades, turned off all the lights, and glanced into the microscope. His face became tense, and his shaggy yellow eyebrows came together. “Uhmm, uhmm,” he muttered. “Gone. I see. I see-e-e,” he drawled, looking like an inspired madman at the extinguished bulb overhead. “It is very simple.”

He swished the shades down once more and lit the bulb again. Glancing at the bulb, he grinned gleefully, almost rapaciously. “I’ll catch it,” he said with solemn emphasis, “I’ll catch it. The sun might do it, too.”

Again the shades flew up. The sun was coming out. It poured its brightness on the Institute walls and fell in slanting planes across the paving stones of Herzen Street. The professor looked out of the window, calculating the position of the sun during the day. He stepped away and returned, again and again, hopping slightly, and finally l...