GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. LXXXI.

Adam and Eve Concludes.

“Is it true that one common coffin

Portends annihilation for us all?”

M. Yu. Lermontov. A Fragment.

Finishing his work on the novel Master and Margarita in 1940, shortly before Russia’s war with Nazi Germany started, Bulgakov retained the atomic explosion of Adam and Eve, describing it in Ivanushka’s dream. The question may be asked, how Bulgakov could actually describe an explosion that never happened in his time, and therefore nobody had ever witnessed it. (Herbert G. Wells not excepting!)

Bulgakov is very poetic in his depictions of nature in all his works, and here are a few examples:

“…There appeared from afar a frightening cloud, with its edges smoking, and it covered the forest...”

“[Varenukha] saw... a low creeping yellow-bellied storm cloud. Faraway a thick murmur started.”

“Having devoured it [the sun], across the sky from the west a storm cloud was rising, threateningly and inevitably. The cloud’s edges were already boiling with white foam, the black smoky belly cast a yellow light…”

“…A thunderstorm was already amassing on the horizon. A black cloud rose up in the west and cut off half of the sun… One fiery thread ran across the whole sky, and the thunderstorm started.”

“A strange cloud was being brought from the direction of the sea… It was already pressing its belly against the Bald Skull… It was pressing itself upon the Temple in Yerushalaim, it was sliding down in long streams from the hill. It was pouring into windows and chasing people away from the crooked streets inside their homes. It was in no hurry to release its moisture, and was releasing only its light. As soon as the smoking black brew would be torn asunder by the fire, out of the pitch-black darkness upwards soared the great block of the Temple with its gleaming scaly covers. But as it died down for a moment, the Temple would become immersed into the dark chasm, several times reemerging from it only to plunge back again, and each time this plunge was accompanied by the rumble of catastrophe.

Other quivering flickers summoned from the chasm the opposite to the Temple on the western hill Palace of Herod the Great, and scary eyeless golden statues soared upwards toward the black sky, stretching out their arms toward it. But again the heavenly fire would hide, and the heavy strikes of thunder chased the golden idols back into the darkness…”

“The thunderstorm had been carried away without a trace, and, arching over the Moskva River, a multi-colored rainbow was standing in the sky, drinking water from the Moskva River.”

“That’s not a gray cloud with a snake’s belly overflowing the city, those are not brownish muddy rivers pouring down the old streets,--- that’s Petlura’s countless force going on parade to Saint Sophia’s Square.”

Having reread all poetic descriptions of Nature in Bulgakov’s works, I found the answer in Lermontov’s poem 1831, 11^th June.

“Dark passes the storm cloud in the skies,

And in it hides the fateful flame;

As it bursts out, it turns to ashes

All that it meets, with a wondrous swiftness,

And then back inside the cloud it hides.

And who can explain its source,

And who can peer into the depth of clouds…”

Incidentally, the play Adam and Eve, where Bulgakov offers a glimpse of an atomic bomb explosion for the first time, was written exactly one hundred years after Lermontov’s poem 1831, 11^th June, quoted above.

So, even if Bulgakov knew nothing about the technical details of the atomic bomb, this much he knew, that “it turns to ashes all that it meets.”

Our attention is naturally drawn by Bulgakov’s phrase “unnatural lighting.” But our primary attention needs to be drawn to Bulgakov himself. Knowing Bulgakov’s precision and honesty as a writer, he could not have ended his novel Master and Margarita without giving the reader some clue as to the nature of the “discovery of state significance” made by Margarita’s husband. Taking into consideration that Bulgakov is the only writer who never parts with his main characters, but takes them along to his subsequent compositions, it is impossible not to connect Ivanushka’s dream with the scene in Adam and Eve, which was witnessed before their departure from the destroyed dead city by the surviving group of principal characters.

This scene is indeed apocalyptic, indicative of things to come. Physician by profession, having worked as such through World War I, the Revolution, and the Civil War, Bulgakov was not a bloodthirsty man, but it was due to his personal experience that he reached the conclusion that only the unconventional atomic bomb can stop the “conventional” insanity.

(We shall return later on with Bulgakov’s Diaboliada in Nature’s Psychological Warfare.)

GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. LXXX.

Adam and Eve.

“Noiselessly, a whole city block goes down in the window, and a second colonnade appears, and some kind of stallions, in a strange lighting.”

Bulgakov. Adam and Eve.

(See additional details of this play’s plot and my commentary on them in my chapter under the title of Rooster.)

In his play Adam and Eve Bulgakov raises the questions of chemical, bacteriological, and nuclear weapons, and he does it as always in his own inimitable way with a macabre sense of humor, or rather, irony. The play is remarkable for, having been written in 1931, showing the USSR in preparation for a war with Germany.

