Satire-warning in M. Bulgakov’s stories “Fatal Eggs” and “Heart of a Dog”

“Fatal Eggs” (1924) is a story written by M. A. Bulgakov during a special period in the cultural life of the country. Back then, many works were created only to motivate wide circle population to perform tasks necessary for the country's survival in critical conditions. Therefore, many different one-day authors appeared, whose creations did not linger in the memory of readers. Not only art, but also science was put on stream. Then all advanced inventions went to the service of industry and agriculture, increasing their efficiency. But scientific thought on the part of the Soviet government was subject to ideological control, which (among other things) was ridiculed by Bulgakov in “Fatal Eggs.”

The story was created in 1924, and the events in it unfold in 1928. The first publication took place in the magazine “Nedra” (No. 6, 1925). The work had different names - first “Ray of Life”, in addition, there was another one - “Professor Persikov’s Eggs” (the meaning of this name was to preserve the satirical tone of the story), but for ethical reasons this name had to be changed.

The central figure of the story, Professor Persikov, remotely contains some features real prototypes- brother-doctors Pokrovsky, relatives of Bulgakov, one of whom lived and worked on Prechistenka.

In addition, the text mentions the Smolensk province, in which the events of “Fatal Eggs” unfold, for a reason: Bulgakov worked there as a doctor and briefly visited the Pokrovskys in their Moscow apartment. The situation of the Soviet country during the period of war communism also comes from real life: at that time there were food shortages due to the unstable socio-political situation, there were riots in management structures due to unprofessionalism, and the new government had not yet managed to fully control public life.

Bulgakov in “Fatal Eggs” ridicules both the cultural and socio-political situation of the country after the revolutionary coup.

Genre and direction

The genre of the work “Fatal Eggs” is a story. It is characterized by a minimal amount storylines and, as a rule, a relatively small amount of narration (relative to the novel).

Direction - modernism. Although the events outlined by Bulgakov are fantastic, the action takes place in a real place, the characters (not only Professor Persikov, but everyone else) are also quite viable citizens of the new country. And a scientific discovery is not fabulous, it only has fantastic consequences. But on the whole the story is realistic, although some of its elements are colored grotesquely and satirically.

This combination of fantasy, realism and satire is characteristic of modernism, when the author makes bold experiments on literary work, bypassing established classical norms and canons.

The modernist movement itself appeared in special conditions of social and cultural life, when previous genres and trends began to become obsolete, and art required new forms, new ideas and ways of expression. “Fatal Eggs” is just such a work that meets modernist requirements.

About what?

“Fatal Eggs” is a story about the brilliant discovery of a scientist - professor of zoology Persikov, which ended in tears, both for those around him and for the scientist himself. The hero in his laboratory discovers a beam that can only be obtained with a special combination of mirror glass with beams of light. This ray affects living organisms so that they increase in size and begin to multiply at supernatural speed. Professor Persikov and his assistant Ivanov are in no hurry to release their discovery “to the world” and believe that they still need to work on it and conduct additional experiments, since the consequences may be unexpected and even dangerous. However, sensational information about the “ray of life” quickly penetrates the press, recorded by the semi-literate but lively journalist Bronsky, and, filled with false, unverified facts, spreads throughout society.

A discovery becomes known against the will of the scientist. Persikov is pestered by journalists on the streets of Moscow, demanding to tell him about his invention. It becomes impossible to work in the laboratory due to a barrage of press employees; even a spy comes who, for five thousand rubles, tries to find out the secret of the ray from the professor.

After this, Persikov’s house and laboratory are guarded by the NKVD, not allowing journalists in and thus providing the professor with a quiet working environment. But soon an epidemic of chicken infection occurs in the country, because of which people are strictly forbidden to eat chickens, eggs, or trade in live chickens and chicken meat. Even an emergency commission has been created to combat chicken plague. But in circumvention of the law, someone still sells chicken and eggs, and soon an ambulance comes to pick up the buyers of these products.

The country is excited. On the occasion of the epidemic, topical works are created that respond to the current mood of the public. When it begins to subside, the head of a demonstration state farm named Rokk comes to Professor Persikov with a special document from the Kremlin, who, with the help of the “ray of life,” intends to resume chicken breeding.

The document from the Kremlin turns out to be an order to advise Rokk on the use of the “life ray”, and immediately a call comes from the Kremlin. Persikov is categorically against using the beam, which has not yet been fully studied, in chicken farming, but he has to give Rokk cameras with which he can achieve the desired effect. The hero takes the cameras to a state farm in the Smolensk province and orders chicken eggs.

Soon, three boxes of unusual-looking, spotted eggs arrive in a foreign package. Rokk places the resulting eggs under the beam and tells the watchman to watch them so that no one steals the hatched chickens. The next day, egg shells are found, but no chicks. The caretaker blames the watchman for everything, although he swears that he carefully watched the process.

In the last chamber, the eggs are still intact, and Rokk hopes that at least chickens will hatch from them. He decided to take a break and goes with his wife Manya to swim in the pond. On the shore of the pond, he notices a strange calm, and then a huge snake rushes at Manya and swallows her right in front of her husband. This causes him to turn gray and almost fall into madness.

Strange news reaches the GPU that something strange is happening in the Smolensk province. Two GPU agents, Shchukin and Polaitis, go to the state farm and find there a distraught Rokk, who cannot really explain anything.

Agents examine the state farm building - the former estate of Sheremetev, and find in the greenhouse cameras with a reddish beam and hordes of huge snakes, reptiles and ostriches. Shchukin and Polaitis die in a fight with monsters.

Newspaper editors receive strange messages from the Smolensk province about strange birds the size of horses, huge reptiles and snakes, and Professor Persikov receives boxes of chicken eggs. At the same time, the scientist and his assistant see a sheet with an emergency message about anacondas in the Smolensk province. It immediately turns out that the orders of Rokka and Persikov were mixed up: the supply manager received snake and ostrich ones, and the inventor received chicken ones.

By that time, Persikov was inventing a special poison for killing toads, which was then useful for fighting huge snakes and ostriches.

Red Army troops, armed with gas, are fighting this scourge, but Moscow is still alarmed, and many are planning to flee the city.

Maddened people break into the institute where the professor works, destroy his laboratory, blaming him for all the troubles and thinking that it was he who released the huge snakes, kill his watchman Pankrat, housekeeper Marya Stepanovna and himself. They then set the institute on fire.

In August 1928, a frost suddenly sets in, killing the last snakes and crocodiles that were not finished off by special forces. After epidemics that were caused by the rotting corpses of snakes and people suffering from the invasion of reptiles, by 1929 a normal spring began.

The beam discovered by the late Persikov can no longer be obtained by anyone, not even by his former assistant Ivanov, now an ordinary professor.

The main characters and their characteristics

1. Vladimir Ipatievich Persikov- a brilliant scientist, professor of zoology, who discovered a unique ray. The hero opposes the use of the ray because its discovery has not yet been verified and researched. He is careful, does not like unnecessary fuss and believes that any invention requires many years of testing before the time comes for its operation. Because of interference in his activities, his life's work perishes with him. The image of Persikov symbolizes humanism and the ethics of scientific thinking, which were destined to die under the Soviet dictatorship. A lonely talent is contrasted with an unenlightened and driven crowd that does not have its own opinion, drawing it from newspapers. According to Bulgakov, it is impossible to build a developed and fair state without an intellectual and cultural elite, which was expelled from the USSR by stupid and cruel people who had neither the knowledge nor the talent to build a country on their own.
2. Pyotr Stepanovich Ivanov- Assistant to Professor Persikov, who helps him in his experiments and admires his new discovery. However, he is not such a talented scientist, so he fails to receive the “life ray” after the death of the professor. This is the image of an opportunist who is always ready to appropriate achievements that are truly significant person, even if you have to step over his corpse.
3. Alfred Arkadievich Bronsky- an omnipresent, fast, dexterous journalist, a semi-literate employee of many Soviet magazines and newspapers. He is the first to enter Persikov's apartment and learn about his unusual discovery, then spreads this news everywhere against the will of the professor, embellishing and distorting the facts.
4. Alexander Semenovich Rokk- a former revolutionary, and now the head of the Red Ray state farm. An uneducated, rude, but cunning person. He attends Professor Persikov’s report, where he talks about the “ray of life” he discovered, and he comes up with the idea of ​​restoring the chicken population after the epidemic using this invention. Rokk, due to illiteracy, does not realize the full danger of such an innovation. This is a symbol of a new type of people, tailored according to the standards new government. A dependent, stupid, cowardly, but, as they say, “punchy” citizen who plays only by the rules of the Soviet state: runs through the authorities, seeks permission, tries by hook or by crook to adapt to new requirements.

Topics

• The central theme is the carelessness of people in handling new scientific inventions and lack of understanding of the dangers of the consequences of such handling. People like Rokk are narrow-minded and want to achieve their goals by any means necessary. They don’t care what happens after, they are only interested in the immediate benefit of what could turn into collapse tomorrow.
• The second theme is social: confusion in management structures, due to which any disaster can occur. After all, if the uneducated Rokk had not been allowed to manage the state farm, the disaster would not have happened.
• The third theme is impunity and the enormous influence of the media, irresponsible in the pursuit of sensations.
• The fourth theme is ignorance, which resulted in many people not understanding the cause-and-effect relationship and unwillingness to understand it (they blame Professor Persikov for the disaster, although in fact Rokk and the authorities who assisted him are to blame).

Issues

• The problem of authoritarian power and its destructive influence on all spheres of society. Science should be separated from the state, but this was impossible under Soviet rule: distorted and simplified science, suppressed by ideology, was demonstrated to all people through newspapers, magazines and other media.
• Additionally, Fatal Eggs discusses social problem, which consists in the unsuccessful attempt of the Soviet system to combine the scientific intelligentsia and other segments of the population who are far from science in general. It is not for nothing that the story shows how an NKVD employee (in fact, a representative of the authorities), protecting Persikov from journalists and spies, finds a common language with the simple and illiterate watchman Pankrat. The author implies that they are on the same intellectual level with him: the only difference is that one has a special badge under the collar of his jacket, and the other does not. The author hints at how imperfect such power is, where insufficiently educated people try to control what they themselves do not really understand.
• An important problem of the story is the irresponsibility of totalitarian power to society, which is symbolized by Rokk’s careless handling of the “ray of life”, where Rokk himself is power, the “ray of life” is the ways the state influences people (ideology, propaganda, control), and reptiles, reptiles and ostriches hatched from eggs - society itself, whose consciousness is distorted and damaged. A completely different, more reasonable and rational way of managing society is symbolized by Professor Persikov and his scientific experiments, which require caution, taking into account all the subtleties and attentiveness. However, it is precisely this method that is eradicated and disappears altogether, because the crowd is led and does not want to independently understand the intricacies of politics.

Meaning

“Fatal Eggs” is a kind of satire on Soviet power, on its imperfections due to its novelty. The USSR is like one big, untested invention, and therefore dangerous for society, which no one knows how to handle yet, which is why various malfunctions, failures and disasters occur. Society in "Fatal Eggs" is experimental animals in a laboratory, subjected to irresponsible and unscrupulous experiments that clearly serve to harm rather than benefit. Uneducated people are allowed to manage this laboratory; they are entrusted with serious tasks that they are unable to perform due to their inability to navigate social, scientific and other spheres of life. As a result, experimental citizens may turn into moral monsters, which will lead to irreversible catastrophic consequences for the country. At the same time, the unenlightened crowd mercilessly attacks those who can really help them overcome difficulties, who know how to use an invention on a national scale. The intellectual elite is being exterminated, but there is no one to replace it. It is very symbolic that after Persikov’s death no one can restore the invention lost with him.

Criticism

A. A. Platonov (Klimentov), ​​considered this work as a symbol of the implementation of revolutionary processes. According to Platonov, Persikov is the creator of the revolutionary idea, his assistant Ivanov is the one who implements this idea, and Rokk is the one who decided, for his own benefit, to use the idea of ​​revolution in a distorted form, and not as it should be (for the sake of the general benefit) - as a result, everyone suffered. The characters in “The Fatal Eggs” behave as Otto von Bismarck (1871 - 1898) once described: “The revolution is prepared by geniuses, carried out by fanatics, and the fruits of it are enjoyed by scoundrels.” Some critics believed that “Fatal Eggs” was written by Bulgakov for fun, but members of RAPP (Russian Association of Proletarian Writers) reacted negatively to the book, quickly considering the political background in this work.

Philologist Boris Sokolov (b. 1957) tried to find out what prototypes Professor Persikov had: it could be the Soviet biologist Alexander Gurvich, but if we proceed from the political meaning of the story, then it is Vladimir Lenin.

“I opened a whole thousand corpses, and in none of them did I find any signs of a soul,” said Professor Mechnikov. The response, of course, was applause.

It happened at dawn XX century. A new god was given to people. His name is Science. To object to the priest of Science was the same as to confess... - but no one confessed! There was no child who would ask the famous scientist the most natural question - why did he decide to look for a soul in an object that, in fact, is characterized by the absence of a soul? It is said that if there is no soul, then there is no soul! And if it’s not there, then it never was.

