Snow Queen.
“Is
it possible that you shoot [all] reporters?”
M. A. Bulgakov. Fateful
Eggs.
Having baffled the reader concerning the origin of the
“red beam,” Bulgakov somewhat clears up this matter at the end of the book. As
it turns out, the “beam” was born in the eyes of Professor Persikov. (“…Crocodiles and snakes brought to life by the mysterious, born on Herzen Street
[the location of Professor Persikov’s Institute] in the eyes of a genius
[Persikov], beam.”) Indeed, Persikov was a chosen one of Nature. (More
on this, right after this segment.) As I already pointed out before, this beam
must have had its source in the moonlight and reached the microscope lenses and
mirrors not directly, but reflected by the eyes of Professor Persikov. This is
the reason why it was he, and nobody else, who saw it, pinpointed it, and thus
made his monumental historical discovery.
In my chapter on Bulgakov, I am writing about
Bulgakov’s uniqueness in the sense that in his head he had a very special personal
computer (very few people can boast of having their own computer in their
head), which stored information and retrieved it for Bulgakov’s use whenever it
was needed. Bulgakov’s reading was unlike most other people’s reading. His
memory stored the details that struck him, until he would use these details in
his works. This is a special form of selective memory, when a person does not
bother to retain the whole thing in his mind, but only certain definitive
moments and situations. Like oftentimes we vividly remember the strong beginning
or the strong ending of a movie, but not much of everything else.
There can be no doubt that Bulgakov deliberately leads
the reader along a misleading path with his allusion to H. G. Wells’ Food of the Gods. But Bulgakov’s
Professor Persikov, in Fateful Eggs,
clearly relates to H. C. Andersen’s “wicked
imp” from the introduction to his fairytale Snow Queen. Andersen had created “a most wicked magician [who] designed a
mirror possessing a very special magic power: anything good and beautiful
reflected in it shrank to next to nothing, while everything ugly and useless
was magnified and made to appear ten times worse than it did before. The
loveliest landscapes looked like spoiled spinach and the handsomest people
would become quite odious, or were turned upside down on their heads. Their
features would be so distorted that their friends couldn’t recognize them…
What’s more, if a good or kind thought passed through anyone’s mind, the mirror
would reproduce it as an ugly wrinkle. Pupils at the school of magic where he
taught spread abroad the fame of this mirror and declared that now for the
first time the world and its inhabitants might be seen as they really were.
They carried the mirror from place to place until at last there was no country
or person that had not been misrepresented in it. Its admirers then tried to
take it up to Heaven… till at last the mirror trembled... fell to the earth,
shattering into millions, billions, and trillions of pieces. And then it caused
an even greater unhappiness than before, for all those pieces of glass,
scarcely so large as a grain of sand, flew about in the air and got into
people’s eyes, causing them to view everything the wrong way.”
Here we find the most significant affinity between
Andersen and Bulgakov: their intolerance of all forms of brainwashing. Andersen’s ‘brainwashers’ are punished by Heaven when
their wicked mirror is shattered into myriads of pieces. (“Its admirers then tried
to take it up to Heaven to see if they could carry on their sport up there. But
the higher they flew, the more wrinkled the mirror became, and they had trouble
holding it together. Yet still they flew on and on, higher and higher, till at
last the mirror trembled so fearfully that it escaped from their hands and fell
to the earth, shattering into millions, billions, and trillions of pieces…”)
In Bulgakov’s novel, the brainwasher Berlioz has his head cut off through a
scheme of the devil. (Death to the brainwashers? It is not without a reason
that in Fateful Eggs Professor
Persikov asks a team of GPU agents: “Is
it possible that you shoot [all] reporters?”)
There is an impression that in our enlightened
twenty-first century mass media has fallen into the hands of the same “very-very wicked wizards” which
apparently existed in the times of H. C. Andersen in the nineteenth century,
and his words from the fairytale could just as adequately describe the
situation existing today. But there is a difference. Quite often, pictures we
see on the television screen contradict the text being read. The most
astonishing thing here is that these same “very-very
wicked wizards” are inflicting irreparable harm on the national interest of
their host countries, while the “keepers of the faith” of those
countries are asleep at the switch, as their trickle-down must be really
good.
What concerns our main hero Professor Persikov, none
of those innumerable fragments of wizard glass has penetrated either his eye or
his heart. Quite the opposite! Bulgakov writes that right before his violent
death, “his eyes for a moment reacquired that former
sharp glitter reminiscent of that former inspired Persikov.”
A contradiction? You bet! Bulgakov thrives on them! A
genius cannot be expected to provide a dutiful snapshot of reality. Without
understanding this contradiction, it is impossible to understand either
M. Yu. Lermontov, or M. A. Bulgakov. Instead of a fragment of Andersen’s
wicked-wicked wizard’s mirror, Bulgakov’s Professor Persikov receives a gift
from Nature: a red beam from the stream of moonlight coming from the moon’s
crescent over the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, is reflected from his right
eye into the mirror of the microscope, allowing the professor to make a great
discovery. Had he been allowed to proceed with his work on it, this great
discovery would have advanced Soviet science and the USSR itself far ahead.
However, the ignorant interference that passed this discovery into the hands of
an ignoramus, A. S. Rokk, spoiled everything...
Nevertheless, Nature did not leave Russia in her
plight even then, with its own interference in the events: sending out her frost in the month of August. One more
coincidence with Andersen’s Snow Queen,
and contrarian yet again: Russia is saved from a catastrophe by frost, like it
was saved by frost from Napoleon and Hitler.
Thus we have found three important common points
between the two great writers, Andersen and Bulgakov, not to mention their
fairytale optimism!
The Good always triumphs over Evil!
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