Having learned that Eve’s husband is an engineer in bridge construction, professor Yefrosimov, a chemical scientist, advises him to drop whatever he is working on. What is the use of spending two years on building a bridge that can be destroyed in three minutes?
Yefrosimov is not only a chemist. He is well versed in behind-the-scenes political games. The phrase of Adam: “There will be a terrible explosion, but that will be the last, cleansing explosion, because on the side of the USSR is a great idea!” happens to be buried in the subsequent and very interesting reasoning of Yefrosimov. Pity!
What Yefrosimov is saying here is about who is really ruling the world, and how: they are “old men in top hats.”
Bulgakov simplifies the picture, confusing the reader, he merges two images into one. His phrase “You--- the idea, the scientist--- the arsenic,” puts everything in its place. There are scientists who propose ideas, these include political scientists. There are also scientists who mix together all sorts of rubbish, these are the chemists. But neither side combines the ideas with the chemicals. I base my approach on the assertion that for Bulgakov “top hat” is a symbol of power. “Old men” are those who wield that power. The “old men” are interested in the discoveries of historical-political thought, that is, in how to advance your country, while leaving all other countries behind. An idea alone cannot be enough, one needs the whole spectrum of scientific-technological progress. This progress is represented by such scientists as Yefrosimov. The scientists need these “old men” for the financing [recommendation for financing] of their projects. The “old men” bring together the discoveries of historical-political thought [the ideas] and scientific-technological progress. The goal of the “old men” is a high standard of living. Bulgakov shows this by the words “economka” (the Russian word meaning “housekeeper,” creating the Russian linguistic pun “economka-economika,” the latter meaning “economy”) and “coffee.” In reality, Yefrosimov is talking not about an economka but about the economika of a country. The better off is the country’s economy, the more the demand for housekeepers and coffee.
It is possible to raise a country’s standard of living in two ways: by trade [the “bridges”] and by war [the “explosions”]. There are exceptions, of course. After World War II, Great Britain overnight turned from one of the world’s greatest imperial powers into a second-rate country, continuing its political subsistence only thanks to the United States of America. So, here is a “love-hate” relationship indeed. Refusing to provide the British with urgently needed massive loans, the United States reduced Great Britain to a status of virtual dependency…
There is also a third way: the way of pushing countries back into the stone age. Today we see a successful implementation of this idea in the Arab World, by means of encouraging rebellions and insurrections. Here, the idea of freedom is linked to arms trade, and thus it promotes self-enrichment of the seller countries and impoverishment of the nations on whose territory these rebellions take place. The idea of freedom thus turns into a slave trade. In order for one person to be free, a multitude of slaves is required, to pay for that freedom.
Yefrosimov tells Adam: “You come up with an idea, and the scientist supplements it with arsenic.” He tells Adam about one such scientist, who “mixed together some rubbish… and started warming it up… What came out of it was that before he finished drinking his coffee, thousands of people lay down side by side in the fields… And the most interesting part of it was that they were all young people, definitely blameless of any kinds of ideas…”
The success of such weapons does not depend on their smell. “The whole question is how it will smell. No matter how he tried, this thing would always smell of something: of mustard, of almonds, of rotting cabbage, and finally, of gentle geranium. It was a macabre smell, friends, but it wasn’t a super-smell.” […Naturally, the presence of smell is not a problem today, but even a plus, because it is used for intimidation, a person receives a warning smell, about what may happen next, and he knows very well what will follow that smell: headache, pressure in the temples, burning in the nose, the eyes, the mouth and the throat, itching of the eyes, a feeling of pressure and pain in the eyes, but most importantly, before the “chemical attack,” odors of various chemicals are being used as a psychological attack. In this case, chemicals are used not to kill a person, but in order to intimidate...] “As for the ‘super,’ it will happen when there will be no smell in the lab, no noise, and fast action… No smell, no explosion, and fast action.”

Following that macabre conversation, a chemical attack took place, and the whole population of the city perished, with the exception, as we know it already, of the four persons saved by Yefrosimov by “taking their pictures” with his very special photo camera.
The end of the play would have been totally incomprehensible (how could the USSR win after being subjected to a series of attacks), had Bulgakov not given us a very interesting scene to observe, in the following stage remark:
“Noiselessly, a whole city block goes down in the window, and a second colonnade appears, and some kind of stallions, in a strange lighting.”
First, the question. How can a whole city block fall down noiselessly? This word alone is already convincing us that we are dealing with an allegory.
Next, the stallions, and in strange lighting at that! An obvious allusion to the horses of the Apocalypse. Once we remember the words of the engineer Adam: “…There will be a terrible explosion, but that will be the last, cleansing explosion, because on the side of the USSR is a great idea!” it becomes clear right away that Bulgakov is depicting in these two instances an atomic explosion which ends the war. After that, mankind gets “organized,” an international world government is formed, and there are no more enemies. The whole globe becomes open, and travel visas are no longer needed.

…That was how Bulgakov saw the future of mankind in 1931.

 

(To be continued tomorrow…)

GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. LXXIX.

Alexander Semyonovich Rokk Continues.

 

“Dubelt:

‘Judas Iscariot coming to the priests, they promised to give him silver… And these pieces of silver, dear friend, were thirty in number. This is what I pay to all, in his memory.’”

M. A. Bulgakov. Alexander Pushkin.

The time has now come for us to get acquainted with the man whom Bulgakov blames for the catastrophe of yet another foreign intervention, with the codename Anaconda. Bulgakov gives a detailed depiction of Kalsoner’s appearance, but he says little about the appearance of Rokk, except that he is short in stature (“short legs”) and has “small eyes,” which ties these two personages together.

The biography of Kalsoner is obscure, but there is a detailed description of what he has been doing since his arrival to Moscow in 1921. The biography of Rokk is written tongue-in-cheek.---

“Playing the flute was none other than the head of the state farm Alexander Semyonovich Rokk, and to give him his due, he was playing outstandingly. The truth is that once upon a time the flute was the specialty of Alexander Semyonovich. Right until 1917, he had been serving [sic!] in the famous concert ensemble of Maestro Petukhov (petukh means rooster in Russian), every evening gracing with harmonious sounds the foyer of the cozy cinema theater Magical Reveries in the city of Yekaterinoslav (“Glory of Catherine the Great serves here as an indication of supreme power”). However, the great year 1917 which broke the careers of many people, took Alexander Semyonovich too upon new paths. He left Magical Reveries and the dusty star-spangled satin in the foyer, and plunged into the open sea of war and revolution, giving up the flute in favor of the lethal Mauser. He was long battered by the waves, frequently swept ashore now in the Crimea, now in Moscow, now in Turkestan, now even in Vladivostok. It took a revolution to fully reveal the talents of Alexander Semyonovich. It turned out that this man was positively great and surely the foyer of the Reveries was not the right place for him. Not engaging ourselves in lengthy details, let us just say that the last year 1927 and the beginning of 1928, found Alexander Semyonovich in Turkestan, where he, for starters, was editing a huge newspaper, after which he became known as the local member of the supreme economic commission and was celebrated for his amazing works on the irrigation of the Turkestan region. In 1928 Rokk arrived in Moscow and there received a well-deserved vacation. The supreme commission of the organization whose ticket this provincial-old-fashioned man had been so proudly carrying in his pocket, appreciated him and appointed him to a position that was both quiet and highly esteemed. Alas! Alas! To the misfortune of the republic, the bubbly brain of Alexander Semyonovich was hardly extinguished, in Moscow Rokk became acquainted with the discovery of Persikov, and in the suites of [the hotel] Red Paris on Tverskaya Street the idea was born to Alexander Semyonovich of how with the help of Persikov’s beam to revive in the course of just one month the chicken [industry] in the republic. Rokk was listened to at the commission for animal husbandry, he was agreed with, and now Rokk, with a thick piece of paper in hand, went to see the eccentric zoologist.”

The words “concert ensemble,” and especially the name of the ensemble’s maestro: Petukhov (in Russian, named after Rooster), plus the city Yekaterinoslav (in Russian, Catherine’s Glory), where Rokk worked, not even to mention the name of the cinema theater Magical Reveries, all indicate that even if Rokk was indeed a professional flutist (compare this to the thief Miloslavsky in Bulgakov’s play Bliss, calling himself a “soloist of the State Theaters), then his profession, just like the profession of the clock master Bitkov in his play Alexander Pushkin, allowed him to get into contact with people, to get access to their houses (for celebrations, weddings, funerals, etc.), and in this manner and same as Bitkov, he did not necessarily have to be a full-time secret police agent, but at any rate, he could be a part-time informer, earning his Judas’s money.