What then was and is? - Dead body. It’s just that first this corpse is alive, and then it’s dead.

In the story by M.A. Bulgakov " Heart of a Dog"outstanding scientist F. F. During the experiment, Preobrazhensky unexpectedly solves an unprecedented problem - he creates a new human unit on the basis of a dead corpse. The corpse thus protrudesas the giver of life.What is this - literary fantasy? Not at all! It is not for nothing that it is scientifically substantiated and written down in school textbooks - living things come from non-living things, organic from inorganic. Disputing this truth is the same as denying the sequence of elements of the ingenious periodic table. This is an activity worthy not just of obscurantists and ignoramuses, but of literal animals.And one such animal, the dog Sharik, the hero of the above-mentioned story by Bulgakov, allowed yourself to climb onto the table of your highly learned master - and it lit up the portrait of Professor Mechnikov so much that only fragments fell down. Risky, no matter what you say. And not only from the dog’s side, but also from the author’s side of the story.

Mikhail Bulgakov gained his first fame with his novel The White Guard. This novel, publishednegligible circulation, liked by many. Few, for example, the seer Maximilian Voloshin, were stunned by him.This was an anticipation of the stunning impression that Bulgakov’s main creation, “The Master and Margarita,” made on Russia, and then on the whole world.

What was the reason for this amazement? What exactly happened? - What happened was that one person, M. A. Bulgakov, regained that vision of the world that most people had completely lost.

What did Bulgakov see?Heaven open and angels descending to the sons of men . And he not only saw, but managed to tell everyone about it, capturing what he saw in the most accessible, most beloved artistic form at that time - in the novel.

Europeans XIX centuries have loved the novel with such love that it is better not to compare it with anything - let it remain incomparable. At the heart of this love was the greatest need of the human soul - to love your neighbor as yourself. In the person of the novel's heroes, the reader found precisely such neighbors, and love for them was even better because it was carried out without the slightest moral and material costs. The desire to surround oneself with all kinds of comfort, and above all moral, - main feature, distinguishing an educated European from barbarians of all stripes.

But this love also came to an end - in science it is called the “crisis of the novel.” For there is nothing eternal under that sky and on that earth where the heroes of the pre-Bulgakov novel live, where Chardin’s “Laundress” washes her clothes. Look at her, busy with her simple work for centuries! Isn't she worthy of love? Isn't the artist worthy of praise who captured her and gave us the opportunity to see this sweet appearance many years after her death? “That’s the trouble, her death is already here, she reigns in this picture.” After all, the sky above the Washerwoman’s head is a condensation of light particles, behind which there is emptiness, and the ground under her feet is the elements of the periodic table clinging to each other. And the Washerwoman has no other way than to decompose into all these particles and elements, and Chardin knew about this when he painted her. Therefore, we do not see a living Washerwoman on the canvas, but one who has been dead for a long time. This means there is no point in getting into trouble and objecting to Professor Mechnikov.

But then something happens that can be conventionally called a miracle, and a person has a different vision, and he begins to see the world not as in Chardin’s painting, but, say, as in the painting of a church wall. And he sees - not in a picture, not in a painting, but in realitythe sky is open, and sees that it is open over the heads of those who believed in their absolute death, who agreed to recognize themselves as a living corpse, and now rushes back and forth until it reaches its final state. And under their feet he, this one who has received his sight, seeshell of the underworld coming into motion for the sake of what is happening on earth.

And it turns out that nothing has changed over the past periodin the sky above, neither below the ground- everything is surprisingly similar to how it was once painted on the church wall. Only the earthly world looks different, so visitors “from below” have to acquire caps, jackets, cracked pince-nez and other rubbish so as not to stand out too much from the crowd.

But now he, having regained his sight, gets used to this multidimensional picture, and then his gaze begins to discern even more amazing things. He peers into what is happening between heaven and earth and sees that all these jackets and pince-nez, trams and airplanes, in a word, all the signs of the times that create his unique appearance, can be taken and swept aside like a worthless heap of rubbish.And what is revealed with trepidation at the same time - isn’t this the same thing as what is painted on the church wall? Everything is similar, everything, even the squat Bald Mountain.

This was how Mikhail Bulgakov was given to see the world at the very time when science - which had already explained everything in the world and promised to change everything in its own way - triumphed in its final victory. Final, but not irrevocable.

Woe to those who dwell on the earth... for the devil has come down to you in great wrath, knowing that he has not long to live.

At first, Bulgakov creates a satire on this victorious science - the story “Fatal Eggs”. Everything in this story is magnificent: the crazy professor Persikov, who looks like a reptile, and the pale, envious assistant Ivanov, and the Bolshevik Rokk, who has been demoted from commissar to business executive. And the way Rokk tries to manage the scientific process with the help of Browning, and the way Persikov himself constantly calls “this, what’s-her-name, Lubyanka” with a request to shoot all those who interfere with his work. A wise story, and its bitter moral is true: modern science is capable of destroying everything around it, and its creators themselves. This is all true, no one will dare to say that the “Fatal Eggs” are missing the mark. However, science did not waver.

And then Bulgakov wrote a new story about talented scientists and outstanding scientific discoveries - “The Heart of a Dog.”

Formally, it can be regarded as a work dedicated to a new stage in the triumph of science: the hero, Professor Preobrazhensky, manages, unlike Persikov, to cope with the rebelliousagainst him with the work of his own hands. But you shouldn’t rush to conclusions based on formal features. After all, at the same time, again formally, “Heart of a Dog” is a satire, as everyone who has read it is witness to.Therefore, it is necessary to understand, triumphantwhether in this case science or being ridiculed. And if it is not science that is being ridiculed here, then what is it? Gogol's question - “What are you laughing at?” - turns out to be unusually appropriate here. Alas, Gogol’s answer turns out to be even more appropriate here - “You’re laughing at yourself!”Yes, the reader of “Heart of a Dog” laughs at himself, and not just some abstract, arbitrary reader, but an educated reader, and a well-educated one, knowledgeable inthe latest achievements of science, who believed in it to the end, that it was called upon to replace the Lord God, father and mother, shame and conscience. This reader is an invisible hero, taken outside the text - and serves as the main object of ridicule in “The Heart of a Dog.” It is the author who fools him and leads him by the nose, it is he who finds himself exposed to such an extent that you can already see how a scalpel tickles his bare ribs with an insidious question - are there any signs of a soul to be found here?

No, reader, no matter how you deny it, no matter how you refer to Professor Mechnikov, you still have a soul. And it was precisely on its presence that Bulgakov made his unmistakable calculation, otherwise would he even have started with “The Heart of a Dog”, or with any other work? It’s not for nothing that, having opened “The Heart of a Dog,” you immediately find someone to cling to with your soul - here he is, a hero, a scientist, a fearless transformer of nature. You will love him, Philip of Preobrazhensky, as yourself, and will be touched by everything that is dear to him, and you will hate everything that is hostile to him, that interferes with his victorious movement forward.

But know, reader, you will not be happy in this love, you will not achieve reciprocity from F. F. Preobrazhensky, he will never love you. To be convinced of this, you need to re-read “The Heart of a Dog”, re-read it very carefully, word by word, for it was written by an author who knows well that every word requires an answer, and therefore does not allow himself meaningless, random words.

So let's get started. Sharik's cry - "Oh, look at me, I'm dying!" - “Heart of a Dog” opens. And you, reader, follow this call and find yourself inside a special world created by Bulgakov’s word - therefore, be attentive to every word! - and living according to strict laws. Although this world is small on the outside - less than five printed pages, it will be difficult for you to get out of it, and it will seem scary to you, even though you laughed a lot when reading “The Heart of a Dog” for the first time, and even re-reading it, you will laugh again every time.

In fact, is it possible to resist laughing while listening to a homeless dog criticize Soviet public catering! Meanwhile, he exercises his natural right, because it has been proven - scientifically proven! - that there is no soul, there is only a short period of physical sensations (aka torment) between two black abysses. Beings, these sensationsexperiencing, are located one after another on the evolutionary ladder (Oh, the greatest chain from the dog to Mendeleev the chemist! -AND. A. Bormental). And at some point this ladder so smoothly turns into a social ladder that it is not so easy to catch this moment. For example, the same Ball from a garbage dog becomes the pet dog of a prominent scientist. His diet immediately begins to play with such colors and shades that a small employee, forced to poison himself in a cheap canteen, could never have dreamed of. We can safely say that a social chasm has formed between Sharik and the mentioned employee. Therefore, before the ball dizzyBy the ascension there was a certain equality between them. And since neither one nor the other, and no one at all, has any soul, the main criterion for distinguishing one animal from another (and also a person from a person) becomes the method and quality of nutrition. Sharik, from the first page of “The Heart of a Dog,” has good reason to be dissatisfied with his diet, as well as with his entire fate. He was clearly unlucky. After all, he could well have been born from Mrs. Darwin in the most cultured England, but no, he was born from an unknown mongrel in barbaric Russia, and even during a period of devastation. It's hard for him. And he’s not the only one. Those who neighbor him on the evolutionary-social ladder also have a hard time - hunger, cold, confusion in everything. The times are such that not every bipedal erect walker gets even the stinking corned beef cabbage soup that they cook at the Normal Nutrition Council. Some of them, like four-legged creatures (brothers? colleagues?), rummage through trash heaps and don’t always find them there. Take this circumstance into account, dear reader, when you laugh, listening to how the recreated Sharikov pokes Professor Preobrazhensky: “One lives in eight rooms, and the other rummages in the trash.” But Ball the Dog doesn’t poke anyone, he just moans - hunger, cold, his side is scalded by boiling water! - and, to his credit, he feels sorry for more than just himself. After all, he stands at the bottom step of the great ladder, is not familiar with the achievements of science, no one explained to him that there is no soul, so he gives himself free rein - he sympathizes, sympathizes, which in the absence of a soul is both meaningless and simply impossible. He was about to die himself, but he felt sorry for everyone - the patrons of the cheap canteen, and the typist, who is oppressed by a scoundrel-lover. Attention! - Not The typist had time to emerge in Sharik’s consciousness, in his confused monologue, when she already entered the gateway and addressed the unfortunate dog with mutual pity: “...Why are you whining, poor thing? Who offended you? Typistrealized. This is just the beginning. In “Heart of a Dog” not a single word is wasted. Everything is being realized. And the scoundrel lover who appeared in a ball-shaped monologue-delirium with the exclamation:“No matter how much I steal, it’s all on the female body, on cancerous necks, on Abrau-Durso. Because I was hungry enough in my youth, but there is no afterlife,” he will also be realized, just not soon, remember him for now, reader, and try to remember his words, because soon you will forget about everything in the world.

The reader is perplexed. Why on earth should I forget about everything in the world? - Due to the presence of this most unproven soul in you, its ability to sympathize and sympathize. After all, after reading the first page, you became like Romeo, who, before meeting Juliet, lavished his feelings on the first Rosaline he came across. You saw a hungry dog ​​with his side scalded to the bone, and you felt sorry for him to the point of tears. And when a rich eccentric lures him with a piece of sausage and leads him along Prechistenka, and further, further, past the most decent doorman Fyodor, up the luxurious stairs to your sparse apartment - you will be endlessly grateful to Philip Philipovich and happy as if you yourself, hungry, wounded, were warmed, healed, caressed. It doesn’t matter that you are subsequently destined to hate Sharikov, who stood in opposition to scientific progress. It doesn't matter now. Now you and Sharik are stretched out on the patterned carpet near the leather sofa, and everything that happens in the next few hours in this magnificent apartment will be perceived by both of you through a sweet drowsiness.

Wake up, reader! Remember that you are re-reading “Heart of a Dog”. Of course, you are again captivated by the course of events, you are experiencing again (and this will be the case both on the tenth and twentieth reading, such is the power of real art), but you must already know that Ball I was deceived that he, a suffering dog, was brought here not out of compassion, but for experiments. In addition, take the trouble to note that Philip Philipovich did not even see that the dog’s side was scalded, and the ideal housekeeper Zina, who noticed this, was imbued with him not at all with pity, but with disgust - “Fathers! How lousy." Did you notice? - Watch further!

Philip Philipovich's office - the dog has already figured out that this is a major scientist experimentingin the field of rejuvenation through transplantation of the gonads, strange creatures begin to fill. Who are they from the point of view of evolutionary theory? -Goats and monkeys! - so said Shakespeare through the mouth of his Venetian Moor, for in his century these poor animals were undeservedly considered the embodiment of the most vile depravity. But so much time has passed since then, such horizons have opened up for science that humanity has begun to look at things more broadly. If in the time of Shakespeare, Philip Philipovich's clients were goats and monkeys, then over the past period they have climbed the evolutionary-social ladder to such a height that other two-legged people can only look at them with a telescope. And here's the proof - money! They have a lot of money - and the green-haired lecher who looks like the devil, and the old witch in a sparkling necklace, and everyone else. And their money smoothly flows into the pocket of a snow-white professor's robe - after all, a cunning dog, almost asleep, takes notice of the chervonets.Finally, he was completely overwhelmed, and one of the visitors completely blurred in his mind, the dog heard only voices:

“Gentlemen,” Philip Philipovich shouted indignantly, “you can’t do this.” You need to restrain yourself. How old is she?
- Fourteen, professor... You understand, publicity will ruin me.

