posted on 27 Dec 2019

The Fatal Eggs by Mikhail Bulgakov

The Soviet writer Mikhail Bulgakov is known primarily for The Master and Margarita, the book that many regard as his masterpiece, a sort of anti-Stalinist satire of ‘magic realism’. That novel was abandoned, burned, restarted, suppressed, and Bulgakov didn’t live to see it published in an uncensored form: he died in 1940 and it was another thirty years before the work was finally published in English in its entirety.

But he also wrote a number of other much shorter works and as political satires some of these are more effective than the rather sprawling The Master and Margarita. Of these shorter works the one that I think had to wait the longest for an uncensored English language edition is The Fatal Eggs, which wasn’t published until the early 1980s but is now available in a couple of different English translations.

Because this had waited so long for proper publication I expected it to be somehow sub-standard, one of those cases of deserved neglect. But this couldn’t be further from the truth. The Fatal Eggs is an extraordinary – and extraordinarily rich – little book.

Written in 1925 it is set in a Soviet near-future 1928 – an ‘alternative history’ that is at once remarkably close to Russian reality (post-revolution, a country still in turmoil from the slaughter and chaos of the civil war years, a regime constantly suspicious of revolt, counter-revolution, western influence and capitalist invasion) while also oddly but plausibly different. Searchlights probe the night skies of Moscow; a dancing neon lady on the roof of the former Muir & Mirrerlees department store (nationalised during the revolution and its assets confiscated by the Bolsheviks in 1922) advertises ‘workers’ credit’. Propaganda messages are broadcast from giant loudspeakers on the tops of buildings. KGB agents are everywhere and as is usually the case in Bulgakov’s world are satirised as being immediately recognisable because of physical oddity or grotesque appearance – in this story one has a mechanical leg that whirrs when he walks.

As the story opens Professor Persikov, director of the Zoological Institute and a research biologist at the state university, is self-importantly and to the exclusion of all else busily at work in his laboratory. He has accidentally discovered a ‘red ray’ – an anomaly in the light spectrum – that causes amoeba cells to proliferate at a fantastically accelerated rate. Tested on frog-spawn the same thing happens, but with even more nightmarish results – giant frogs virtually take over the building, squatting damply in the gloom beneath work benches, staring out with huge malevolent eyes. The red ray doesn’t, it turns out, merely accelerate growth: it accelerates and increases the urge to predate, survive, feed and breed.

I won’t spoil the plot by telling you exactly what happens because how the story unfolds is intrinsic to its excitement – and it is exciting, because it isn’t entirely predictable.

What I found most intriguing about The Fatal Eggs is that while it is a genuine piece of what might be called ‘near science fiction’, clearly informed by writers such as HG Wells and other Soviet and Eastern European fabulists and allegorical writers such as Zamyatin and Capek, it is also located in a recognisable political and social environment, and perhaps most importantly in a frighteningly familiar climate of intellectual, political and public hysteria.

Whereas The Master and Margarita depends on the surreal and the fantastical, the triumph of The Fatal Eggs is its rootedness in a plausible but weirdly different actuality. Everything is politicised, subject at a moment’s notice to reversal, to switches in the official state ‘line’, to interference by commissars, secret police and terrified functionaries and bureaucrats. And its depiction of a bungling political control of science – and the awful, bitterly satirised results this produces when the ‘red ray’ is used to speed up the country’s repopulating of chicken farms following a catastrophic outbreak of ‘fowl plague’ – is funny, terrifying and believable. Indeed it made me think of the bungling politicisation of science which took place sixty years later and is minutely detailed in two extraordinary books, Serhii Plokhy’s Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy and Svetlana Alexievich’s Chernobyl Prayer (both discussed in this piece elsewhere on Letterpress).

In scarcely more than a hundred pages The Fatal Eggs offers an unexpectedly rich read. If you have ever found The Master and Margarita hard going but would still like to sample Bulgakov’s darkly funny and bitterly satirical vision, then give this little novella a try. I think a similar case can also be made for his novella Heart of a Dog, which has a similar scientific background and which I must also reread soon. This was an unexpected pleasure – a little book that has been on my bookshelves for fifteen years waiting patiently to be read.

Highly recommended.

 

Alun Severn

December 2019