This may have been the case precisely, judging by Bulgakov’s description of it. The city of Yekaterinoslav points to imperial power of the tsars. Magical Reveries points to a group of ‘magicians’ possessing the art of ‘charming’ people just like Rokk managed to charm the anaconda. The fact that Rokk worked in Turkestan as editor of a large newspaper supports the proposition that the Magical Reveries group was engaged in propaganda among the populace. Rokk’s flute may well be a ‘euphemism’ for Rokk’s propaganda pen.)

Many revolutionaries of yore never deemed it beneath themselves to work as part-time agents of the secret police, which never prevented them from becoming commissars after the revolution, either. This is what probably happened to A. S. Rokk. Bulgakov writes that Alexander Semyonovich “plunged into the open sea of war and revolution, exchanging the flute for the Mauser…” It takes a revolution, no less, to fully reveal the talents of A. S. Rokk. “He was long battered by the waves, frequently swept ashore now in the Crimea, now in Moscow, now in Turkestan, now even in Vladivostok… The last year 1927 and the beginning of 1928 found Alexander Semyonovich in Turkestan, where he, for starters, was editing a huge newspaper… and [later] became known as the local member of the supreme economic commission and was celebrated for his amazing works on the irrigation (obviously, another euphemism for propaganda and indoctrination!) of the Turkestan region.

There can be no doubt here that this is how Bulgakov mockingly describes the nature of the work that Rokk was performing as a commissar.

People working for tsarist Okhrana before the revolution were becoming commissars following the Revolution by the same token as the double-dealing Soviet currency hustlers, fartsovshchiks, of the 1970’s and 1980’s, engaging foreigners in Moscow, were in fact working for the KGB, only to become Russia’s nouveau-riches and oligarchs of the 1990’s and the opposition of the twenty-first century, like today’s celebrated profanity-spouting prostitutes of Pussy Riot, or the notorious anti-Semite Alexei “First-Toast-for-the-Holocaust” Navalny, so much beloved by the West on account of their anti-Putin posturing.

Bulgakov labels the status of A. S. Rokk as “missing, subsequent fate unknown,” but I do not believe that he could really meet some unpleasant fate, although disappear without a visible trace he could, but not in this plain sense. There are three principal arguments against Rokk’s demise. On the one hand, a man with his prodigious communication skills, one who could sweet-talk a deadly anaconda into leaving him alone, successfully targeting his wife instead, a man like this can have no problems getting out of any predicament, having thus escaped the worst imaginable scenario of being embraced and then swallowed by a dread-inspiring, compassion-lacking, rational argument-impervious monster.

Secondly, if ever there existed a danger of being recognized and lynched for the calamity that he unleashed on his countrymen, Bulgakov gives us an indication that this would not be a problem for Rokk either. In fact, A. S. Rokk has become unrecognizable. A dark-haired man in the prime of his life has been transformed into a white-haired trembling old man, who --- what a resilience! --- eventually comes to his senses and “stretching out his hands like a Biblical prophet,” tries to convince the GPU agents that his wife was really-really dead.

But the third and most convincing proof that A. S. Rokk will splendidly blend into the post-NEP Soviet reality of the grandiose Five-Year Plans is his incredible chameleonic biography. Rokk is perfectly adaptable, which fact is very well shown in Bulgakov’s play Adam and Eve in the person of Ponchik-Nepobeda (who is none other than our old acquaintance Shpolyansky from White Guard), who changes his opinions several times back and forth, depending on who in his view is winning the war.

GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. LXXVIII.

Alexander Semyonovich Rokk.

“A sulking crowd, soon to be forgotten,

We’ll pass over the world without noise and trace,

Without throwing to the ages either a fertile thought,

Or labor, started by genius.”

M. Yu. Lermontov. A Thought.

If Professor Persikov opens a whole line of scientists in Bulgakov’s works (followed by Yefrosimov in Adam and Eve, 1931; Rein in Bliss, 1934; Timofeev in Ivan Vasilievich, 1935; and of course the nameless husband of Margarita, a “major scientist who happened to make a most important discovery of national significance, in Master and Margarita, 1940), then A. S. Rokk has his own precursor in the person of a certain Kalsoner. These two works, Diaboliada, 1923, and Fateful Eggs, 1924, ought to be analyzed together, side by side, as this is the way they were conceived by Bulgakov. Fateful Eggs flows organically from Diaboliada, being its sequel of sorts, as first of all they have the same underlying subject: the introduction of the NEP in the USSR, in 1921, and its abolition in 1928, as a result of the introduction of the First Five-Year Plan.

Bulgakov’s attitude toward the NEP was very negative, as can be gleaned from these two works, and also from his numerous sketches. It is quite remarkable that, writing in 1924, Bulgakov was able to predict the end of the NEP so accurately, dating the events in Fateful Eggs as taking place in 1928.

Secondly, Kalsoner, the antagonist of Diaboliada, has an egg-shaped head:

“The most remarkable in him was the head. It presented an exact replica of a giant egg, thrust onto his shoulders horizontally, its sharp end facing forward. It was bald, like an egg, and… glistening…”

This links Kalsoner to Rokk in Fateful Eggs, and reveals the plan to make it a sequel to Diaboliada.

And thirdly, the character of Manechka, the woman swallowed by the anaconda, is introduced by Bulgakov already in Diaboliada, as “one young woman with dreamy eyes and diamond earrings in her ears.” Whom Kalsoner mentions after having fired the old staff and putting new people in their places: “’There are three persons there,’ he pointed to the door to the secretaries’ office, ‘and of course, Manechka.’”

So, we see that Manechka is present in both these works, connecting them together, first as Kalsoner’s secretary, and then as Rokk’s wife. Manechka of 1921, in Diaboliada, with her “diamond earrings,” points to the introduction of the NEP in Russia. But the most stunning clue is provided by Bulgakov in the following manner:

“On 20^th September 1921, the cashier… returned… with a large dead hen with a wrung-off neck. He put the hen on his attaché case, and on top of it he placed his right hand, and announced: ‘There will be no money.’”

Add to this the cashier’s peculiar words which follow: “Don’t push forward, gentlemen, or else, you comrades will overturn my desk!”

Bulgakov thus, symbolically, shows the death of the workers-peasants’ revolution and the coming of the bourgeois-friendly New Economic Policy. This switch was terrible for all but the well-to-do: instead of money, regular workers were paid with the products of their labor, which they were supposed to sell themselves to those who would buy them. In Korotkov’s words,---

“Well, let us not brood over this for too long. Let’s try to sell these.”