Reader, take a closer look at this visitor, because you are not a dog. And although “Heart of a Dog” claims that dogs can also read, they still don’t read Dostoevsky. But you must have read it. And when he showed you Svidrigailov, you felt everything you should have - disgust, shame, and even repentance, because Svidrigailov could not bear his own abomination and shot himself. This one won't shoot himself. He lives under a different sky. Science explained everything to him, allowed him everything, freed him from shame, and the same science, in the person of Philip Philipovich, will help him eliminate all undesirable consequences. And you, reader, apparently, are calm and in no hurry to condemn anyone. Dostoevsky lies with his conscience in the bookcase, you respect science, you like Philip Philipovich very much. And in fact, a man does not even allow his servant to take Mosselprom sausage into his mouth! And how he gracefully, with humor, reprimands her on this matter - you will hear:

You’re a grown girl, but like a child you put all sorts of nasty things into your mouth... Neither I nor Dr. Bormenthal will bother with you when you get a stomach ache...

And how many times “Zinusha”, “baby”! And what a commotion arises when Sharikov twice tries to encroach on her virtue (the episode with the chervonets and the night visit)!

But it’s clear that you won’t win over an educated reader like ours just by cooing with the servants. But Philip Philipovich’s reasoning about terror is a stronger argument.

How did you manage, Philip Philipovich, to lure such a nervous dog? - asks Bormenthal.

And Preobrazhensky answers:

Laskoy, sir. The only way that is possible in dealing with a living being.

(This is where both “Zinusha” and “baby” come from. Do you hear, reader? No, you don’t want to hear, you revel in Philip Philipovich’s speech.)

Terror cannot do anything with an animal, no matter what stage of development it is at (!! - E.S.). This is what I have asserted, am asserting, and will continue to assert. They are in vain to think that terror will help them. No, no, no, it won’t help, no matter what it is: white, red or even brown. Terror completely paralyzes the nervous system.

And a few pages later:

You can't bully anyone. Humans and animals can only be influenced by suggestion.

Would an intelligent person really dare to object to these words? Golden words. And spoken they are unusually on time. Just before the appearance of the patients. The reader is already so disposed towards Philip Philipovich that he is ready to show leniency to anyone who is included in the sphere of his existence, if he, this everyone, of course, does not act as the hero’s offender. (The offenders appear in the next scene.)

And in fact, Preobrazhensky’s visitors are comical, even disgusting, to be honest, but what does he have to do with it? He is a doctor, he helps everyone who turns to him, he, by the way, took the Hippocratic oath. He doesn’t forcibly turn them into animals by inserting monkey glands into them, they themselves ask him about it. Being at such a dizzying top of the evolutionary ladder (such money! such money!), you can afford to go down a few steps. The means, in any case, allow it. But the main thing, the main thing is that science (in the person of Preobrazhensky) wins, science moves forward!

True, Sharik, lying on the carpet, will mentally note: “Indecent apartment,” and immediately add: “But how good it is!” But you, reader, from now on listen to Sharik’s opinions only to laugh. A dog is already a past stage for you, both in terms of evolution and in terms of sympathy. You, like Prince Hamlet, “found yourself a more attractive magnet.” The dog, by the way, no longer needs sympathy. He is settled in a beautiful apartment, eats in three throats, is treated kindly...

Yes, they brought him here for experiments!!!

The reader arrogantly raises his eyebrows and retorts:

It is no small honor for a homeless dog to serve the progress of science!

That's how fickle it is human soul- after all, you just suffered with him in a cold gateway! You will inevitably listen to Professor Mechnikov.

But sentiment aside. Four offenders have already appeared in Preobrazhensky’s office and demand the reader’s closest attention. They introduce themselves:

We are the new house management of our house... I am Shvonder, she is Vyazemskaya, he is Comrade Pestrukhin and Zharovkin.

The narrative enters a new, acutely dramatic phase. The struggle begins not for life, but fordeath between scientist F. F. Preobrazhensky and the house committee represented by its chairman Shvonder. The latter wants to force Preobrazhensky to share the universal nightmare fate - to become a tenant of a communal apartment. The scientist desperately resists. During their first fight, the reader's sympathy for Philip Philipovich develops into a different feeling, hot and strong, into that love, which, as mentioned above, is destined to remain without reciprocity.

Firstly, nothing strengthens love more than anxiety for a dear being; this is noted in Ovid and Ibn-Hazm. And the reader has every reason to worry about his hero. Secondly, it is during this scene that the reader first learns that Philip is not one of many, even major scientists, but a star of the first magnitude. Such a discovery will never cool a feeling of love, but, on the contrary, will warm it up. And thirdly, according to Ovid and Ibn Hazm, the most ardent of all types of love is love for heroism. And it is in this scene that PhilipFilippovich performs such a heroic act,that the reader's mouth opens and his heart stops. The scientist declares that he “does not love the proletariat.” Declares it directly to THEM's face. Let THEY be represented here as just members of the house committee,but we know what is behind it, what this house represents, after all, it is a work of art, after all!

You are right, reader, it is highly artistic, and therefore deserves careful analysis, and not superficial emotional assessments, which are nothing more than panic and hysteria. Here, admire your hero - he is completely calm; you were worried about him, but he did not share your experiences (and your feelings in general). He sees well who and what is in front of him.

Let's go from the end. Firstly, Zharovkin. You'll see- it seems like a surname is like a surname. And if you sniff it, it smells like beef stew. Then Pestrukhin. Cows are usually called pieds, but there are also chickens with the same name. In any case, the origin of the uninvited guest is quite transparent. Now Vyazemskaya. May her “human” name not mislead our thoughtful reader. Vyazemskaya is just a breed of cows, now irretrievably ruined. Pestrukhin and Vyazemskaya, judging by some of the author’s remarks, are connected by tender ties. Naturally, because they are from the same herd. Finally, Shvonder. Although he hid behind a fig-foreign root and suffix, he still smells like a dog’s tail (Schwanz) and a pigsty (Schwein). In general, in the “great chain from the dog to Mendeleev the chemist” on the evolutionary-social on the stairs they managed to settle down a little higher than the same Sharik, but not by much (they probably have barely any money). Well, can their claims seriously agitate Philip Preobrazhensky, who stands on the very top step of the notorious ladder?! Or do you think, reader, that Pyotr Alexandrovich will be scared when he learns that the Vyazemskaya cow is going to explain it to him at the discussion?

Philip Philipovich calls Pyotr Alexandrovich, Pyotr Alexandrovich tells the house committee to get out, Vyazemskaya mumbles goodbye that Philip Philipovich is a “hater of the proletariat,” he calmly agrees with her. In this case, only the dog Sharik could see some kind of heroism in the scientist’s behavior:

The dog stood on its hind legs and performed some kind of prayer in front of Philip Philipovich.

And you, reader, I’m ashamed to say, have become like him.And your concern for your dear scientist is false. Nothing threatens him. He knows this very well. And if he is angry, it is for a different reason, but quite rightly. Firstly, they stained his carpets, but he respects them very much, almost calling them by their patronymics - “all my carpets are Persian.” And secondly, they broke into his place and rudely distracted him at the moment when he was about to have lunch!!! It should be noted here that science, which replaced all previous religions, also surpassed them in terms of tolerance and humanity. I would like to see this Shvonder somewhere in Ancient Rome or Egypt, if he blocked the way of the High Priest going to the Temple to eat a sacred meal, and began to discuss with him about the excess living space that this priest had. I would like to see what would be left of such a Shvonder after this.

But then he leaves in shame, and the Priest, having regained calm, without which the sacred ceremony is unthinkable, enters the dining room.

Behave decently, reader, all this is not about you - neither crystal decanters with multi-colored vodkas, nor a silver covered dish exuding crayfish-smelling steam, nor pickled eels, nor salmon cut into thin slices, nor cheese in tears, nor snow-covered caviar in a silver bowl. tub. You, as well as the dog Sharik, are assigned the role of observer here, and the mocking author does not hide from you that you are not attending a simple dinner (it’s even a shame to call such a dinner simple), but at some kind of sacred ritual.

The table is like tomb- analogy with the altar.

Napkins are folded in the formpapal tiaras- analogy with the high priest. Below it is said that “during these dinners, Philip Philipovich received the titledeities" That's right, in all mysteries it is the high priest who acts as the deputy of the deity.

During the meal, Philip Philipovichpreached. And the topic of his sermon is none other than Food.

- ...You need to be able to eat, but imagine - most people don’t know how to eat at all. You need to not only know what to eat, but also when and how. (Philip Philipovich shook his spoon meaningfully.) And what can I say?

Remember these words, reader! Not because they have practical significance for you, because in the canteen where you poison yourself, such information is informational ballast. Remember them because later they will help you understand the system of views of Philip Preobrazhensky and finally get out of the maze of dog hearts.

But everything happens the other way around. The reader immediately forgets the most important points of Philip Philipovich's sermon, because he hears from him something that for an intelligent person is sweeter than anything in the world and can only be compared with black caviar. The great scientist begins to honor THEM both in tail and in mane.

If you care about your digestion, my good advice- don’t talk about Bolshevism at dinner... And - God save you - don’t read Soviet newspapers.

What, did you eat?!

Or this passage:

People... who are generally two hundred years behind Europeans in development, are still not quite confident in buttoning up their own pants...

So them, so them!

But this is still not an apotheosis. The apotheosis of the reader's delight occurs in the place where Philip Philipovich speaks about the events of 1917. What happened, according to Professor Preobrazhensky, in this memorable year for humanity? Here's what:

One fine day in March 17, all the galoshes disappeared, including two pairs of mine , three sticks, a coat and a samovar from the doorman!

The reader bursts into happy laughter and, pulling both cookies out of his pockets, applauds loudly.

Ah, reader! Your gloating is a hangover at someone else's feast. But Professor Preobrazhensky is not making jokes at all, he is telling the pure truth. In one thousand nine hundred and seventeenfor himnothing more significant happened than the loss of galoshes. Because he stood and stands at such a height that all the shocks and storms of the world passunderneath, and the foamy crests of the swept waves only reach his feet, that is, his galoshes.

And he doesn’t care what’s in your yard, reader, whether it’s world war, devastation, New Economic Policy, all this will pass under him. That's why he doesn't need to read newspapers. He doesn’t care about regime changes, about the struggle of all sorts of parties and factions, he firmly knows that all this cannot shake his power. His power will remain indestructible until this heaven and this earth pass away. The dead sky is an optical illusion, a thickened emptiness, and the dead earth is the tomb of everything that it generates for a short life. And all these short-lived ones are climbing the evolutionary-social stairs, trying at all costs to delay the inevitable death. And if before they prayed to all sorts of gods for an extension of life, then to whom does their last hope turn today? To him and only to him, to Philip of Preobrazhensky, the priest of almighty Science. Therefore, it is even more important than before to climb this ladder to the very top steps, closer to the great scientist who is elevated above all. He has already rejuvenated their gonads, replacing them with monkey ones, and he promises even greater miracles. Do you remember, reader, how during the reception the old libertine whined:

Eh, professor, if only you could discover a way to rejuvenate your hair!
“Not right away, not right away, my dear,” muttered Philip Philipovich, but he by no means refused.

And he absolutely doesn’t care who was in the place where Pyotr Alexandrovich sits now until the 17th year (or that military man who will deliver Sharikov’s denunciation to him at the very end), and who will take this place if Pyotr Alexandrovich succeeds Still, “clarify” and push away. Whoever turns out to be there, he will create the necessary conditions for his deity for scientific research and will bark at any Shvonder in such a way that...

As for Philip Philipovich’s patients one step lower, those whom we saw at the reception, then, judging by their habits, before the 17th year they were by no means rummaging through garbage dumps. And if anyone has been rummaging, now they should doubly appreciate their luxurious life and the one who promises to extend this life. That's it. And the brave scientist cannot go even lower for completely natural reasons. After all, no matter how omnipotent science may be, replacing the Lord God, father and mother, it will not be enough for everyone. No black caviar, no brilliant surgeons, no ducats with which surgeons are paid, no monkey gonads. Yes, the last circumstance is the most important. Monkeys are scarce animals. Not many big onesanthropoid apes live in distant equatorial countries.

Well, no problem! The great scientist is already following a new, more effective path. And more economical, by the way. He is going to experiment on animals, which are a dime a dozen, and he doesn’t have to go far to find them.

This concludes the sacred meal - a small sacrament. A great mystery is brewing.

- ...That's what, Ivan Arnoldovich... watch carefully: as soon as death is suitable, immediately from the table - into the nutrient liquid and to me.

