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…)