“‘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…)
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