(No, it’s not for nothing that Bulgakov called the table at which Philip Philipovich himself eats a tomb.)

Don’t worry, Philip Philipovich, the pathologists promised me, -

Bormental answers and rushes off - where? Outside, beyond the text, to where you are, the reader! Beware lest your death be the most suitable for him.

And Preobrazhensky goes to Bolshoi Theater, since he turns out to be very fond of opera.

The loving reader smiles proudly. He was not mistaken in choosing his “subject”. Who doesn’t know that the gods and demigods of science adore classical music? Some play the violin, others... No, Bulgakov is surprisingly accurate. Depicts exactly that.

Yes, reader, Bulgakov is unusually accurate. And he knows everything about his hero. And the fact that he loves opera, and what kind of opera. If some structuralist philologist came across “Heart of a Dog,” he would immediately say that the opera “Aida” was simply soldered to the text of the work. It sounds on the first page, it ends the last page, it appears in all climaxes. Re-read the first page, the place where Sharik remembers the summer in Sokolniki:

And if it weren’t for some grimza that sings in the meadow under the moon - “dear Aida” - so that your heart falls, it would be great.

It is unlikely that Preobrazhensky’s “heart sinks” from “dear Aida,” but he also prefers not to listen to this aria and goes straight to the second act. For in the second act, someone appears at whom he will look as if spellbound, forgetting about time - just like women and children sometimes look in the mirror. He looks in it like in a mirror, this is his, Philip Philipovich, image - the High Priest Ancient Egypt, the double of the deity, the ruler before whom kings bow. And his power rests on great and secret knowledge, which is colloquially called the latest achievement of science.

“To the sacred banks of the Nile,” the priest sings.
“To the sacred banks of the Nile,” sings Preobrazhensky.

The reader is clearly unhappy. He wants to think that Philip Philipovich goes to the Bolshoi out of love for Bel Canto. After all, what kind of opera is Aida for an intellectual? And the comparison with the priest is stretched! The expression “priest of science” is purely metaphorical. What do modern, experimental science have in common with the dark superstitions of distant eras? -Have you, reader, ever heard that the new is the well-forgotten old?

As for Aida, flip through a few more pages and you will read:

If there was no “Aida” at the Bolshoi, and there was no meeting of the All-Russian Surgical Society, the deity was placed in a deep chair in the office.

Consequently, Bulgakov emphasizes that his hero went to listen to this and only this opera.

So he leaves for the theater. And you, reader, together with Sharik the Dog, will stay in his apartment. You, I must say, will do absolutely right: in this world, small on the outside and so spacious on the inside, which was created by Bulgakov’s word and is called “The Heart of a Dog,” the best place is this beautiful apartment. There, outside the windows, it is cold and dark. The blizzard is howling there. There they die from hunger, from disease, from fear of terror and repression. And the worst thing is that Dr. Bormenthal, a knight of science who has entered into an alliance with death, is lurking there. And all the night killers compete in their art before him. But he's in no hurry. He is waiting for the most skilled of them. The one who kills with one blow to the heart. To a young heart - so that all other organs that will be used are also young and healthy.

In fairness, it should be noted that at the time to which the action of “The Heart of a Dog” refers, human sacrifices in the name of the triumph of various scientific theories were carried out, and on a considerable scale (for example, the World War, and much more of the same kind), but what happened It's all extremely messy. Philip Philipovich was right when he asserted that the devastation is not in the closets, but in the heads. Agree that it is completely absurd for a serious scientist to expect the services of a home-grown killer as a favor. But, looking at Professor Preobrazhensky, you begin to believe that he will be able to overcome these difficulties. “A tenacious person, persistent. He was always trying to achieve something,” the author characterizes him on the last page of “Heart of a Dog.”And he has already achieved a lot. Look at the inspired methodical nature of hisapartment - this temple of order in the middle of the destroyed Moscow - the slaughter of small sacrificial animals for a small sacrament - the meal of Philip Philipovich. The dog Sharik immediately dubbed the kitchen in Preobrazhensky’s apartment the main part of heaven. But this is not the traditional paradise inhabited by holy righteous people, where Huckleberry Finn was afraid to go, lest he die of boredom there. Everything in this paradise suggests other gods: “the shutter jumped back with thunder, revealedterrible hell, in which the flame bubbled and shimmered”, “the flame shot and raged”, “it burned in the crimson pillarseternal fiery torment "The face of the cook Daria Petrovna. If this is paradise, then it is the kind that one goes to for impeccable service to Moloch. And it’s not for nothing that the tireless Daria occupies a strong place here:

With a sharp narrow knife she cut off the heads and legs of the helpless hazel grouse, then, like furious executioner , the flesh was torn off the bones, the entrails were torn out of the chickens.

You have already agreed, reader, that the author of “Heart of a Dog” does not throw around words? It would be irresponsible for any author, even the most satirical one, to compare a diligent cook with a furious executioner. But Preobrazhensky’s meal is not prepared by an ordinary cook - it is the priestess of Moloch and, concurrently, Astarte.

The “Mother of Pleasures” plays an important role in the magical apartment on Obukhov Lane. She has no power over the impassive High Priest (papal tiara, patriarchal cockle in the operation scene - the high priest is celibate). On the contrary, Astarte serves him, she is his broker, she provides him with clients:

Would you believe it, professor, every night there are naked girls in flocks (“Green-haired”).
- This is my last passion. He's such a scoundrel! ("Witch in Diamonds")

Daria, like Pushkin’s Cleopatra, “on the bed of passionatetemptations" rises as a "simple mercenary"and performs his duty impeccably. Like the servants of the ancient Astarte temples, who lavished their flame on all mortals without distinction: rich and poor, handsome and ugly, healthy and crippled, she serves her goddess, not disdaining anything. Polygraph Poligrafovich Sharikov came from a dog under Daria’s eyes, not all the dog’s hair has come off from him yet, he still catches fleas with his teeth, but is already marked with the sign of Daria’s attention:

-...Chic tie. Daria Petrovna gave it as a gift.

In the scene where Sharikov makes an attempt on the temple vestal Zina, Daria - “grandiose and naked” - utters words that might seem ambiguous if they were not completely unambiguous:

-...I was married, and Zina was an innocent girl.

And if we consider that it is said elsewhere that the chaste Bormental “bashfully covered his throat without a tie with his hand,” then Daria’s nakedness in the face of two scientists takes on a truly cosmic scale.

And Bormental’s chastity is by no means an obstacle to Daria’s lusts. The scientist’s diary records: “It turns out that D.P. was in love with me and whistled card from Philip Philipovich's album." Word“in love” in this case is just a euphemism for a delicate scientist. Falling in love belongs to the realm of the non-existent soul. Neither in “The Heart of a Dog” nor in any other heart along the entire “great chain from the dog to Mendeleev the chemist” is there any place for such feelings that are not confirmed by scientific experiment. There is no place for him in the scene that the dog Sharik, lying on the warm stove, spies:

...A black-mustachioed and excited man in a wide leather belt<…>hugged Daria Petrovna. That face was burning with torment and passion, everything except deathly , powdered nose.

A corpse, reader, it is a corpse emerging. The omnipotent and inevitable death reminds itself at this moment.

And nearby, two rooms away, in Preobrazhensky’s office, the same death acts as the scientist’s imperturbable assistant in his persistent scientific quest. Ball

...I looked at terrible things. Human brains lay in a disgusting liquid in glass vessels. The deity’s hands, bare to the elbows, were wearing red rubber gloves, and slippery, blunt fingers fiddled in the convolutions. At times the deity armed himself with a small sparkling knife and quietly cut the yellow elastic brains.

Whose brains is this, reader? Oh, it doesn't matter! After all, death, as you know, does not sort things out. So Dr. Bormenthal thinks so: “Does it matter whose pituitary gland?” - he will write in his diary after an unprecedented operation. Here are the indications for the operation:

Conducting Preobrazhensky’s experiment with a combined transplantation of the pituitary gland and testicles to clarify the question of the survival of the pituitary gland, and subsequently its influence on the rejuvenation of the body in humans.

In light of the enormous task at hand, can any one individual matter? And where is she? She is no longer in sight. There is a corpse left, and one thing is important - that it be of the best quality. After all, he is destined to contribute to the progress of science and, consequently, to the happiness of all mankind. After all, constant rejuvenation is immortality, damn it!

Here's what science promises:

...You will not die... but you will be like gods!

Here it is appropriate to ask the reader the following question: is he sure that this happiness will be enough forAllhumanity? As you know, there is not enough animal meat for everyone, there is nothing to say about caviar, but here it is. But the reader doesn't hear. He is captured by the turmoil in Preobrazhensky’s apartment, the excitement of the heroes was transferred to him. Holding his breath, he prepares to contemplate the great sacrament - “a bad dirty deed, if not a whole crime.”Whose words are these, reader? Who in the operation scene directly calls Philip Philipovich a priest:

The priest stood in the white radiance and chanted through his teeth about the sacred banks of the Nile,

Is it really the dog Sharik? Do you really believe that dogs know such words? - No, this sounds like a direct speech from the author, and you are obliged to listen to it, and not refer to the fact that you have no time for this, your attention is absorbed in a unique operation, “which has no equal in Europe.”

So, before Sharik ascended the ladder of evolution, “for some reason he imagined disgusting wolf eyes in the bath.” Zina, a vestal virgin admitted to the sacrament, “unexpectedly found herself in a robe that looked like a shroud.” Her eyes became “as vile” as Bormental’s, but with him they were “false and in their depths lurked a nasty dirty deed, if not a whole crime.” The operation begins: “Philip Philipovich’s teeth clenched, his eyes acquired a sharp, prickly shine.”“Bormenthal attacked Sharik’s wound predatorily.” “His (Bormenthal’s) face became fleshy and multi-colored.” “Philip Philipovich’s face became scary.” “Philip Philipovich became positively scary... his teeth opened up to his gums.” "Bormenthal is insidiousstabbed Sharik somewhere near his heart.” “I’m going to the saddle,” growled Philip Philipovich.” A few lines below, the professor “roared angrily,” and “his face became like that of an inspired robber.” Scientists were "excited askillerswho are in a hurry." “Philip Philipovich fell off completely, aswell-fed vampire».

But these are all figurative expressions! - the reader will cry. - Who doesn’t know that a surgical operation requires enormous exertion of intellectual and physical strength! To suspect a doctor just because he clenched his teeth, because he was dripping with sweat!..

Sorry, reader, but there are no doctors in this scene. The hero of “Heart of a Dog” is a “deity”, “priest”, “scientist”, who has no equal in Moscow, London, Oxford. Philip Philipovich, even at the hour when Bormental offers him to kill Sharikov, does not call himself a doctor; he gives a different reason for his refusal:

I am a Moscow student. - Philip Philipovich proudly raised his shoulders and looked like an ancient French king.

Bulgakov only once calls Preobrazhensky and Bormental “doctors” (when they discuss the possible murder of their ward) and one more time - “both aesculapians.” But Aesculapius is still not a doctor. This is a Greek deity in French pronunciation, it lives in blessed lands, in the temple, among the myrtles and laurels. And the doctor is the one who, in the icy cold and blizzard, drags himself to the sick in Grachevka, Muryevsky district, and it’s also fortunate that along the road lies the Grabilovka cultural center, where you can spend the night and warm up in the teacher’s house.

Since this journey is described by the same Bulgakov in “Notes of a Young Doctor”, and these “Notes” were created simultaneously with “The Heart of a Dog”, then you, the reader, can rest assured that our author knew perfectly well what a doctor is and how he is different from a scientist, especially a “great scientist.” A “great scientist” must be famous and rich - otherwise, go prove that you are great. But to become famous among men so dark that theydo they put mustard plasters on zipun? The idea itself is completeabsurd. You might as well get rich by treating these guys. Something, and they know this very well - the doctor is obliged to treat them, he is entitled to a government salary for this. However, the hero of “Notes” does not expect any offerings. He, Bulgakov’s doctor, is prohibited by his Bulgakov ethics. He even tries to refuse the “towel with a rooster,” but then takes it out of pity for the girl whom he miraculously saved from certain death. The question arises, why does he treat them with such diligence, jumps up at night, rushes through the cold, barely leaving the hot bath - “pneumonia is guaranteed!” The conclusion that arises is completely absurd - he loves them. For what, considering all of the above? There is only one answer to this - because they are people. Well, maybe they remind him of someone.

We must give the Young Doctor his due - he does not declare this love anywhere. He is silent about her - others talk and shout about her too much. But he makes an absolutely amazing statement - he says that he hates death:

I always do this when I see death. I hate her.

Listen to these words, reader. In a world where death is recognized as the only absolute value and is even declared the giver of life - living things came from non-living things, every schoolchild knows this - such words are even impossible to utter. But the Young Doctor does not at all look like a madman - why is he rushing across objective reality?Maybe he lives in another world, and there is another objective reality, another sky, another earth?

