Book Review - The Fatal Eggs (Mikhail Bulgakov)

Today I review Mikhail Bulgakov's 1928 novel, The Fatal Eggs.

In Moscow 1928, zoology professor Vladimir Persikov stumbles across a momentous discovery: a ray of light generated in a microscope that causes cells to evolve at a lightning rate. This causes the frog population in his lab to explode, becoming more virulent and more aggressive to one another. As the media and the authorities begin to intrude more into his personal life, Persikov has to fight to contain an even greater threat: a plague of giant mutated reptiles.

To anyone who knows their history, The Fatal Eggs was published at a crucial point in Russian history. Josef Stalin had just gained control of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party, and would soon impose his brutal dictatorial governorship on all of Soviet society. Given the tight control of all forms of cultural expression in Stalinist Russia, it's impossible to read The Fatal Eggs without trying to separate it from its historial context.

Bulgakov came under investigation following the book's publication for being an alleged counter-revolutionary. It becomes clear soon enough why that should be the case, as Professor Persikov hardly comes across as the model Soviet citizen. He's short-tempered and anti-social, is more concerned with his experiments than engaging with the society around him, and doesn't hide his irritation and contempt for the authorities who keep intervening in his life.

The novel opens with a brief prologue about Persikov's career during the Civil War (1918-1922). Rather than go off on a rant against the Whitists or the Trotskyists, Bulgakov focuses on how the constant rationining and War Communism (confiscation of food by the Red Army) causes Persikov's specimens to starve to death. This causes Persikov far more upset than the wider geopolitical forces tearing his country apart.

Persikov emerges as the sort of bourgeois scientist you'd find in the works of Jules Verne or H.G. Wells (Bulgakov gives a nod to Wells's story, Food for the Gods at one point). Like Verne's Phileas Fogg, or Wells's time traveller, Persikov is dedicated to science itself, caring little for personal relationships. One of the first things we learn about him is that his wife ran off with another man, leaving a note where she expresses her disgust with his keeping of frogs and reptiles. Right from the start, Bulgakov establishes a dichotomy between science and interpersonal relations, with Persikov choosing the former to give his life meaning.

Persikov is at times a comical figure with his constant grumbling and irritation at the world around him, like a Stalinist-era Victor Meldrew.

Bulgakov only adds to his consternation (and perhaps Stalin's as well) by depicting Russia as a grotesque parody of a country. He makes constant reference to neon news reports delivered by garish spotlights. The reporters who pester Persikov skew the facts to give him a celebrity status he tries to reject. Whether at home or in his lab, Persikov is bedevilled by the sounds of the outside world: trams, loudspeakers, broadcasts from the Bolshoi Theatre. Even the secret police, the symbol of Leninist and later Stalinist terror, come across as nothing more than a nuisance to him.

Instead of a flowering utopia built on equality and hard-work, Bulgakov portrays a Russia that's succumbing to a sort of insanity.

In an absurdist twist, the reptilian disaster is not caused by an evil plot, but by bureaucratic incompetence. A Party apparatchik persuades Persikov to let him use his ray on a batch of chicken eggs in the hopes of procuring a bountiful source of food for the people. A screw-up in the postal service means a batch of Persikov's own snake eggs are delivered to the experiment farm instead, resulting in a plague of enormous man-eating snakes terrorizing the countryside.

Furthermore, the day is saved not by Soviet might but (in another Wellsian parallel), by a fluke of nature: the Russian winter sweeps in and kills off the reptiles. Sadly, this isn't enough to save Persikov from a furious mob who blame him for the disaster. Bulgakov ends his black comedy with a suitable ending: the bourgeois scientist (an icon of 19th century literature) is destroyed by that symbol of Soviet fury, the angry mob.

At 100 pages exactly, The Fatal Eggs is a nifty read that nonetheless leaves the reader a lot of food for thought. Bulgakov follows a man at the mercy of greater events than himself, yet just about finds enough ridiculousness in the scenario to poke fun at it. In doing so, he creates a surreal yet poignantly apt depiction of a dark chapter in Russian history.