Left without basic means of subsistence, many people were leaving Moscow, while others were simply thrown out of their jobs, replaced by “the right people,” brought in from the provinces. Bulgakov shows the ugly side of the NEP through the case of his main character Korotkov, a senior office worker in a Moscow organization, who loses both his job and his identity after his documents have been stolen, and receiving no support from society, gradually loses his mind. The theme of “man overboard” is exceptionally treated by Bulgakov in Diaboliada.

The introduction of a “dead hen with a wrung-off neck,” yet again not only shows Bulgakov’s deep knowledge of Russian history, but also its allegorical use on the pages of his works, as I am intent on demonstrating in this essay.

Take note of the following excerpt from a letter of the Polish King Stefan Batory to the Russian Tsar Ivan Grozny, as quoted by N. I. Kostomarov in his History. (As we know, N. I. Kostomarov did not like Russian tsars in general and Ivan Grozny in particular.)---

“A mother hen, wrote Batory inter alia, protects her chicks from the eagle and the hawk, whereas you, two-headed eagle, are hiding from us.”

According to Bulgakov, people in Russia were overnight deprived of their support systems in their own country. Any government which is incapable of protecting the rights of all its citizens and hypocritically endows with special “protection” the “needy ones,” thus counterpoising one part of the population against everybody else, can indeed be compared to a “large dead hen with a wrung-off neck.” The law must be the same for all, and protection must be the same for all. Otherwise, the real most vulnerable portion of the population: the children, the elderly, and the poor, are left out, like a “man overboard.”

In front of our eyes on the pages of Diaboliada a human tragedy is unfolding which has of course become quite current today in Ukraine among the discriminated Russian-speaking population, also made acute by the loss of human identity. The supernatural element obviously makes the novella tremendously interesting, which subject I am discussing in the chapter Triangle. But here, in the chapter on Nature, for the reason that the egg-shaped head of Kalsoner unmistakably points to the eggs of snakes and crocodiles which Rokk is dealing with in Fateful Eggs, this line of Diaboliada relates as the theme of biological weaponry, as well as the background theme of the NEP, to the subject matter of Nature.

(To be continued tomorrow...)

UKRAINE

It is awfully unpleasant and terribly unrewarding for an honest observer these days to join the Ukraine debate. If one wishes to be reasonable, he can be easily accused of pushing the pro-Russian line, and, of course, we all know that propaganda is a very dirty word. But if we take the Western approach, we are instantly and inevitably crossing the line between scholarly decency and militant Russophobia, and immediately stop making common sense.

The fatal flaw of today’s debate on Ukraine is that it is not about Ukraine, but it is all about Russia. Which means that Ukraine may well be beyond help, as the ailment is located outside its proper body.

Granted, it is utterly impossible not to mention Russia, when talking about Ukraine, but, on my part, I will try to avoid saying “Russia” from this point on… until further notice.

Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine… Let’s talk about Ukraine. What kind of country is it anyway, today, as we speak? If I remember correctly, the last time Ukraine voted for President, Mr. Yanukovich won, and his Party of the Regions enjoyed a comfortable democratic majority in the country’s parliament, Rada. Mind you, that election was on Mr. Yushchenko’s watch, so there was hardly any kind of conspiracy there to overthrow that darling of the West and to install an enemy of Western values in the citadel of Ukrainian democracy Kiev…

So, Yushchenko went out, and Yanukovich came in, all fair and square. The Ukrainians had made their choice. And here now comes the big question. Where are all those majority Ukrainians who voted for Yanukovich? Where are the majority members of his Party of Regions in the Rada? Have they suddenly disappeared, given up their democratic majority ghost, leaving all national offices to certain very questionable personalities who had never before counted for much in the political makeup of Ukrainian politics?

Incidentally, why are the senior rabbis of Ukraine so worried these days, following the dramatic downfall of Mr. Yanukovich? Why are they advising the Jews of Ukraine to flee the country, yes, to run for their lives, giving them the choice of safe haven between Israel and another country which I have promised not to name for a while? I suggest that those who were not aware of this pre-Kristallnacht turn of events read about this in Israeli newspapers, such as Haaretz… After all, the State of Israel did not vote on the wrong side of the United States in the United Nations General Assembly the other day… Israelis therefore can be trusted not to disseminate anti-Western propaganda in such matters…

What I very much want to know these days is the whereabouts and the physical condition of the “People’s Governor” of the Donetsk Region of Ukraine Pavel Gubarev. There is a popular rumor which has been inflaming the people of Eastern and Southern Ukraine that, following his capture and dispatch to Kiev he was beaten into an irreversible coma and denied medical help. I do not intend to engage in rumor-mongering, but this particular rumor is highly significant. The best advice that the American and European VIP visitors can give to the current government in Kiev would be to produce the man, to allow him at least to be visited by his lawyers and independent European observers, which would surely help at least in part to reduce the domestic unrest and the growing threat of a civil war… That is, in case this widespread rumor is indeed merely a rumor…

Pavel Gubarev is not alone, of course. There are scores of known names of Ukrainian “dissidents” who have disappeared without a trace, many claimed to have been arrested and held incommunicado. Even by the admission of the authorities in Kiev, these are political prisoners (one of them is the head of Ukrainian TV, beaten up on well publicized videotape and then arrested for the crime of “keeping Ukrainians informed about current events,” according to his feeble self-defense before succumbing to physical violence.)

No, this is not anti-Western propaganda. These and many-many others are well-documented cases which American and Western media would not touch with a ten-foot pole. Human rights are demonstrably and violently abused by the people supported by the freest of the free, who do not seem to give a damn…

Why?!.....

And now the reader receives my notice. Russia is no longer a taboo word in this article.

The answer, the only answer why the West does not care about the human tragedy unfolding in Ukraine is because the West does not care about Ukraine. It cares about Russia, and doing mischief on Russia’s borders--- at all costs--- seems to be the preeminent strategic objective of the free world, ever since the last sensible American President, George Herbert Walker Bush-Senior left office, dismayed by the collapse of the USSR. A man of old school, he never saw Russia as a “regional power.” You don’t fool with Mother Nature, and you don’t fool with Russia. He understood that, but the next president after him, Mr. Clinton, didn’t, and those who came after him didn’t either. They all pushed the NATO military alliance to a close proximity and even into direct contact with Russia’s borders…

…Oh, please, do bring back Cold War!!! Then Russia was a fellow topnotch boxer, a full member of the exclusive superpower club. Cold War was a fight-fest between two mutually respectful titans. It was a love-hate relationship, and the world was much safer on account of that love and mutual respect than today, when there is no love and no respect on the part of the sole world power for the former superpower reduced to the inferior position of a “regional power,” not even to mention the severe shortage of love on the part of the superpower scorned. Today Russia is a nuisance to the United States. Needless to say, the negative feeling is reciprocated in spades, and what Russia sees in Washington today is a sworn enemy without any redeeming value…

Hence, Ukraine. Poor people, I pity the weakest of them, who suffer the most, and I fear the strongest of them, who are on the verge of a bloody civil war that may engulf the world.