In any case, it is absolutely immutable: when the Young Doctor operates with enormous exertion of physical, intellectual, and also mental strength, then no associations arise with either murderers or vampires. So, reader, you can’t deny this: “murderer” and “vampire” are not figurative expressions, these are personal epithets of your beloved scientist.

But the reader does not think of giving up. It’s not for nothing that he was raised from infancy to admire science. He firmly learned that in science the most important thing is the result, scientists are judged by their results, and they are there - brilliant, inimitable:

The surgeon's scalpel brought to life a new human unit. Prof. Preobrazhensky, you are a creator. (Blot).

This is what Bormenthal writes in his diary, which he begins to keep immediately after the operation on the darkest and most ominous day of the year - December 22. You, the reader, naturally see no reason to disagree with him.

But what happens - the reader did not have time to admire the above result, a new human unit named P. P. Sharikov, how he already wants to throw something heavy at him, and Bormental, the chronicler of its occurrence, openly admits that he is ready to feed him arsenic. And now, in the “complete and most terrible” silence, in the darkness of the dead of night, the “creator” again decomposes his creation into its component parts, the “new human unit” disappears, the dog Sharik is restored to its original form.

So, it turns out that Preobrazhensky’s brilliant results have been discredited? It turns out that the scientist himself failed? Not at all. He only confirmed his right to be called a “creator”. Moreover, if the result of the first operation was still unexpected, if a man appeared from a dog by accident, then during the second the scientist showed himself to be an absolute ruler, and he made a dog out of a man completely consciously.

Think, O reader, about what happened. Philip Preobrazhensky turned a man into a dog because this man encroached on his everyday comfort. Onyourcomfort, because your soul is fused with the professor’s soul all the time while reading. And the transformation of a man into a dog, accordingly, took place with your sympathy and complicity.

But the reader doesn’t even listen. He highly values ​​the title of a person and that is why he does not intend to throw this title away. Sharikov - vile, drunk, swearing, smelling of dead cats - is clearly not worthy of the title of human being. This is not a person, but “such scum that it makes your hair stand on end” - this is what Preobrazhensky himself declares, and anyone who has read “The Heart of a Dog” will subscribe to this statement. And then the most important question arises - who, in fact, is considered a person? Where in the “greatest chain from the dog to Mendeleev the chemist” is the border beyond which the “highly standing” begin, not to mention the “extremely high standing”? Who will undertake to determine this border? - Only science. Here all hope lies in science, in the person of its best, most talented representatives. And it is not for nothing that Preobrazhensky - “priest”, “lord”, “deity”, and finally, “creator” - states:

Humanity... in evolutionary order, every year persistently, distinguishing frommasses of all kinds of scum, creates dozens of outstanding geniuses who adorn the globe.

There is no doubt that “outstanding geniuses” will be able to stand up for themselves, disassociate themselves from the “mass of all scum” and show it its rightful place. And the means for this have already been invented, and the quality and quantity of these means is increasing.

Here again the question arises, but more modest- is there a guarantee that an error will not creep into such an important matter as the scientific demarcation between “scum” and “highly standing” ones? After all, even Philip Philipovich himself, who has no equal in Moscow, London, or Oxford, still had some misfire.

However, the reader is perfectly prepared for defense. Firstly, he knows that the mistakes of geniuses can influence world progress much more noticeably than the planned achievements of ordinary scientists. Secondly:

"F. F., as a true scientist, admitted his mistake... This does not make his amazing, stunning discovery any less.” (Bormenthal's Diary).

Thirdly, the whole pandemonium with Sharikov, which casts a shadow on the results of a brilliant experiment, was not at all the fault of the scientist.

Then by whose? Who's to blame?

Professor Preobrazhensky gives a clear and precise answer to this - Klim Chugunov is to blame. And since Klim, then, therefore, so is his killer, who stabbed the wrong person in the heart. If only Spinoza had been stabbed to death in the Stop Signal pub near the Preobrazhenskaya outpost!..

Philip Philipovich! What if Spinoza's brain?
- Yes! - Philip Philipovich barked. - Yes! ...You can graft the pituitary gland of Spinoza or some other devil like that and make an extremely high-standing dog out of him, but for what the hell?

Yes, what the hell? - we will ask, following Philip Philipovich. Don’t you think, reader, that if the scientist Spinoza had appeared in the apartment, he would not have laid claim to the living space? But in addition to Sharikov’s sixteen arshins, he is still owed a surplus for scientific work. Or do you think that the “highly standing” should neglect what is due to him by birthright and humbly go to the trash heap?

Sharikov, coached by Shvonder, yells that he did not consent to the operation and that he can file a lawsuit. “Highly standing” would not behave so stupidly. He would rather demand to be recognized as the co-author of a great discovery. Are you in doubt, reader? In vain. You are not familiar with the scientific world from books. But if you only believe in books, then open “Fatal Eggs” and read how Professor Persikov invited his assistant Ivanov to be a co-author. He knew what he was doing, old man. He understood not only frogs, but also people. It’s not for nothing that Persikov, if something goes wrong, immediately calls the Lubyanka. So Ivanov, offended that it was not he, but Persikov, who made the discovery, could well have called there. And the brilliant Spinoza would have gotten the phone he needed in no time. So Preobrazhensky is absolutely right, categorically refusing to make Spinoza out of a dog. No good will come of this.

That's how it is. The “deity” who lives in Obukhov Lane knows very well that́ good and what is evil. And even on Sharikov, whom the “gods” built with their own strength and talent, the light of this knowledge was shed, and he understands perfectly where there is good and what is evil. And all his thoughts and actions are aimed exclusively at acquiring good and avoiding, if possible, evil.

Are you surprised, reader? Have you read and then re-read “Heart of a Dog” to the end and didn’t notice anything like that? Such is the magical power of art - while appealing to feelings, it sometimes completely deprives objectivity. Being entirely and completely on the side of Preobrazhensky, you only saw how Sharikov encroached onhisgood and causesto himevil. But in relation to himself, he behaves diametrically opposite. It couldn't be any other way. After all, the deity created it according to all the rules of science, the same science that implies interspecies struggle, as well as intraspecies struggle. Sharik the dog, by the way, did not show any inclinations towards interspecies struggle; intransigence towards cats emerged in him only as a result of re-creation. And with regard to the intraspecific struggle, the same one that in Shvonder’s language is called “class”, he was completely passive.

The reader shudders with disgust. He cannot hear about the class struggle, inevitably associated with terror, which Preobrazhensky so convincingly branded at the very beginning of the story. Of course, the reader is right. Class harmony is incomparably better than class struggle. It is the harmony between “the masses of all scum” and the few “geniuses who adorn the globe.” And you believe, reader, that science is capable of establishing such harmony, and certainly without any terror, but “with affection, the only way that is possible in dealing with a living being” (F. F. Preobrazhensky). So why didn’t such harmony arise in a luxurious apartment on Obukhov Lane? After all, the genius was evident, and the scum was “such that your hair stood on end.”

The reader is beside himself with indignation. It amazes with the pages that describe the adventures of Sharikov the man. He's not just disgusting, he's dangerous tothose around you. Yes, Sharikov, treated by a scoundrelShvonder (after all, it’s clear who the main villain is) represents a potential danger. No, why potential? He managed to write a terrible denunciation against Preobrazhensky (against his creator!), he armed himself with a revolver and threatens Bormenthal.

Alas for you, reader. These same pages testify against you. Philip Philipovich begins to think about turning a man into a dog long before the denunciation and the revolver - after the episode with the cat and the flooding of the apartment, as a result of which the reception was disrupted. The losses (in addition to broken glass, damaged carpets, etc.) amounted, as clearly stated, to 390 rubles. There is something to think about.

Floating in a transparent and heavy liquid, without falling to the bottom, was a small white lump, extracted from the depths of Sharikov’s brain... A highly learned man... exclaimed:
- By God, I think I’ll make up my mind.

But this is what brings Bormental to the idea of ​​“feeding him arsenic” - Sharikov stole two chervonets, and his drunken guests, when leaving, took with them an ashtray, a beaver hat and Philip Philipovich’s memorial cane.

Shame on you, reader! Death penalty for such a petty theft! Be that as it may, it was only after these tragic events that Bormenthal providentially notes:

- ...But if this Shvonder still processes it, what will come of it?!

It turns out that the death penalty is for prevention purposes?

The reader does not respond to this. Shvonder has just been mentioned, a figure so sinister that even thinking about him can leave you speechless. The reader is firmly convinced that there is no beast more terrible than Shvonder along the entire great chain from the dog to Mendeleev the chemist. But Shvonder had already been shown his place on the evolutionary-social ladder, and he - how come you, reader, didn’t notice this? - I didn’t show my nose in Preobrazhensky’s apartment. Is he renewing his demands for the apartment to be densified? How dare he after the order of Pyotr Alexandrovich himself! But in this case, the professor himself gave a reason to those looking for a reason; he, dressed up in the language of the house book, compacted himself. Shvonder can only gloat, but on the most legal grounds, while Sharikov has a legal right to the living space on which he was born. Why should he sacrifice his rights? While inside the “Heart of a Dog,” have you ever seen, O reader, someone give up their goods?

...You will be like gods, knowing good and evil.

And is Sharikov, created by the gods in laboratory conditions, supposed to behave differently? What kind of ridiculous idea is it to ask more from those who descended from a dog than from those who descended from a monkey? It is also unfair to demand that Sharikov be grateful to Philip Philipovich for creating him. A similar thought, no, no, flashes through every reader of “The Heart of a Dog.” But does anyone nearby give thanks for their creation? And who do you want to thank? All living things came from non-living things by pure chance, Sharikov is no exception here, all the others were also born solely by chance. But since such an opportunity has arisen, we must use it to the fullest. This is the law of life, confirmed and sanctified by science, the same one that replaced all religions. It is this law that commands Sharikov to frantically chase cats. But, as Philip Philipovich rightly noted:

Cats are temporary... It's a matter of discipline and two to three weeks.

Naturally, intransigence towards cats is nothing more than an interspecies struggle. Having realized it as a passed stage, Sharikov is actively involved in the intraspecific struggle. You, reader, are indignant at him as an unheard-of grabber, but he simply cannot behave differently - he strictly obeys the law according to which he was created and re-created. And the education that he receives from his creators is permeated with the ideas of the same science and can only develop and strengthen his natural inclinations.

The most expressive attempt by scientists to educate Sharikov occurs during lunch.This is the second dinner depicted in “The Heart of a Dog,” and you, the reader, who was also present at the first dinner, probably remember that Philip Philipovich’s meals are sacred ritual acts, small sacraments, but still sacraments. There is no better time and place for initiation into the “highly standing” ones. After all, it is food, it is the way of eating, according to science, that first of all distinguishes some animals from others - all these ruminants, herbivores, insectivores, predators, etc. And intraspecific differences are even more so determined by the method of nutrition - just compare the canteen lunch for employees of the Council of Normal Nutrition, described by Sharik at the beginning of “The Heart of a Dog”, and the daily feasts of Philip Philipovich - and everything immediately becomes clear, it is immediately clear who is at what level costs.

And it was not for nothing that during the first dinner food was the topic of the sermon:

- ...You need to know not only what to eat, but also when and how.<…>And what can I say?

With the same sermon, only shifted to practical plane, Bormental during lunch on the second round talks to Sharikov.

Do you want to say, reader, that Sharikov is not capable of accepting such a sublime sermon? But after all, he perceives: laying a napkin - laying it down, eating with a fork - eating with a fork, pouring vodka in the established order - and he does it.

Do you think he does this under outside pressure? That the true meaning of the sermon does not fall on his heart? Slander! He is so imbued with this meaning that he even offers his own interpretation of the priest’s words “and what to say about it”:

Everything you have is like it’s on parade... but in a way that’s real, it’s not...
- How is this “for real?”...
Sharikov did not answer Philip Philipovich, but raised his glass and said:
- Well, I wish that everyone...
“And the same for you,” Bormental responded with some irony.

A scientist committed to facts cannot help but appreciate the result:

And Philip Philipovich became somewhat better after the wine. His eyes cleared up, he favorably looked at Sharikov.

The reader, you see, is in awe that the vile Sharikov will be processed by the vile Shvonder, but he does not need any processing, even from his creator Preobrazhensky. He just needs to mature. The great scientist, using a stray dog ​​and Klim Chugunov as semi-finished products, creatednewa human unit, and created it quite traditionally - in his own image and likeness. And in the place where the notorious soul could have been (and now it is completely empty), the fundamental idea of ​​his - and now theirs - fits perfectly. general - life philosophy: one must eat and generally live according to the highest standards. Is there any soulless creature “throughout the whole great chain” who will object to this idea? In any case, not the die-hard Marxists (Pyotr Aleksandrovich, etc.), waiting for Preobrazhensky’s operation to maximize their own life extension “at the highest level.” And all sorts of mongrels, like Shvonder, Pestrukhin etc ., simply have not yet (or already) reached this level. So they are engaged in demagoguery. And why not, if it has proven so profitable for so many? So Philip Philipovich himself did not disdain it when a threat arose to his incomparable existence from the insolent Sharikov.

