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...)