REGIONAL POWER

(I interrupt my wife’s Bulgakov postings on my blog to bring the reader my two comments on current events: Regional Power and Ukraine.)

So, we are told, Russia is a “regional power”?

Now, then, what exactly is her “region”?

Is it Eurasia? At least, that would be a “region” that matches her size… Just follow her pipeline tentacles reaching East and West, and yes, South too…

But wait, what about the Arctic “region”? Russia today is by far the most powerful power in the Arctic… yes, region… A recent international legal decision has given her another large chunk of it. Yet nobody wanted to notice that, while the Russians do not like to brag…

But wait, what about the Middle East? They say there can be no discussion of Iran without Russia. They say there can be no peace in Syria without Russia. They say there can be no peace in the Middle East as such (we are talking about Israel and her neighbors) without Russia… And in case you do not read the elusive news reports, check out the shockingly unanticipated triangle of Mr. Al Sisi’s Cairo, King Abdullah’s Riyadh, and Mr. Putin’s Moscow…

But wait, what about the “region” of Central and South America. The shaky dominoes theory for South-East Asia of the twentieth century is steadily becoming the soupe du jour for America Latina in the twenty-first century…

But wait, what about the high seas? The wet region is becoming home to more and more Russian ships, and as every A-student in middle school knows, the geographic area of their presence far exceeds the landmass of the terra-firma world.

But wait, what about the “region” of outer space? It is no secret to those who want to know that today Russia is by far the dominant power in the upper regions, at least if we add to the physical presence up there the means of getting there.

So, when we are told that Russia is a “regional” power, I can buy that, with a few clarifications, to be sure.

But still, when the President of the United States calls Russia a “regional power,” one has to listen and to try to understand. What is the meaning of this phrase, coming from the mouth of the leader of the free world? There has to be a meaning there, of course. Even the emptiest rhetoric is full of meaning if we treat it seriously enough…

Well, stripping the politics of the day and the empty rhetoric pinned to it away, the meaning is simple. When the sun is in the sky, nobody sees the stars, as the late Maestro Arturo Toscanini used to say. In modern world, there is only one world power, no matter what, and that power is the United States of America. Moscow who? Peking who? BRICS who? SCO who? EU?.. well, let’s skip the quote from Ms. Victoria Nuland…

Reader, please do not mistake my irony for sarcasm. I, for one, will never call the United States anything but a great world power. And I do not expect Washington to call anybody “You’re the man!” That would be somewhat unbecoming for a great power. As Schopenhauer said, “familiarity breeds contempt.”

But by the same token, I do not like Washington to keep repeating the same thing over and over again, in the course of the last twenty-plus years:

“I am the man… and all of you are… well… regional powers.”

GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. LXXVII.

“I’m not a villain, oh no, Fate is my ruin…”

M. Y. Lermontov.

 

And so, Professor Persikov lost, and Commissar Rokk practically called open season on the Soviet Union. Instead of inviting foreign specialists from reputable firms, Rokk let inside people who know people, so to speak, anybody who cared to show up regardless of their qualifications, thus opening the door to all kinds of corruption and fraud. [Bulgakov writes about this problem in many of his literary sketches.]

This NEP madness was eventually stopped by Hitler’s second version of Mein Kampf. The first Soviet-friendly version had been written by Hitler in a Bavarian prison under the supervision and influence of the bona fide German patriot Rudolf Hess who, like many other patriots in Germany, was following Bismarck’s testament to his German posterity, to be on good terms with Russia and never get into a situation of fighting a war on two fronts.
The second version of Mein Kampf (consisting of a radically revised First Volume and newly written Volume Two) was commissioned to Hitler for money by anonymous “well-wishers,” who were hiding behind a certain Mr. Czerny. Whatever one may say about that, the people behind Hitler’s” new improved” book were not motivated by Germany’s national interest, which is never the case when money changes hands.
Well, as soon as the new Mein Kampf reached the USSR (and that was very soon!), this spelled the end of NEP. In 1928 Stalin introduced the First Five-Year Plan, focused on an accelerated development of heavy industry, and in the Urals, far away from the reptilians both foreign and domestic, in a neck-breaking rush, the best specimens of military hardware were being built, such as the T-34 tank, for instance, which is still considered universally as the best tank ever built…

The fact that Professor Persikov’s discovery can be understood as an allegory, is revealed by the use of the word “gads” (see my earlier explanation of this word in Russian). The enraged mob breaking into the Institute to kill Persikov accuses him of “letting the gads loose.” Clearly, this word can be interpreted in this larger context not as “reptilians” but as “scoundrels.” Bulgakov shows this broader meaning of “gads” in the already quoted passage in his White Guard:

“Right then an electric charge pierced the brains of the smartest of them… They understood that fate had tied them to the defeated side, and their hearts were filled with horror. ‘The Germans have been defeated,’ said the gads. ‘We have been defeated,’ said the smart gads.” The residents of Kiev understood the same thing.

The horrific murder of Professor Persikov--- a Russian patriot, a cosmopolitan in the best sense of this word, who understands that his nation the Soviet Union cannot live in isolation from the rest of the world--- can be rationalized, although hardly justified, by the generally negative attitude of the Russian people toward the West. Persikov is not to blame for the disaster, brought about by Rokk against Persikov’s better judgment and fiery resistance. Bulgakov’s sympathies are with Persikov, but the people are dead set against him.---

“This Persikov must be shot!” shouted someone’s screechy voice.

“What does Persikov have to do with it?” responded another from the thick. “It’s the son of a bitch in the state farm, that’s who ought to be shot!”
“They should have put up the guard!” yelled someone else.

As we see, there are reasonable people in the crowd, who understand that Persikov is not to blame for the unfolding catastrophe, at least not directly to blame. But the crowd is raging, and it is thirsty for blood, for which reason, guilty or not, Persikov, who has refused to flee, is a dead man.