How?! Philip Philipovich?!

Yes, none other than him. At the end of the second lunch, having appreciated the success of his pet, the great scientist offers him:

Study 1 and try to become at least somewhat acceptable member of a socialist society.

The reader turns pale, loses consciousness and falls under the table with a crash.

But when the time came to publish “Heart of a Dog,” almost seventy years after it was written, when the Preobrazhenskys gained such strength that they swept aside socialist demagoguery to hell, just as in 1917 they swept away religious demagoguery, the editor turned pale .

He turned pale, but did not faint. He took it and replaced itthe word "socialist" is similar. It turned out - “social society”. Here are the scoundrels - attribute to the greatest writer XX century such a brainless phrase. But you, reader, have no doubt. When you read this story for the first (second, third) time in the samizdat version, the word “socialist” was there, you simply overlooked it in a whirlwind of emotions, like many other things.

So, we have dealt with Marxist demagoguery. In Preobrazhensky’s apartment, this heart of the “Heart of a Dog,” you won’t scare or surprise anyone with it. Of course, because this Marxism is the best there is illegitimate son Darwinism. He just grew up, like many illegitimate children, in a parish orphanage, and so he picked up all sorts of blissful vocabulary: “equality,” “brotherhood,” “justice.” “Love for one’s neighbor” was just not enough! No, whatever you say, this Marxism is contradictory.Scientific mentality and Christian sentimentality - where does this fit?!

But Philip of Preobrazhensky, the legitimate son of the cathedral archpriest Philip of Preobrazhensky, decisively and competently threw out all these sentiments appealing to a non-existent soul from his apartment. Their place is there, in the gateway, near the trash cans, on the lowest steps of the evolutionary-social ladder.They are tested by the hungry dog ​​Sharik, the hungry typist, and even the cook Vlas (probably a poorly educated person), who fed stray dogs. Oh, this Vlas!What a eulogy poor Sharik composes for him on the first pages of the story, what heartfelt words addressed to him come out of the dog’s kind, grateful heart.

Stop! So whose heart is beating in the chest of Polygraph Sharikov? Klim’s heart, skillfully pierced by the killer - a voluntary accomplice of science, as we know, remained in the morgue, and the entire work is called “the heart of a dog.” Has our author, whose every word is worth its weight in gold, cheapened in such an important matter as the title of the story?

And now, reader, you will have to temporarily leave the space of the text being studied, make, so to speak, a retreat beyond its boundaries.

There was once a beautiful and unhappy breed of people in this world. It was called the Russian intelligentsia. Why beautiful? Because God created her this way. Why unhappy? Because she forgot God. Priests like Philip Preobrazhensky Sr. tried very hard for this, and then Science arrived, a new god with its miracles and its priests, like Philip Preobrazhensky Jr.

People of this beautiful, unfortunate breed valued honesty and kindness above all else in the world; they even valued honesty above kindness. Having touched money, they immediately washed their hands, and not only for hygienic reasons. They also believed in true love, as in “The Master and Margarita.” They also condemned relationships that seemed to be similar to love, but not sublime, faithful, eternal. They called such relationships “dog love,” and they said these words infrequently and in a low voice, so that the children would not hear. Therefore, when only memories remained from the Russian intelligentsia, the mentioned expression completely sank into oblivion and did not reach you, O reader. But the great Bulgakov, who knew what true love, and heard about “dog love.”

A great poet Mandelstam in his prose dubbed everyone in droves a “tribe of dogs” Soviet writers, this evil pack that hunted both him and Bulgakov. Maybe the poet didn’t come up with this name? Maybe it circulated among those whom these writers poisoned and killed? And why did Bulgakov call Sharikov Polygraph? There is no such name in the calendar (don’t look for it, reader, you’ve already looked for it) and cannot exist. After all, “poly-graph” in ancient Greek means “much-writing,” why would the ancient Greeks need such a name? They didn’t have a Writers’ Union, which provided food and living at the highest level for board members and fatty scraps for ordinary members. You, reader, of course, were and still are amused by Sharikov’s name and patronymic, but it undoubtedly gave the author double pleasure. At least somehow he got even with those who “destroyed the Master.”

Yes, reader, have no doubt, the “heart of a dog” that beats in the chest of citizen Polygraph is related to the heart of the good dog Sharik only by muscle tissue. But the feelings that fill him are exactly the same as those of many, many upright and high-ranking people - scientists, members of the Writers' Union, party and government officials, military leaders and strong business executives. These feelings are love for oneself, a thirst for material goods in quantity, the more the better, and fierce hatred for those who are trying to curtail these benefits. And the final battle on the pages of “Heart of a Dog” is played out around Sharikov’s integral sixteen arshins, and not at all on ideological grounds. Yes, if not for these controversial meters (as the heroes of a later era would put it), Sharikov would write denunciations against the high priest, but no, against the deity who creates new human units, prolongs the existence of old ones, in words and deeds teaches how to live and eat at the highest level.

No, reader, you simply must hold your attention and note how scrupulously faithful Philip Philipovich is to his ideological principles even in moments of the most difficult trials. Here he and Bormental are holding council at night on a very serious issue - to kill or not to kill Sharikov. And here are the indispensable attributes of this meeting:

Between doctors (sic !) on the round table... there was a bottle of cognac, a saucer with lemon and a cigar box.

The witty French like to say thatthe devil is in the details . In this case, their wit is inappropriate. The devil is not hiding in Preobrazhensky's apartment. It has collapsed here in its entire length and width - and if you don’t want to notice it, reader, then you can declare everything that happens outside this magnificent apartment an optical illusion: poverty, hunger, cold, repression, torture, exhausting labormasses of all kinds of scum for the sake of a bright future for themselves and a dark but seductive present for the owners and guests of the same apartment.

However, how did the meeting end? Yes, nothing, except for another hooligan prank of the drunken Sharikov. And do you really, reader, seriously imagine that your hero, “a figure of world significance,” would consult some Bormenthal about something? Maybe he will also consult with you?

-...You are not a figure of world significance.
- Where...<…>
Philip Philipovich proudly raised his shoulders and looked like an ancient French king.

He simply poses in front of both of you, and at the same time gives a verbose outlet for accumulated negative emotions. Of course - a communal apartment with Sharikov! Yes, not every proletarian dreams of such a neighbor in a nightmare. But the fate of this neighbor was predetermined long before the petty theft and slander of Zinusha. Scroll back a few pages, reader, and you will see that immediately after lunch on the second, having sent Bormenthal and Sharikov to the circus, Philip Philipovich took out from the cupboard a jar in which

Floating in the transparent and heavy liquid was... a small white lump, extracted from the depths of Sharikov’s brain.

Having looked at it and locking the jar in the closet, he exclaimed:

By God, I think I'll make up my mind.
Nobody answered him to this. All sounds stopped in the apartment.

But you, reader, know well that he made up his mind. And I decided already then.

“Having no equal” neither in Moscow, nor in Europe, nor in London, nor in Oxford, Professor Preobrazhensky is not your half-educated student Frankenstein. He appreciated his masterpiece better and earlier than others, but he also knows his own worth. And he plays ahead - and wins. Know ours, Frankenstein!

As for the aforementioned masterpiece named Poligraf Poligrafovich, he has no equal and undoubtedly deserves admiration, despite the breaking of glass, drunken swearing and other Sharikov obscenities. In the end, this is all temporary. A matter of two or three weeks, as Philip Philipovich put it in relation to hunting for cats and other dog heritage. And drunken lewdness is the legacy of Klim Chugunov, and it will also be eliminated.

Don’t believe Preobrazhensky, reader, when he exclaims that Klim is to blame for everything. He is simply deceiving your and Bormenthal's naivety. He really wants to secure your consent to the destruction of the “new human unit.” After all, you willingly gave it, this consent, when killing Klim the First. He inspires you that in front of you is Klim the second. But who was the first Klim? A tavern balalaika player with cirrhosis of the liver. Rub your eyes, reader, is Sharikov really like that?

Having made a giant leap up the evolutionary ladder by the will of his creator, he now of his own free will climbs up the social ladder at full speed.

...I was hungry enough when I was young... and there is no afterlife.

And now he has already been realized and embodied in the image of P. P. Sharikova. And now he is already entering Preobrazhensky’s apartment, leading that same typist behind him.

...You will live in a luxurious apartment...
pineapples every day...

No, Philip Philipovich will not wait for Frankenstein's fate.

Crime has matured and fallen (M. A. Bulgakov).

Yes, not some banal murder that the knight Bormental is ready to take on, but a grandiose crime worthy of the High Priest -turning a man into a dog .

"To the banks of the sacred Nile..."

Life in a “luxury apartment” is returning to normal and returning to its usual “highest level.” Nothing hinders the progress of science either -

The dog saw terrible things. Hands in slippery gloves important person immersed it in a vessel, took out the brains - a persistent person, persistent, always achieving something...

The transformation of man into dog took place completely and irrevocably. Who's next?

Don't be afraid, reader, turnyouThere is no point in owning a dog - it is expensive and labor-intensive. But if you and millions like you are deprived of your means of subsistence, you will have no choice but to feed from garbage cans and live there. Turn yourself into stray dogs. Having slipped to the bottom of the social ladder, it is quite logical to continue moving down.

Sharikov caught and strangled stray cats to make collars out of them. And the “new units” that arose as a result of involution (and the word is already ready), they are not even suitable for organs. Look how much their advertisements say: “I’m selling a kidney.” Who will buy from them? You need to buy from reputable companies that catch and kill young, healthy people who have not yet had time to starve. Intraspecific struggle has reached new round. Or rather, science brought her to this stage. In the wild they devour each other in order to survive for the time being. And here such horizons open up!.. Why be shy if there is no soul and there is no afterlife? What if? - Well, then there’s even more reason to stay.Hereand wait until science has advanced so much that it guarantees the “highest standard of living” on the other side.

"To the banks of the sacred Nile..."

So, you see for yourself, reader, there can be no talk of any love in the context of the “heart of a dog.” About love - this is “The Master and Margarita”. But there is a lot there that you can laugh at. Bulgakov is Bulgakov.

O Great Mocker!

O our beloved Master!

The story “Fatal Eggs” was written in 1924. Its publication in 1925 caused a wide response in criticism and literary circles - from admiration to political accusations against the writer. Here's how A. Voronsky wrote about it: Bulgakov's "Fatal Eggs" - an unusually talented and sharp work - caused a number of fierce attacks. Bulgakov was dubbed a counter-revolutionary, a White Guard, etc., and, in our opinion, he was dubbed in vain... The writer wrote a pamphlet about how a good idea turns into disgusting nonsense when this idea gets into the head of a brave but ignorant person.”

The story “Fatal Eggs” tells how professor of zoology Persikov discovered the “ray of life”, which helps accelerate the maturation and reproduction of living beings. At the same time, a chicken pestilence began in the country, threatening the population with starvation. And, of course, salvation is seen in Professor Persikov’s discovery. A certain Alexander Semenovich Rokk, a man in a leather double-breasted jacket and with a huge old-fashioned pistol in a yellow holster on his side, is taking this discovery into practice. Rokk introduced himself to the professor as the head of the demonstration state farm "Red Ray", which intends to carry out experiments with chicken eggs using the discovery. Despite Persikov’s protests, citing the untested experience and the unpredictability of the consequences, Rock manages to take back his discovery with the help of paper from the Kremlin. To which Persikov could only say: “I wash my hands of it” (later Pilate would behave in a similar way when deciding the fate of Yeshua in “The Master and Margarita.”) Here the question arises about the moral responsibility of the scientist.

In understanding this problem, Bulgakov is close to Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky believed that a person is responsible not only for his actions, but even for his thoughts and their consequences. The most famous and condensed version of this idea is in the novel The Brothers Karamazov. In the third meeting with Ivan Fedorovich Karamazov, Smerdyakov says: “...You are to blame for everything, sir, because you knew about the murder, sir, but they entrusted it to me, sir, and you yourself, knowing everything, left. That’s why I want to prove this to your eyes this evening that the main killer in everything here is you, sir, and I’m just not the main one, even though it was I who killed...” The point of the conversation is that although Ivan Fedorovich himself did not commit the crime , but it was he who gave Smerdyakov the philosophical idea: “If there is no God, then everything is permitted.” Therefore, the blame for the murder lies with Ivan Karamazov.

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One of the sources for the plot of the story was the novel by the famous British science fiction writer H.G. Wells “Food of the Gods”. There we are talking about wonderful food that accelerates the growth of living organisms and the development of intellectual abilities in giant people, and the growth of the spiritual and physical capabilities of humanity leads in the novel to a more perfect world order and a collision between the world of the future and the world of the past - the world of giants with the world of pygmies. In Bulgakov, however, the giants turn out to be not intellectually advanced human individuals, but especially aggressive reptiles. “The Fatal Eggs” also reflected another of Wells’s novels, “The Struggle of the Worlds,” where the Martians who conquered the Earth suddenly die from terrestrial microbes. The same fate awaits the hordes of reptiles approaching Moscow, who fall victim to the fantastic August frosts.

