GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. LXXX.

Adam and Eve.

“Noiselessly, a whole city block goes down in the window, and a second colonnade appears, and some kind of stallions, in a strange lighting.”

Bulgakov. Adam and Eve.

(See additional details of this play’s plot and my commentary on them in my chapter under the title of Rooster.)

In his play Adam and Eve Bulgakov raises the questions of chemical, bacteriological, and nuclear weapons, and he does it as always in his own inimitable way with a macabre sense of humor, or rather, irony. The play is remarkable for, having been written in 1931, showing the USSR in preparation for a war with Germany.

Having learned that Eve’s husband is an engineer in bridge construction, professor Yefrosimov, a chemical scientist, advises him to drop whatever he is working on. What is the use of spending two years on building a bridge that can be destroyed in three minutes?
Yefrosimov is not only a chemist. He is well versed in behind-the-scenes political games. The phrase of Adam: “There will be a terrible explosion, but that will be the last, cleansing explosion, because on the side of the USSR is a great idea!” happens to be buried in the subsequent and very interesting reasoning of Yefrosimov. Pity!
What Yefrosimov is saying here is about who is really ruling the world, and how: they are “old men in top hats.”
Bulgakov simplifies the picture, confusing the reader, he merges two images into one. His phrase “You--- the idea, the scientist--- the arsenic,” puts everything in its place. There are scientists who propose ideas, these include political scientists. There are also scientists who mix together all sorts of rubbish, these are the chemists. But neither side combines the ideas with the chemicals. I base my approach on the assertion that for Bulgakov “top hat” is a symbol of power. “Old men” are those who wield that power. The “old men” are interested in the discoveries of historical-political thought, that is, in how to advance your country, while leaving all other countries behind. An idea alone cannot be enough, one needs the whole spectrum of scientific-technological progress. This progress is represented by such scientists as Yefrosimov. The scientists need these “old men” for the financing [recommendation for financing] of their projects. The “old men” bring together the discoveries of historical-political thought [the ideas] and scientific-technological progress. The goal of the “old men” is a high standard of living. Bulgakov shows this by the words “economka” (the Russian word meaning “housekeeper,” creating the Russian linguistic pun “economka-economika,” the latter meaning “economy”) and “coffee.” In reality, Yefrosimov is talking not about an economka but about the economika of a country. The better off is the country’s economy, the more the demand for housekeepers and coffee.
It is possible to raise a country’s standard of living in two ways: by trade [the “bridges”] and by war [the “explosions”]. There are exceptions, of course. After World War II, Great Britain overnight turned from one of the world’s greatest imperial powers into a second-rate country, continuing its political subsistence only thanks to the United States of America. So, here is a “love-hate” relationship indeed. Refusing to provide the British with urgently needed massive loans, the United States reduced Great Britain to a status of virtual dependency…
There is also a third way: the way of pushing countries back into the stone age. Today we see a successful implementation of this idea in the Arab World, by means of encouraging rebellions and insurrections. Here, the idea of freedom is linked to arms trade, and thus it promotes self-enrichment of the seller countries and impoverishment of the nations on whose territory these rebellions take place. The idea of freedom thus turns into a slave trade. In order for one person to be free, a multitude of slaves is required, to pay for that freedom.
Yefrosimov tells Adam: “You come up with an idea, and the scientist supplements it with arsenic.” He tells Adam about one such scientist, who “mixed together some rubbish… and started warming it up… What came out of it was that before he finished drinking his coffee, thousands of people lay down side by side in the fields… And the most interesting part of it was that they were all young people, definitely blameless of any kinds of ideas…”
The success of such weapons does not depend on their smell. “The whole question is how it will smell. No matter how he tried, this thing would always smell of something: of mustard, of almonds, of rotting cabbage, and finally, of gentle geranium. It was a macabre smell, friends, but it wasn’t a super-smell.” […Naturally, the presence of smell is not a problem today, but even a plus, because it is used for intimidation, a person receives a warning smell, about what may happen next, and he knows very well what will follow that smell: headache, pressure in the temples, burning in the nose, the eyes, the mouth and the throat, itching of the eyes, a feeling of pressure and pain in the eyes, but most importantly, before the “chemical attack,” odors of various chemicals are being used as a psychological attack. In this case, chemicals are used not to kill a person, but in order to intimidate...] “As for the ‘super,’ it will happen when there will be no smell in the lab, no noise, and fast action… No smell, no explosion, and fast action.”

Following that macabre conversation, a chemical attack took place, and the whole population of the city perished, with the exception, as we know it already, of the four persons saved by Yefrosimov by “taking their pictures” with his very special photo camera.
The end of the play would have been totally incomprehensible (how could the USSR win after being subjected to a series of attacks), had Bulgakov not given us a very interesting scene to observe, in the following stage remark:
“Noiselessly, a whole city block goes down in the window, and a second colonnade appears, and some kind of stallions, in a strange lighting.”
First, the question. How can a whole city block fall down noiselessly? This word alone is already convincing us that we are dealing with an allegory.
Next, the stallions, and in strange lighting at that! An obvious allusion to the horses of the Apocalypse. Once we remember the words of the engineer Adam: “…There will be a terrible explosion, but that will be the last, cleansing explosion, because on the side of the USSR is a great idea!” it becomes clear right away that Bulgakov is depicting in these two instances an atomic explosion which ends the war. After that, mankind gets “organized,” an international world government is formed, and there are no more enemies. The whole globe becomes open, and travel visas are no longer needed.

…That was how Bulgakov saw the future of mankind in 1931.

 

(To be continued tomorrow…)