As I said before, I was struck by the abundance of respect and even love that Bulgakov shows for the character of Professor Persikov. This character in particular indicates Bulgakov’s respect for professionalism in people, whoever they are. Bulgakov’s professional is a master of his trade. This is how Bulgakov wishes to be seen by others. This is why he has given the hero of his last novel the name of Master. Reading A. S. Pushkin’s article Voltaire, I couldn’t help thinking that the following line from Pushkin’s work must have produced a very strong impression on Bulgakov:

“The true place of a writer is his scientific study.”

There is another gruesome depiction of violent death in Fateful Eggs, but this time Bulgakov has no sympathy for the victim. We are talking about Manya, Manechka, Rokk’s wife, the wearer of certain diamond earrings, courtesy of her previous incarnation as Manechka the secretary in Diaboliada, Bulgakov’s embodiment of the vices of the NEP.

She dies a horrible death in front of her husband’s eyes. The husband manages to flee the scene… (Sic!)

“The snake in front of Rokk’s eyes opened its mouth for a moment, out of which something struck out, resembling a fork, then snatched Manya, as she was sinking into the dust, by the shoulder with her teeth with a strength that lifted her some two and a half feet above the ground. Manya repeated her piercing deathly scream. The snake twisted its body in a thirty-five-foot-long screw, its tail raising up a tornado, and started pressing Manya. The woman made no more sounds, and the only sound Rokk could hear was the sound of her cracking bones. High up above the ground came Manya’s head, tenderly pressed to the snake’s cheek. A splash of blood came out of Manya’s mouth, her broken arm popped out, showing fountains of blood coming from under her nails. Next the snake dislocated its jaws, opened its mouth wide and all at once pulled its head over Manya’s head, and started pulling itself over her, like a glove is being pulled on a finger. There was such hot breath coming from the snake in all directions that it touched the face of Rokk, while the snake’s tail nearly swept him off the road in acrid dust. Here is when Rokk’s hair turned white, first the left side, then the right side of his head once black like a boot, changed color to silver. In deathly nausea, he finally tore himself from the road, and seeing nothing and no one, he started running, deafening the neighboring areas with his roar.”

In this terrifying but unsympathetic passage, Bulgakov allegorically depicts the death of the NEP: Manya is being devoured by the snake created by her husband, while her loving husband runs away…

(To be continued...)

 

GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. LXXVI.

“‘The Germans have been defeated,’ said the gads.

‘We have been defeated,’ said the smart gads.”

M. A. Bulgakov. White Guard.

 

And so, once again Bulgakov shows us his optimism. “After long epidemics, mass diseases from the corpses of “gads” [reptilians] and humans… it took a long time still for the army to go around cleaning up the ground, but the cleaning was done, and it was all over by the spring of 1929…

(All Russians know it of course that since time immemorial bad people have been called “gads,” reptilians, and in his earlier great novel White Guard Bulgakov says in no uncertain terms that he is using the word “gad” in accordance with precisely that old Russian tradition.---

[In the aftermath of the German defeat in the Great War/WWI] “Right then an electric charge pierced the brains of the smartest of them… They understood that fate had tied them to the defeated side, and their hearts were filled with horror. ‘The Germans have been defeated,’ said the gads. ‘We have been defeated,’ said the smart gads.”)

…In the already mentioned earlier novel Food of the Gods, by H. G. Wells, there is no happy ending, not to mention the fact that unlike in Bulgakov’s Fateful Eggs, where growth experiments are conducted on lower animals, such experiments in Wells’ novel are conducted on humans.

Nature, in Wells’ fantastic creation, takes her revenge on the human race: the sun disappears, and with it ends life on Earth.

In his novella Fateful Eggs, Bulgakov uses an allegory to expose the ugliness of the NEP (New Economic Policy, introduced by Lenin in 1921), which replaced a no less terrible, but in a different way, policy of War Communism. NEP was eventually abolished by Stalin in 1928, with the introduction of the First Soviet Five-Year Plan. Having written Diaboliada in 1923, Bulgakov followed it in 1924 with Fateful Eggs, where he predicted the end of NEP four years in advance. (The novella’s action takes place mostly in the summer of 1928.) His depiction of the grotesque “reproduction” and the ferocious struggle for a place under the ‘red beam,’ the fact that “the newly-borns fiercely attacked each other, tore each other into pieces, and devoured them,” can only be explained as an allegory of competition in capitalist society, bent exclusively on self-profit.

Bulgakov introduces two leading characters in his novella: Professor Persikov and Commissar Rokk.

Bulgakov clearly shows that the idea belongs to Persikov (within the broader allegory the professor appears more as a political economist than as a zoologist; we are obviously dealing here with two parallel realities, one literal [Bulgakov depicts Professor Persikov here as a brilliant bona fide zoologist], and the other allegorical, dealing with NEP, where Professor Persikov comes out as a political economist), who naturally wants to develop it on his own, together with his scientific associates, and in a professionally controlled setting.

The Government becomes interested in Professor Persikov’s research, but assigns its implementation to a certain A. S. Rokk ( more about it later), because he guarantees results within a very short period of time, one month, to be precise. Despite Persikov’s stiff and indignant resistance, he is bound to lose.

(He personally telephones the Kremlin, in an extreme state of irritation. “Excuse me… I cannot understand… How can it be? I… without my consent and advice… But he will cook up hell knows what! … If it comes to that, I categorically protest. I am not giving my sanction!”)

Later he complains to his assistant Privatdozent Ivanov:

“‘And what forwardness, what pushiness. And, mind you, I am assigned to instruct this scalawag. And how am I supposed to instruct this ignoramus when I myself cannot say anything on this subject.’

‘But couldn’t you refuse?’--- asked Ivanov.
Persikov went red in the face, took up a piece of paper, and showed it to Ivanov. The other read it and smirked ironically. ‘Y-yes,’ he said meaningfully.”

There are two storylines in Fateful Eggs, and at first sight both seem to be about foreign intervention, the first one by the Powers of the Entente (England, France, the United States, plus Japan), following Russia’s separate peace treaty with Germany in 1918, and the second one codenamed Anaconda, once again coming from the West, in the form of a biological weapons attack.