Among the sources of the story there are also more exotic ones. Thus, the poet Maximilian Voloshin, who lived in Koktebel, in the Crimea, sent Bulgakov a clipping from a Feodosia newspaper in 1921, which said “about the appearance in the area of ​​the Kara-Dag mountain of a huge reptile, which a company of Red Army soldiers was sent to capture.” The writer and literary critic Viktor Borisovich Shklovsky, who served as Shpolyansky’s prototype in the “White Guard,” in his book “Sentimental Journey” (1923), cites rumors that circulated in Kyiv at the beginning of 1919 and probably fed Bulgakov’s fantasy:

“They said that the French have a violet ray with which they can blind all the Bolsheviks, and Boris Mirsky wrote a feuilleton “Sick Beauty” about this ray. Gorgeous - old world, which must be treated with a violet ray. And never before had the Bolsheviks been so feared as at that time. They said that the British - people who were not sick told this - that the British had already landed herds of monkeys in Baku, trained in all the rules of the military system. They said that these monkeys cannot be propagated, that they go into attacks without fear, that they will defeat the Bolsheviks.

They showed with their hand the height of these monkeys a yard above the floor. They said that when one such monkey was killed during the capture of Baku, it was buried with an orchestra of Scottish military music and the Scots cried.

Because the instructors of the monkey legions were the Scots.

A black wind was blowing from Russia, the black spot of Russia was growing, the “sick beauty” was raving.”

In Bulgakov, the terrible violet ray is parodically turned into a red ray of life, which also caused a lot of trouble. Instead of miraculous fighting monkeys, supposedly brought from abroad, attacking the Bolsheviks, in Bulgakov, hordes of giant, ferocious reptiles, hatched from eggs sent from abroad, approach Moscow.

Please note that there was an original edition of the story that was different from the published one. On December 27, 1924, Bulgakov read “Fatal Eggs” at a meeting of writers at the cooperative publishing house “Nikitinsky Subbotniki”. On January 6, 1925, the Berlin newspaper “Days” responded to this event in the “Russian Literary News” section:

“The young writer Bulgakov recently read the adventurous story “Fatal Eggs.” Although it is literary insignificant, it is worth getting acquainted with its plot in order to get an idea of ​​this side of Russian literary creativity.

The action takes place in the future. The professor invents a method for the unusually rapid reproduction of eggs using red sun rays... A Soviet worker, Semyon Borisovich Rokk, steals the professor's secret and orders boxes of chicken eggs from abroad. And so it happened that at the border the eggs of reptiles and chickens were confused, and Rokk received the eggs of bare-legged reptiles. He bred them in his Smolensk province (where all the action takes place), and boundless hordes of reptiles moved towards Moscow, besieged it and devoured it. The final picture is of dead Moscow and a huge snake entwined around the bell tower of Ivan the Great.”

It is unlikely that the reviews of visitors to the Nikitin Subbotniks, most of whom Bulgakov did not give a damn about, could force the writer to change the ending of the story. There is no doubt that the first, “pessimistic” end of the story existed. Bulgakov’s neighbor in the “bad apartment,” writer Vladimir Levshin (Manasevich), gives the same version of the ending, allegedly improvised by Bulgakov in a telephone conversation with the Nedra publishing house. At that time, the text of the finale was not yet ready, but Bulgakov, writing on the fly, pretended to read from what was written: “...The story ended with a grandiose picture of the evacuation of Moscow, which is approached by hordes of giant boa constrictors.” Let us note that, according to the recollections of the secretary of the editorial office of the almanac “Nedra” P.N. Zaitsev, Bulgakov immediately transferred “Fatal Eggs” here in finished form, and, most likely, Levshin’s memories of “telephone improvisation” are a memory error. By the way, an anonymous correspondent reported to Bulgakov about the existence of “Fatal Eggs” with a different ending in a letter on March 9, 1936. It is possible that a version of the ending was written down by someone present at the reading on December 27, 1924 and later ended up in samizdat.

It is interesting that the real “pessimistic” ending almost literally coincided with the one proposed by Maxim Gorky after the publication of the story, which was published in February 1925. On May 8, he wrote to the writer Mikhail Slonimsky: “I liked Bulgakov very much, very much, but he did not finish the story. The march of the reptiles to Moscow was not used, but think what a monstrously interesting picture this is!”

Probably, Bulgakov changed the ending of the story due to the obvious censorship unacceptability of the final version with the occupation of Moscow by hordes of giant reptiles.

By the way, “Fatal Eggs” passed censorship with difficulty. On October 18, 1924, Bulgakov wrote in his diary:

“I’m still struggling with ‘Gudok’. Today I spent the day trying to get 100 rubles from Nedra. There are big difficulties with my grotesque story “Fatal Eggs”. Angarsky highlighted 20 places that need to be changed for censorship reasons. Will it pass censorship? The end of the story is spoiled because I wrote it hastily.”

Fortunately for the writer, the censorship saw in the bastards’ campaign against Moscow only a parody of the intervention of 14 states against Soviet Russia during the Civil War (the bastards were foreign, since they hatched from foreign eggs). Therefore, the capture of the capital of the world proletariat by hordes of reptiles was perceived by censors only as a dangerous hint of the possible defeat of the USSR in a future war with the imperialists and the destruction of Moscow in this war. And the curial pestilence, against which neighboring states are establishing cordons, is the revolutionary ideas of the USSR, against which the Entente proclaimed the policy of a cordon sanitaire.

However, in fact, Bulgakov’s “insolence,” for which he was afraid of ending up in “places not so remote,” was something completely different. The main character of the story is Professor Vladimir Ipatievich Persikov, the inventor of the red “ray of life”, with the help of which monstrous reptiles are born. The red ray is a symbol of the socialist revolution in Russia, carried out under the slogan of building a better future, but which brought terror and dictatorship. The death of Persikov during a spontaneous riot of the crowd, excited by the threat of an invasion of Moscow by invincible giant reptiles, personifies the danger that was fraught with the experiment launched by Lenin and the Bolsheviks to spread the “red ray” first in Russia and then throughout the world.

Vladimir Ipatievich Persikov was born on April 16, 1870, because on the day the story begins in the imaginary future of 1928, April 16, he turns 58 years old. Thus, the main character is the same age as Lenin. April 16 is also not a random date. On this day (according to modern times) in 1917, the leader of the Bolsheviks returned to Petrograd from exile. And exactly eleven years later, Professor Persikov discovered a wonderful red ray (making Persikov’s birthday on April 22 would be too transparent). For Russia, such a ray of light was the arrival of Lenin, who the next day published the famous April Theses, with a call for the development of the “bourgeois-democratic” revolution into a socialist one.

Persikov’s portrait is reminiscent of Lenin’s portrait: “The head is wonderful, like a pusher, with tufts of yellowish hair sticking out on the sides... Persikov’s face always bore a somewhat capricious imprint. On his red nose are small, old-fashioned glasses with silver frames, shiny, small eyes, tall and stooped. He spoke in a creaky, thin, croaking voice and, among other oddities, had this: when he said something weightily and confidently, the index finger of his right hand turned into a hook and squinted his eyes. And since he always spoke confidently, because his erudition in his field was absolutely phenomenal, the hook very often appeared before the eyes of Professor Persikov’s interlocutors.”

From Lenin there is a characteristic bald head with reddish hair, an oratorical gesture, a manner of speaking, and finally, the famous squinting of the eyes, which became part of Lenin’s myth. The extensive erudition that Lenin undoubtedly had also coincides, and even foreign languages Lenin and Persikov speak the same language, speaking French and German fluently. In the first newspaper report about the discovery of the red ray, the professor's name was misrepresented by the reporter as Pevsikov, which clearly indicates the burr of Vladimir Ipatievich, like Vladimir Ilyich. By the way, Persikov is named Vladimir Ipatievich only on the first page of the story, and then everyone around him calls him Vladimir Ipatiech - almost Vladimir Ilyich. Finally, the time and place of completion of the story, indicated at the end of the text - “Moscow, 1924, October” - indicate, among other things, the place and year of death of the Bolshevik leader and the month forever associated with his name thanks to October Revolution.

In the Leninist context of the image of Persikov, the German, judging by the inscriptions on the boxes, finds its explanation for the origin of the eggs of reptiles, which then, under the influence of a red ray, almost captured (and in the first edition even captured) Moscow. After all, after the February Revolution, Lenin and his comrades were transported from Switzerland to Russia through Germany in a sealed carriage (it is no coincidence that the eggs that arrived at Rokk, which he mistakes for chicken eggs, are covered with labels all around).

The likening of the Bolsheviks to giant reptiles marching on Moscow was made in a letter from a nameless, insightful Bulgakov reader on March 9, 1936: “... Among other reptiles, undoubtedly, the unfree press hatched from the fatal egg.”

Among Persikov's prototypes was the famous pathologist Alexey Ivanovich Abrikosov, whose surname is parodied in the surname of Vladimir Ipatich. Abrikosov had just dissected Lenin’s corpse and extracted his brain. In the story, this brain is, as it were, handed over to the scientist who extracted it, unlike the Bolsheviks, a gentle man, not a cruel one, and passionately passionate about zoology, and not the socialist revolution.

Bulgakov’s idea of ​​a ray of life could have been prompted by his acquaintance with the discovery in 1921 by biologist Alexander Gavrilovich Gurvich of mitogenetic radiation, under the influence of which mitosis (cell division) occurs.

The Chicken Pestilence is a parody of the tragic famine of 1921 in the Volga region. Persikov is a comrade of the chairman of Dobrokur, an organization designed to help eliminate the consequences of the death of the chicken population in the USSR. Dobrokur's prototype was clearly the Famine Relief Committee, created in July 1921 by a group of public figures and scientists opposed to the Bolsheviks. The Committee was headed by former ministers of the Provisional Government S.N. Prokopovich, N.M. Kishkin and a prominent figure in the liberal movement E.D. Kuskova. The Soviet government used the names of the members of this organization to receive foreign aid, which, however, was often used not at all to help the starving, but for the needs of the party elite and the world revolution. Already at the end of August 1921, the Committee was abolished, and its leaders and many ordinary participants were arrested. It is interesting that Persikov also died in August. His death symbolizes, among other things, the collapse of the attempts of the non-party intelligentsia to establish civilized cooperation with the totalitarian government.

L.E. Belozerskaya believed that “describing the appearance and some habits of Professor Persikov, M.A. I started from the image of a living person, my relative, Evgeniy Nikitich Tarnovsky,” a professor of statistics, with whom they had to live at one time. The image of Persikov could also reflect some features of Bulgakov’s uncle on his mother’s side, the surgeon N.M. Pokrovsky.

In “Fatal Eggs,” Bulgakov, for the first time in his work, raised the problem of the responsibility of the scientist and the state for the use of a discovery that could harm humanity. The fruits of the discovery can be used by unenlightened and self-confident people, and even those with unlimited power. And then a catastrophe can happen much sooner than general prosperity.

Criticism after the release of “Fatal Eggs” quickly saw through the political hints hidden in the story. The Bulgakov archive contains a typewritten copy of an excerpt from an article by critic M. Lirov (Moisey Litvakov) about Bulgakov’s work, published in 1925 in issues 5–6 of the magazine “Print and Revolution”. Bulgakov emphasized here the most dangerous places for himself: “But the real record was broken by M. Bulgakov with his “story” “Fatal Eggs”. This is truly something remarkable for a “Soviet” almanac.” A typewritten copy of this article has been preserved in Bulgakov’s archive, where the writer underlined the phrase quoted above with a blue pencil, and with a red pencil the phrase Vladimir Ipatievich, used by Lirov seven times, of which only once with the surname Persikov.

M. Lirov continued:

“Professor Vladimir Ipatievich Persikov made an extraordinary discovery - he discovered a red ray of sunlight, under the influence of which the eggs of, say, frogs instantly turn into tadpoles, the tadpoles quickly grow into huge frogs, which immediately multiply and immediately begin mutual destruction. And the same applies to all living creatures. Such were the amazing properties of the red ray discovered by Vladimir Ipatievich. This discovery was quickly learned in Moscow, despite Vladimir Ipatievich’s conspiracy. The nimble Soviet press became very agitated (here is a picture of the morals of the Soviet press, lovingly copied from life... the worst tabloid press of Paris, London and New York). Now “gentle voices” from the Kremlin began to ring on the phone, and Soviet... confusion began.

And then a disaster struck the Soviet country: a devastating epidemic of chickens swept through it. How to get out of a difficult situation? But who usually brings the USSR out of all disasters? Of course, GPU agents. And then there was one security officer Rokk (Rock), who had a state farm at his disposal, and this Rokk decided to restore chicken breeding in his state farm with the help of the discovery of Vladimir Ipatievich.

The Kremlin received an order to Professor Persikov to provide his complex scientific apparatus for temporary use to Rokku for the needs of restoring chicken breeding. Persikov and his assistant, of course, are outraged and indignant. And really, how can such complex devices be provided to laymen?

