The Fatal Eggs

by Joe Auciello / February 2006 issue of Socialist Action newspaper

Mikhail Bulgakov, “The Fatal Eggs,” trans. Hugh Alpin, (London: Hesperus Press, 2005), 104 pp. $13.

“The Fatal Eggs” is a science-fiction satire and a critical allegory of the Russian Revolution. Published in 1925, the events of the story take place in Moscow of 1928 and predict a Pandora’s Box of nightmares conjured up by short-sighted scientists, ignorant government bureaucrats, and simple human error.

The novella roused considerable controversy and was soon banned, like most of Bulgakov’s subsequent literary work. Bulgakov, however, continued to write, even after the secret police raided his apartment and seized his manuscripts. Decades after his death, the posthumous publication of his novels and plays earned him a place as a major writer in Soviet fiction.

In “The Fatal Eggs” Vladimir I. Persikov (V.I. Lenin?), a professor of zoology and director of a scientific institute, accidentally invents a “red ray” that with incredible speed multiplies the growth of living cells and creates giant-sized organisms.

Naturally enough, word leaks out in the tabloid press. Soon after, with an official document from the Kremlin, appears Comrade Faight (“‘Fate with a document? A rare combination,’ said Persikov”). It seems that a pestilence has been wiping out chicken farms, causing a catastrophe in the countryside and cities. This crisis leads Faight to seize the ray, although it has not been adequately tested, since “it’s essential for the state to regenerate its poultry-farming, because they’re writing all sorts of vile things about us abroad.”

Faight intends to turn the ray on chicken eggs and, almost overnight, replace all that had been lost. Then things go wrong. Somehow, the chicken eggs are mistakenly sent to Professor Persikov and reptile eggs for the professor’s experiments are sent to the chicken farm. There, the eggs hatch giant snakes and crocodiles that devour everything in sight, including humans.

The Red Army is called out to contain this devastating outbreak, but they are unable to halt the attack, which rapidly converges on Moscow. Finally, in a plot twist straight out of H.G. Wells, the Soviet Union is saved. For a time, anyway.

The Soviet Union is gone now, unlikely to return in the foreseeable future. The literature of its early years, however, is now enjoying a modest but definite revival in English translation.

For England’s Hesperus Press, publishers of Mayakovsky and Bulgakov, this mission is clearly a labor of love. These Soviet authors, little known to English and American readers, will not make their publishers rich. Yet, theirs is no vanity project, either. Modern readers will discover that the value of these writers has not diminished with time or the permutations of history.

Soviet writers like Bulgakov reveal the social conflicts of their era and deserve to be heard today by anyone eager to learn about the hopes and fears created by an event then unprecedented in the world: the first socialist revolution.

Russian writers and intellectuals in the 1920s were deeply divided about the Soviet government and the desirability of socialism. “The New Course Resolution” of 1923, a document adopted unanimously by the Soviet Politburo, stated, “Among the intelligentsia, as a result of general causes as well as the improvement of their position within our country … there is to be noted a general swing of opinion in favor of Soviet power,” (Leon Trotsky, “The Challenge of the Left Opposition 1923-1925” p. 407). There is no reason to doubt the claim, but this favorable opinion was by no means universal.

Bulgakov represents the social stratum that scorned reaction but feared revolution. That layer of intellectuals found themselves trapped in a social bind. Tsardom, they felt, could not be supported, for it retarded progress; but Bolshevism, they also believed, drove progress recklessly, like an express train without brakes.

To her skeptics and critics, the Soviet Republic, only eight years old in 1925, seemed bound for disaster. And there was ample reason to think so. Shortly after the socialist revolution, the counterrevolutionary forces regrouped and, with the assistance of the Allied governments, plunged the country into three years of civil war.

The Bolsheviks were forced to introduce a set of policies known as “war communism,” according to which by brutal necessity the economy was directed to sustaining the war. As a result, trade relations between the town and countryside were strained to the point of collapse; in response, the Red Army went into the villages and seized grain from peasants who then retaliated by planting less and less. Famine broke out in 1921, affecting millions. Starvation was widespread.

The crisis in agriculture continued for years after. The Bolsheviks adopted the New Economic Policy, which encouraged free trade within the country. This policy improved life for the peasant, but heavy industry continued to suffer. Workers in the cities were under-employed or unemployed. Cultural life suffered. Lack of paper and a lack of functioning printing presses meant that journals shut down, and fewer and fewer books were printed. There was, in other words, a shortage of everything except reason to doubt the stability of the Soviet experiment.

Bulgakov was no partisan of the fledgling Soviet republic. The son of a theology professor, Bulgakov became a doctor, practiced medicine, and abandoned it for writing. For him, politics was transitory; literature was eternal. He subscribed to the teaching of the celebrated doctor of antiquity who said, “Life is short, art is long.“ Bulgakov’s personal philosophy was more spiritual than soviet, more religious than revolutionary. He believed Nature more powerful than Civilization, yet he was no worshipper of the soil or the peasant or the Orthodox Church. His experience as a doctor in the Russian countryside made him all too familiar with cultural backwardness, and he valued social progress as its necessary cure. Yet, he was deeply ambivalent about the possibility of social change through communist revolution.

Bulgakov gave voice to the intellectual layer who wanted a calm, orderly tempo of social development. History did not provide it. In addition to the social turmoil within Russia, a series of socialist uprisings erupted in Europe. These revolts either proved short-lived or failed outright. Marxists were able to explain these defeats, and Trotsky was among the first to do so in his “The Lessons of October.”