But by the same token as the “chicken plague” allegorized the intervention of the Entente, the biological intervention allegorized the New Economic Policy. Under these premises, our “zoologist-eccentric” Persikov plays the role of a political economist, whose idea of NEP was supposed to be implemented under his supervision and in a tightly controlled environment, in other words, NEP as an experiment. Knowing the course of Bulgakov’s thought, this should not come as too much of a surprise. In White Guard, he calls “gads” persons who collaborate with foreigners (in this case, with the German occupiers). In his 1934 play Bliss, the thief Miloslavsky answers the question: “And who are you?” by saying: “And what is it to you? Say, I am a soloist of State theaters…” (Being a professional pickpocket, his favorite locations for conducting his business of stealing are theaters, attended by big numbers of rich people, spelling out crowds, hustle, and such, in other words a sea of opportunity for a thief.) As for Commissar Rokk, Bulgakov gives him a rather strange biography: he is a flutist. (More on this will be said later on.)

In Fateful Eggs, Professor Persikov says that he is not a specialist on the feathered race, although just a while ago, in “chicken plague,” Bulgakov depicts as “feathered” Emperor Nicholas II and Grand Duke Mikhail.

Giving a scientific characteristic to roosters to the reporter Bronsky, Professor Persikov for some reason names only “foreigners” from India, the Malayan Archipelago, the Himalayas, Burma, the island of Java, Ceylon. (“He was a first-class scientist in the area of the amphibians and hairless reptilians.”) Even the professor’s research institute is located on Herzen Street, named after a man who spent all his adult life living abroad.

And then, what kind of Institute can that be which has only two researchers: Professor Persikov and Privatdozent Ivanov? This looks more like an experimental team, where they would also like to include one student. Everything in Bulgakov is “not what it ought to be and not the right way, guys!” Any which way you go, there is a ruse.

Writing about “experts on the feathered race,” Bulgakov may have in mind specialists on domestic policy, whereas “experts on the amphibians and reptiles” may well be specialists on foreign policy.

Only a man familiar with the economies of foreign countries could suggest NEP as a replacement for “war communism.”

A note on political economy. How can a zoologist be a political economist? I answer with this question: What does Marxism have to do with zoology? For an explanation I am quoting none other than Bulgakov himself.---

“What, you do not know the difference between naked gads and reptilians?” asked Persikov. “But this is just laughable, young man. Naked gads have no pelvic kidneys. They are absent. That’s what, sir. Shame on you. You are probably a Marxist?”

“A Marxist,” replied the failed student, fizzling out.

It may be noted for clarity that all early Marxists, epitomized by Plekhanov in Russia, were political economists… “That’s what, sir.”

GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. LXXV.

“‘How very fascinating!’ said the magician.

‘Yes, but what do you think it is?’ asked Creepy-Crawly. ‘Can you make it out?’

‘It’s plain enough to see,’ said the other. ‘Of course it’s Copenhagen, or another city. They are all alike! Anyway, it’s a city.’

‘It’s ditch water,’ said Creepy-Crawly.”

H. C. Andersen. The Drop of Water.

Before we get down to the discovery of Professor Persikov, we need to answer the question: what earned him the distinction of being a “favorite of Nature?” Persikov was not among those many who “rush to nonentity,” he was not “amidst the crowd forgotten and alone,” and having received his gift from “Tsar Nature,” “her mark,” Professor Persikov “does not complain about his fate.” When we first meet him, the action takes place in the year 1928, Professor Persikov is a 58-year-old man, which means that he is “old guard,” yet he never fled Russia for foreign lands, and he not only lived through the Bolshevik Revolution and “war communism,” when all of his test animals died of food shortages, and he himself nearly starved and froze to death, but his wife left him and fled to Europe herself. Bulgakov depicts this man as a patriot of his country, who refuses a substantial sum of money from “a certain foreign country,” which offers him “without any ulterior motive,” an advance of 5,000 rubles merely for “taking a look at the blueprints of his chamber.” “Trembling with rage,” Persikov decides to call Lubyanka (the State Security office):

“I have here some suspicious characters coming and going.” When he is visited by the agents of State Security, he asks them whether it would be possible to have snoopy reporters shot.

Bulgakov clearly shows us a scientist absorbed in his work, totally disinterested in fame (“Let them all go to hell!” and protecting himself with his fists from the photo cameras), and even in his own government’s offer of a personal car (“I prefer riding a tram: it goes faster!”). A man of high morality, he wept, having received a letter from abroad, informing him of the death of his wife, fifteen years after their separation. He never remarried, and dismissed prostitutes as completely as he dismissed the journalists. When A. S. Rok tells him: “We must restore the chicken industry, because they write so much trash about us abroad,” Persikov responds: “So let them write it, so what?” For Professor Persikov the West exists exclusively to facilitate his scientific research: the Zeiss equipment… If all of the above is not enough, then we might add that “Tsar Nature” chose Professor Persikov as her favorite, because “he was a first-rate scientist.”

It is time now to get down to Professor Persikov’s discovery as such. Like many other discoveries before him, this one was also made accidentally. Leaving his study to see his assistant, Professor forgot to switch off his microscope, with a batch of amoebae displayed under its lens, where these amoebae remained for the duration of an hour and a half.

From this point on, Bulgakov, being a master of allegories, gives us a totally amazing description of the Russian history of that time, specifically, of the NEP (New Economic Policy, introduced by Lenin in 1921) and what it could have led Russia to on the verge of World War II had it been allowed to go on. I must warn the reader right away that Bulgakov’s attitude toward the NEP was sharply negative throughout his works (specifically in Diaboliada, and in his numerous sketches).

“In it, in this beam, the professor was able to discern what was a thousand times more significant and important than the beam itself, an unstable infant born accidentally during the movement of the mirror and lens of the microscope… Grayish amoebae… were using every last effort to draw themselves toward the red strip, and in it (as though by magic) they were revived. Some kind of force breathed the spirit of life into them. They advanced in numbers and fought each other for a place under the beam. Right there, a crazy, for want of another word, reproduction was underway. Inside the red strip, and then all over the disc, the place became overcrowded, and an inevitable struggle began. The newly-borns fiercely attacked each other, tore each other into pieces, and devoured them… The best and the strongest of them were the winners. And these best were horrid. To begin with, their size was approximately twice as large as that of the regular amoebae, and secondly, they were distinguished by some kind of special viciousness and agility.”

What Professor Persikov saw under his microscope was capitalist society.

Professor Persikov’s discovery became known, newspapers started writing about it, foreign governments got interested and so on. Persikov’s problems begin when his scientific report attracts special interest of another outstanding citizen of the USSR, Alexander Semyonovich Rokk, who is struck by an idea of how to restore the chicken industry in the country (following the pandemic of chicken plague) in the shortest possible time (in one month, to be precise), by using Professor Persikov’s red beam and his specially built chambers.

In no uncertain terms, Bulgakov shows the West’s animosity toward the ongoing “egg” campaign as a certain Mr. Hughes starts creating difficulties, hence the ruling of the Kremlin obligating Professor Persikov to hand over his three already built chambers, together with the “red beam,” to A. S. Rokk.

