Nature
Continues.
“…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.
M. Yu. Lermontov. Glistening,
Run the Clouds.
Bulgakov attaches a special significance to the
“caleçons.” In his first work written after White
Guard (1922-23), Diaboliada (1923),
he develops the antagonist whose name is Kalsoner,
who then travels to his next work Fateful
Eggs (1924), there becoming a certain Alexander Semyonovich Rokk. Fateful Eggs is included in my chapter
on Nature for one simple reason that
here, in this particular work, Bulgakov raises the troubling question of
biological warfare: dangerous animals (snakes, crocodiles, and their fetuses
inside eggs).
Despite its relatively small size, Fateful Eggs is a complex story. In it,
Bulgakov raises several interesting issues. One of them, directly relating to
Russian history, is treated in my chapter Rooster
(the frivolous and unwelcome intervention of the Entente Powers: England, France, the United States, plus Japan,
etc. in the Russian Civil War). It is
obvious that the question of foreign intervention was very close to Bulgakov,
as he is raising it for a second time in the same work. In this instance, foreign
intervention assumes the form of biological warfare.
Due to the fact that already in this early magnificent
work Bulgakov creates a complex character of a Russian scientist and a patriot
V. I. Persikov, this segment reaches beyond the
scope of biological warfare proper. I guarantee that the reader is not
going to be disappointed by the second parallel reality, where everything
converges at the end. Things are by no means what they seem to be.
Among other questions raised in this novella are “War
Communism,” New Economic Policy (NEP), Slavophilism, and cosmopolitanism in the
best sense of this word.
In Fateful Eggs,
Bulgakov most interestingly and subtly touches upon the work of the Soviet
security organs (how about the exceptional character of Vasenka?!), as well as
the interest in, and aid to, the Russian scientists during that time, extended
by the government.
All this is tied together in Bulgakov’s head in
presenting to the reader Russia of the mid-1920’s. Curiously, the action takes
place in the near future, the summer of 1928. There is an element of fantasy
and the supernatural, which I am treating in the chapter Triangle: Diaboliada, Fateful
Eggs, and Master and Margarita.
We are all familiar with H. C. Andersen’s magical
fairytale Snow Queen. Bulgakov wrote
his own magical story and called it Fateful
[in Russian puns with “Rokk’s”] Eggs. Thus the title has two meanings at
once, after Bulgakov has given the last name Rokk, Fate, to one of his
main characters.
In Bulgakov’s fairytale for adults, Professor
Persikov, a zoologist-scientist, catches a beam of red light from a strong
electric bulb, using a microscope mirror and a Zeiss camera. As always is the
case with him, Bulgakov confuses the reader with regard to the actual source of
this beam’s appearance. He writes that “all walls in
the institute were replaced by mirrors,” and that “glints of multicolored lights were being thrown into the plate-glass
of the study, by what could be seen alongside the dark massive cap of Christ
the Savior Cathedral, the foggy moon crescent.”
Bulgakov goes around and around the subject as to
wherefrom had that magic red beam caught by Professor Persikov originated.
Persikov’s first hunch was that it had come from the sun, but in the daytime,
with the sun in abundance, he cannot repeat his feat, and so he decides that
the source of the beam must be the electricity ----
The fact that Professor Persikov fails to
take into consideration that the red beam may come from the lunar crescent is
revealed unequivocally by Professor Persikov’s own words: “The first thing which
remains to be ascertained is whether it comes from electricity only, or also
from the sun…”
“And in the course of one more night, this
matter was cleared up. Persikov caught three beams in three microscopes,
nothing from the sun, and this is how he put it:
‘…Well,
in one word, one has to assume that it can only be obtained from the electric
light.’ Lovingly, he looked up at the frosted orb above…”
----even though Bulgakov clearly shows the reader that
the glints of multicolored lights were being thrown
into the plate-glass of the study… by the moon crescent.”
So, does this mean that Bulgakov introduces the
supernatural element into the story? After all, this is what he writes at the
end of the novella:
“The boundless expanses of the land were
for a long time afterwards rotting from countless corpses of crocodiles and
snakes, brought to life by the mysterious,
born in the eyes of a genius, beam.”
(In other words, Bulgakov believes that
in each great scientist there is an element of the supernatural. We can support
this belief using the example of the great Isaac Newton. Newton must have
believed that his world-historical discovery of calculus was a supernatural
gift from God, and this thought must have frightened him so much that he fought
against it by presenting himself publicly as a dedicated rationalist, fearing
to reveal his private secret that the greatest scientific discoveries come not
by means of rationalization, but by means of revelation, which might have
easily convinced his colleagues that he had lost his mind. Hence his shameful
public claim that Leibniz, the German genius who happened to develop calculus
independently around the same time, had stolen his unpublished notes and passed
them off as his own. Such incredible littleness on Newton’s part can only be
explained by Newton’s firm conviction that his gift from God had to be unique,
not shared with someone else, and that Leibniz could not possibly have come to
the same groundbreaking discovery by going his own way. Curiously, the great
rationalist Dèscartes suffered from the opposite sense of inadequacy. He was
seeking God’s revelation bestowed on him via his intuition, but his quest for
combining the scientific and supernatural elements, in developing the formula
of Creation, would remain unfulfilled.)
But the key to the riddle may not be so mysterious and
so supernatural, after all. Back in the nineteenth century, the homoeopaths
marveled at the special power of moonlight. Here is a most enlightening excerpt
from the great British homoeopath John Henry Clarke, MD:
Goullon of Weimar [wrote] a notable article
on The Influence of the Moon on the Human
Organism, in which he mentions, among other interesting facts, that
somnambulism is a lunar effect; that worm affections are most troublesome at
the fool moon, and that goiter diminishes, more or less, during the waning
moon… Goullon quotes these words of Arago, which show that he had a proper
estimation of the limits of physical analysis:
“A
deeper research is needed, for there is nothing to show that it is the light of
the moon which is its only efficient agent. It must further be remarked that
the nervous system, according to a large number of reports, constitutes an
instrument far more delicate than the most subtle apparatus of actual physics.
And, in fact, who does not know that the olfactory nerve detects in the air the
existence of odorous particles of which chemical analysis cannot reveal the
smallest trace?”
J. H. Clarke, MD. A Dictionary of Practical Materia Medica. Volume II. Page 321. Luna.
Bulgakov confuses the reader not only by the question
wherefrom that “red beam” had actually appeared, but also by his explicit and
misleading allusion to H. G. Wells’ science fiction novel The Food of the Gods. He ends Fateful
Eggs with a riddle:
“No matter how simple was the combination
of lenses with mirror clusters of light, it could not be recreated the second
time around…” Although, as the reader may
remember, Privatdozent Ivanov did his best to build a chamber of lenses and
mirrors, in which it would be possible to obtain this beam in an enlarged
version and outside a microscope, and to get an appropriate credit in Professor
Persikov’s published work, nothing came out of this effort, even though three
separate chambers were built, following the death of Professor Persikov: “Apparently, something special, apart from knowledge, was
necessary for that, which had been the sole possession in the world of the late
Professor Vladimir Ipatievich Persikov.”
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