Nonetheless, to the noncommunist critic, troubles at home and failure abroad inevitably led to one conclusion: Humanity could not improve its social condition by taking the road of revolution. The creation would rebound on the creator, making everything worse. This is the theme of Bulgakov’s satirical novellas, “The Fatal Eggs” and “Heart of a Dog.” A stalled revolution in a backward country, the failure of revolution in the advanced countries—these are the social forces that shaped Bulgakov. Thus, alienated from history, alienated from his society, a writer can make a virtue of isolation by finding refuge in satire, seeking a compensatory comfort in criticism.

Bulgakov excelled as a satirist. But he was not, however much he wrote political allegory and satire, a political theorist. The self-description he provides in his well-known “Letter to the Soviet Government“ was quite true: “I am not someone who is active in politics, but a literary man,” (“Manuscripts Don’t Burn,” p. 109). His mind turned to story, not sociology.

Nonetheless, despite what Bulgakov said about his involvement with politics, politics was involved with him. In 1920s Russia it could not be otherwise. “The Fatal Eggs” was denounced by many contemporary Soviet critics as counter-revolutionary, and a subsequent work, the even more pointed satire, “A Dog’s Heart,” was not published at all.

But Bulgakov was satirizing what Lenin and later Trotsky would criticize—that is, the limits and failures of the Soviet state and its practices. Lenin had no patience with what he called

“komchvanstvo — communist conceit.” By the Eleventh Party Congress in 1922, Lenin sharply criticized the communists’ failure to realize that they had to learn to administer as effectively as the capitalists. Unless the communists were capable of learning, Lenin predicted, “the Soviet power will not be able to exist.”

In Lenin’s last article, “Better Fewer, But Better,” published only a year before Bulgakov began “The Fatal Eggs,” Lenin developed his deep criticisms that echo the themes of Bulgakov’s fiction. Lenin wrote: “Our state apparatus is so deplorable, not to say wretched, that we must first think very carefully how to combat its defects, bearing in mind that these defects are rooted in the past, which, although it has been overthrown, has not yet been overcome, has not yet reached the stage of a culture that has receded into the distant past.

“I say culture deliberately. … We might say that the good in our social system has not been properly studied, understood, and taken to heart; it has been hastily grasped at; it has not been verified or tested, corroborated by experience, and not made durable, etc. Of course, it could not be otherwise in a revolutionary epoch, when development proceeded at such breakneck speed that in a matter of five years we passed from tsarism to the Soviet system.

“It is time we did something about it. We must show sound scepticism for too rapid progress, for boastfulness, etc. ...

“The most harmful thing here would be haste. The most harmful thing would be to rely on the assumption that we know at least something, or that we have any considerable number of elements necessary for the building of a really new state apparatus, one really worthy to be called socialist, Soviet, etc.” (V.I. Lenin, “Selected Works,” Vol. 3, pp. 714-715). Lenin’s withering criticism finds a literary parallel in works like “The Fatal Eggs.” Although Bulgakov was no Leninist, his satirical stories complement the writings of Lenin’s last struggle. The wretched state apparatus was Bulgakov’s target, too.

Bulgakov’s stories, set in what was then the near future, can be read as a warning: culture cannot change on command; science does not develop by diktat. Nor can a plan, however brilliant or grandiose, ignore the fact that mere human beings are involved in carrying it out, and human beings are all too capable of error. Yes, even know-it-all party functionaries!

On first impulse, the majority of the Communist Party’s Politburo refused to publish “Better Fewer, but Better.” That repressive mentality took hold and grew, eventually suffocating creative thinking in art and politics alike. Soon after, like-minded bureaucrats would refuse to publish Bulgakov and other writers, and then critical communists like Trotsky and the Left Opposition would be silenced. In his autobiography, “My Life,” Trotsky recalls, “Lenin’s wife said in 1927 that if he had been alive he would probably have been doing time in a Stalin prison. I think she was right” (p. 481).

The first socialist revolution did not develop as its founders had dared to hope. Revolution in a backward country—war-torn Russia encircled by enemies—soon reached its limits.

Bulgakov would likely have said that historical and cultural backwardness made the revolution’s success impossible. There he differed from the Bolsheviks. They likewise acknowledged the difficulties, but the Bolsheviks believed that launching the revolution in

Russia transformed the balance of forces in the world to the favor of a working-class revolution.

They did not, however, believe that socialism in Russia alone would survive, much less prosper. It is here that the satire of Bulgakov and the criticism of the Bolsheviks—the struggle of Lenin and Trotsky against bureaucraticism—finally meet. What Bulgakov satirizes as socialism was not that at all. The fatal eggs he describes would soon hatch the monstrous deformation of Stalinism, not socialism.

Bulgakov shows the betrayal of socialism allegorically, not theoretically. He describes, vividly and artistically, the surface effects of the burgeoning bureaucracy, not its root causes. His satire is accurate and therefore entertaining; he presents his ideas in the special way of knowing—concrete human experience—that is literature’s purpose. But literary satire perceives only so much. Bulgakov could not explain why the bureaucracy developed within and then dominated Soviet society. For that comprehension, political theory, Marxist theory, is needed. To fully understand “The Fatal Eggs,” it is necessary to read Trotsky’s critique of the Soviet Union under Stalin, “The Revolution Betrayed.”