A number of eggs is ordered from the West: eggs of snakes and ostriches for Professor Persikov’s further experiments, and chicken eggs for Rokk’s chicken farm. A major mix-up occurs when the eggs ordered by Persikov are mistakenly sent by the Ministry of Animal Husbandry to Rokk’s state farm Red Beam of Smolensk Province. Rokk is obviously ignorant in the technicalities of chicken farming, and accepts reptilian eggs as chicken eggs on the grounds that, having arrived from abroad, they have to be different from normal Soviet eggs. (What an imbecile!) What makes the situation much worse is that in the West, in America or in Germany, where these eggs originated from, the relatively harmless eggs of small snakes were apparently substituted by the far more dangerous eggs of anacondas, crocodiles, and other such species. Had these eggs been delivered to Professor Persikov in Moscow, he would have immediately spotted the difference between what he had ordered and these dangerous items, and would not have experimented with them at all. The fact that Persikov had never ordered this dangerous batch, comes through Bulgakov’s depiction of the professor’s horrified reaction:

“My God… My God,” repeated Persikov, and getting green in the face, started slumping down on the rotating stool…

When his assistant Ivanov shows him the color picture in the newspaper, where, “wriggling like some horrific fire hose, was an olive-colored with yellow patches on it snake… Persikov said in extreme surprise: ‘What the hell. This is… but this is anaconda, water boa…’” Having found out that this anaconda was from Smolensk Province, that “that scoundrel [Rokk] bred snakes instead of chicken… Snakes are coming in flocks, laying unbelievable amounts of eggs… Crocodiles and ostriches appeared…”, Persikov, “multicolored, bluish-pale, with insane eyes, got up from the stool, and gasping for breath, started screaming: ‘Anaconda... Anaconda… Water boa! My God!’ ... The scream resonated under the stone vaults of the institute. ‘…Anaconda… Anaconda…,’ thundered the echo. In one move, the Professor tore off his necktie and the buttons on his shirt, became purple in a strange paralytic sort of way, and staggering, with utterly goofy, glassy eyes, rushed somewhere out of there… ‘Give him water… He is having a stroke!..”

It is quite clear from this reaction that Professor Persikov never ordered either anaconda eggs or crocodile eggs for his experiments. Naturally, such a calamity could not be stopped. But once again, Lermontov to the rescue, with his Nature. In Russia’s hot summer month of August, a sudden frost hit the scene of a developing national catastrophe, and the “fragile creatures of rotting hot tropical marshes perished during the course of just two days, leaving upon the expanse of three provinces a terrible stench, decay, and pus. They were smothered by the frost. The calamity came to an end. The forests, the fields, and endless marshes were still littered with multicolored eggs, covered oftentimes by a strange, unseen in these areas pattern… but all these eggs were by now completely harmless. They were dead, the fetuses inside them were all finished off.”

(To be continued tomorrow…)

GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. LXXIV.

“It may be that I do not my design fulfill,

But this design is great, which is enough;

My hour has come--- of glory or of shame;

Immortal, or forever to oblivion doomed.

Enquired I of Nature, and she

Accepted me in her embrace…”

M. Yu. Lermontov. A Fragment.

 

Bulgakov’s Fateful Eggs rest on two whales-works of M. Yu. Lermontov. The first of them is his Plague. Just like there are two men against the backdrop of Lermontov’s poem, Bulgakov shows us two men against the backdrop of chicken plague in Fateful Eggs: Professor V. I. Persikov and the troubleshooter commissar A. S. Rokk.

As the reader is already familiar with the idea of the “plague,” which is that the plague is an allegory of human life, I am showing, in the Chapter Rooster, that Bulgakov, quite obviously portrays people as hens and roosters.
What points us in the direction of Lermontov’s Plague is the following passage from Bulgakov’s Fateful Eggs:

“…and among his other oddities he [Professor Persikov] had this one: whenever he was saying something weighty and confident, the index finger of his right hand was transformed into a hook. ... And considering that he always spoke weightily and confidently, the hook very frequently appeared before the eyes of Professor Persikov’s listeners…”

And now here is Lermontov:

“Some people came to them, and used a hook

To drag the cold corpse to the high pile of bodies.

Without regret, they dragged him there,

Added some logs, and lit them up.”

As a result of the experiment gone wrong, “there were mass epidemics… mass diseases from the corpses of the reptiles and the humans.”

Only through this prism can we explain the professor’s “hook” on the very first page of Fateful Eggs. Bulgakov likes to show bad omens of an impending disaster from the very beginning.

***

We are now getting down to the second ‘whale’ of Bulgakov’s Fateful Eggs, which is Lermontov’s poem Glistening, Run the Clouds:

“…Wretched is the world!

Each person in it is forgotten and lonely amidst the crowd;

And people all rush toward nonentity,---

But even though Nature despises them,

She has her favorites among them, as with other kings.

And he who has her mark upon himself,

Must not complain about his lot,

So that no one, no one would ever say

That she had nursed a snake at her breast.”

In the person of Professor Persikov, Bulgakov shows us such a favorite of Nature. This is the only way to explain that something “special, which he possessed alone, out of the whole world.” With his unique sense of humor, Bulgakov kills off his protagonist in a most gruesome manner:

“A low man on crooked monkey legs… pushed his way to Persikov, and with a terrible blow of the stick broke open his head.”

Here is a response of sorts to Lermontov’s warning:

And he who has her mark upon himself,



Must not complain about his lot…

Naturally, Bulgakov has another fig in his pocket to Lermontov’s line: “So that no one, no one would ever say That she had nursed a snake at her breast.” He gives Professor V. I. Persikov the acronymic name VIPER in the very first chapter, which is titled Curriculum Vitae of Professor Persikov. This is the reason why he is giving him such an unusual last name: he needs its first three letters: PER.

Bulgakov confirms this in two places.---

1.      When the enraged crowd comes to kill Professor Persikov, it shouts: “World villain! You let the reptilians loose!” The Russian word “gad,” which translates as “reptilian,” but also figuratively as “scum,” comes from the word “gadyuka,” meaning “viper.”

2.      When A. S. Rok, having received the eggs at his state farm, telephones Persikov to ask him whether they ought to be washed, he mentions them as being dirty, smeared in some kind of “gryazyuka.” This last word is an artificial derivative of “gryaz’,” “dirt,” created to rhyme with the word “gadyuka,” “viper,” immediately indicating that those were not chicken eggs, but snake eggs.

(To be continued tomorrow…)