After all, Rokk can cause disasters. But the “gentle voices” from the Kremlin are relentless. It’s okay, the security officer - he knows how to do everything.

Rokk received devices that operate using a red ray and began to operate on his state farm.

But a disaster ensued - and here's why: Vladimir Ipatievich prescribed reptile eggs for his experiments, and Rokk prescribed chicken eggs for his work. Soviet transport, naturally, mixed everything up, and instead of chicken eggs, Rokk received the “fatal eggs” of the bastards. Instead of chickens, Rokk bred huge reptiles that devoured him, his employees, the surrounding population and rushed in huge masses to the entire country, mainly to Moscow, destroying everything in their path. The country was declared under martial law, the Red Army was mobilized, whose troops died in heroic but fruitless battles. Danger was already threatening Moscow, but then a miracle happened: in August, terrible frosts suddenly struck, and all the reptiles died. Only this miracle saved Moscow and the entire USSR.

But a terrible riot occurred in Moscow, during which the “inventor” of the red ray himself, Vladimir Ipatievich, died. Crowds of people burst into his laboratory and shouted: “Beat him!” World villain! You have unleashed the reptiles!” - they tore him to pieces.

Everything fell into place. Although the assistant of the late Vladimir Ipatievich continued his experiments, he failed to open the red beam again.”

The critic persistently called Professor Persikov Vladimir Ipatievich, also emphasizing that he was the inventor of the red ray, i.e., as it were, the architect of the October Socialist Revolution. It was made clear to the powers that be that behind Vladimir Ipatievich Persikov the figure of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was visible, and “Fatal Eggs” was a libelous satire on the late leader and the communist idea as a whole. M. Lirov focused the attention of possible biased readers of the story on the fact that Persikov died during a popular revolt, that they were killing him with the words “world villain” and “you have dissolved the bastards.” Here one could see an allusion to Lenin as the proclaimed leader of the world revolution, as well as an association with the famous “Hydra of revolution”, as opponents of Soviet power expressed themselves (the Bolsheviks, in turn, spoke of the “Hydra of counter-revolution”). It is interesting that in the play “Running” ”, completed in the year when the action of “Fatal Eggs” takes place, the “eloquent” messenger Krapilin calls the hangman Khludov “the world’s beast.”

And the death of the “inventor of the red ray” at the hands of the indignant “crowds of the people” (Bulgakov does not have such an exalted expression) could hardly have pleased the communists in power. Lirov was afraid to openly declare that Lenin was parodied in the story (he himself could be prosecuted for such inappropriate associations), but he hinted at this, we repeat, very directly and transparently. Wells did not deceive him. The critic argued that “from mentioning the name of his progenitor Wells, as many are now inclined to do, literary person Bulgakov is not cleared up at all. And what kind of Wells is this, really, when here the same boldness of fiction is accompanied by completely different attributes? The similarity is purely external...” Lirov, like other Bulgakov’s ill-wishers, sought, of course, to clarify not the literary, but the political face of the writer.

By the way, the mention of Wells in “Fatal Eggs” could also have a political meaning. The great science fiction writer, as you know, visited our country and wrote the book “Russia in the Dark” (1921), where, in particular, he spoke about his meetings with Lenin and called the Bolshevik leader, who spoke with inspiration about the future fruits of the GOELRO plan, “a Kremlin dreamer.” Bulgakov depicts Persikov as a “Kremlin dreamer”, detached from the world and immersed in his scientific plans. True, he does not sit in the Kremlin, but he constantly communicates with the Kremlin leaders during the course of the action.

The hopes that critics in the service of power, in contrast to thoughtful and sympathetic readers, would not perceive the anti-communist orientation of “Fatal Eggs” and would not understand who exactly was parodied in the image of the main character, did not materialize (although the purposes of disguise were supposed to serve and transferring the action to a fantastic future, and obvious borrowings from Wells’s novels “Food of the Gods” and “War of the Worlds”). Alert critics understood everything.

M. Lirov, skilled in literary denunciations (only literary ones?) and not knowing in the 1920s that he would perish during the great purge of 1937, sought to read and show “who should” even what in “Fatal Eggs” it was not, without stopping at direct fraud. The critic argued that Rokk, who played the main role in the tragedy that unfolded, was a security officer, an employee of the GPU. Thus, a hint was made that the story parodied real episodes of the struggle for power that unfolded in recent years Lenin’s life and in the year of his death, where the security officer Rokk (or his prototype F.E. Dzerzhinsky) finds himself at one with some “gentle voices” in the Kremlin and leads the country to disaster with his inept actions.

In fact, Rokk is not a security officer at all, although he conducts his experiments in the “Red Ray” under the protection of GPU agents.

He is a participant in the Civil War and Revolution, into the abyss of which he throws himself, “having replaced the flute with a destructive Mauser,” and after the war “he edits a “huge newspaper” in Turkestan, having managed, as a member of the “high economic commission,” to become famous “for his amazing work on irrigating the Turkestan region "".

The obvious prototype of Rocca is the editor of the newspaper "Communist" and poet G.S. Astakhov, one of the main persecutors of Bulgakov in Vladikavkaz in 1920–1921, although there are similarities with F.E. Dzerzhinsky, who headed the Supreme Council national economy countries, if desired, can also be seen. In “Notes on Cuffs” a portrait of Astakhov is given: “brave with an eagle face and a huge revolver on his belt.” Rokk, like Astakhov, walks around with a Mauser and edits a newspaper, only not in the Caucasus, but in the equally outlying Turkestan. Instead of the art of poetry, to which Astakhov considered himself involved, who reviled Pushkin and considered himself clearly above the “sun of Russian poetry,” Rokk is committed to musical art. Before the revolution, he was a professional flutist, and then the flute remained his main hobby. That is why he tries at the end, like an Indian fakir, to charm a giant anaconda by playing the flute, but without success.

If we accept that one of Rock’s prototypes could have been L.D. Trotsky, who actually lost the struggle for power in 1923–1924 (Bulgakov noted this in his diary), then one cannot help but marvel at completely mystical coincidences. Trotsky, like Rokk, played the most active role in the revolution and Civil War, being chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council. At the same time, he was also involved in economic affairs, in particular, restoring transport, but switched entirely to economic work after leaving the military department in January 1925. In particular, Trotsky briefly headed the main concession committee. Rokk arrived in Moscow and received a well-deserved rest in 1928. A similar thing happened to Trotsky almost at the same time. In the fall of 1927, he was removed from the Central Committee and expelled from the party, at the beginning of 1928 he was exiled to Alma-Ata, and literally a year later he was forced to leave the USSR forever, disappear from the country. Needless to say, all these events occurred after the creation of the “Fatal Eggs”. Lirov wrote his article in mid-1925, during a period of further aggravation of the internal party struggle, and, apparently, counting on the inattention of readers, he tried to attribute to Bulgakov its reflection in “Fatal Eggs,” written almost a year earlier.

Bulgakov's story did not go unnoticed by OPTU informants. One of them reported on February 22, 1928:

“The most implacable enemy of Soviet power is the author of “The Days of the Turbins” and “Zoyka’s Apartment” Mikhail. Afanasyevich Bulgakov, former Smenovekhovite. One can simply be amazed at the long-suffering and tolerance of the Soviet government, which still does not prevent the dissemination of Bulgakov’s book (ed. “Nedra”) “Fatal Eggs.” This book is a brazen and outrageous slander against the Red Power. She vividly describes how, under the influence of a red ray, reptiles gnawing each other were born and went to Moscow. There is a vile place there, an evil nod towards the late Comrade LENIN, that there lies a dead toad, which even after death remained with an evil expression on its face (here we mean a giant frog, bred by Persikov with the help of a red ray and killed with potassium cyanide due to her aggressiveness, and “there was an angry expression on her face even after death” - here Seksot saw an allusion to Lenin’s body, preserved in the mausoleum - B.S.). How this book of his is circulating freely is impossible to understand. They read it voraciously. Bulgakov enjoys the love of young people, he is popular. His earnings reach 30,000 rubles. per year. He paid 4,000 rubles in tax alone. Because he paid because he was going to go abroad.

These days he was met by Lerner (we are talking about the famous Pushkinist N.O. Lerner. - B.S.). Bulgakov is very offended by Soviet power and is very dissatisfied with the current situation. You can't work at all. Nothing is certain. We definitely need either war communism again, or complete freedom. The revolution, says Bulgakov, should be made by the peasant who finally speaks his real native language. In the end, there are not so many communists (and among them there are “those like them”), and there are tens of millions of offended and indignant peasants. Naturally, at the very first war, communism will be swept out of Russia, etc. Here they are, the thoughts and hopes that are swarming in the head of the author of “Fatal Eggs,” who is now preparing to take a walk abroad. It would be completely unpleasant to release such a “bird” abroad... By the way, in a conversation with Lerner, Bulgakov touched on the contradictions in the policy of the Soviet government: - On the one hand they shout - save. On the other hand, if you start saving, you will be considered a bourgeois. Where is the logic?

Of course, one cannot vouch for the literal accuracy of the unknown agent’s transmission of Bulgakov’s conversation with Lerner. However, it is quite possible that it was the informer’s tendentious interpretation of the story that contributed to the fact that Bulgakov was never released abroad. In general, what the writer said to the Pushkin scholar agrees well with the thoughts captured in his diary “Under the Heel.” There, in particular, there are discussions about the probability new war and the inability of the Soviet government to withstand it. In an entry dated October 26, 1923, Bulgakov cited his conversation on this topic with a baker neighbor:

“The authorities consider the actions of the government to be fraudulent (bonds, etc.). He said that two Jewish commissars in the Krasnopresnensky Council were beaten by those who showed up for mobilization for insolence and threats with a revolver. I don't know if it's true. According to the baker, the mood of the mobilized is very unpleasant. He, a baker, complained that hooliganism was developing among young people in the villages. The guy has the same thing in his head as everyone else - in his own mind, he understands perfectly well that the Bolsheviks are swindlers, he doesn’t want to go to war, he has no idea about the international situation. We are wild, dark, unhappy people.”

Obviously, in the first edition of the story, the capture of Moscow by foreign reptiles symbolized the future defeat of the USSR in the war, which at that moment the writer considered inevitable. The invasion of reptiles also personified the ephemerality of the NEP prosperity, which was depicted in a rather parodic manner in the fantastic year of 1928.

“Fatal Eggs” received interesting responses abroad as well. Bulgakov kept in his archive a typewritten copy of a TASS message dated January 24, 1926, entitled “Churchill is afraid of socialism.” It said that on January 22, British Chancellor of the Exchequer Winston Churchill, speaking in connection with labor strikes in Scotland, indicated that “the terrible conditions existing in Glasgow give rise to communism,” but “we do not want to see Moscow crocodile eggs on our table.” (emphasized by Bulgakov - B.S.). I am confident that the time will come when the Liberal Party will give every possible assistance to the Conservative Party to eradicate these doctrines. I am not afraid of the Bolshevik revolution in England, but I am afraid of the attempt of the socialist majority to arbitrarily introduce socialism. One tenth of the socialism that ruined Russia would have completely ruined England...” (It is difficult to doubt the validity of these words today, seventy years later.)

In “Fatal Eggs,” Bulgakov parodied V.E. Meyerhold, mentioning “the theater named after the late Vsevolod Meyerhold, who died, as is known, in 1927, during the production of Pushkin’s “Boris Godunov,” when the trapeze with naked boyars collapsed.” This phrase goes back to one humorous conversation in the editorial office of Gudok, which was relayed by the head of the “fourth page” of this newspaper, Ivan Semenovich Ovchinnikov:

“The beginning of the twenties... Bulgakov is sitting in the next room, but for some reason he brings his sheepskin coat to our hanger every morning. The sheepskin coat is one of a kind: it has no fasteners and no belt. Put your hands in the sleeves - and you can consider yourself dressed. Mikhail Afanasyevich himself certifies the sheepskin coat as follows - Russian awesome. Fashion of the late seventeenth century. The chronicle mentions it for the first time in 1377. Now Meyerhold’s Duma boyars are falling from the second floor in such outrages. The injured actors and spectators are taken to the Sklifosovsky Institute. I recommend watching..."

Obviously, Bulgakov assumed that by 1927 - exactly 550 years after the first mention of the ohabnya in the chronicles, Meyerhold's creative evolution would reach the point where the actors playing the boyars would be stripped of the okhabnya and left in what their mother gave birth to, so that only direction and technique acting was replaced by all historical scenery. After all, Vsevolod Emilievich said at one of his lectures in February 1924 about the production of “Godunov”: “... Dmitry had to lie on the couch, certainly half naked... even his body would certainly be shown... by removing stockings, for example, from Godunov, we would force him to approach differently to the whole tragedy..."

It is curious that, as in the lost early story “The Green Serpent,” the motif of a snake, and even in combination with a woman, appears again in the writer in 1924 in the story “Fatal Eggs.” In this story, Bulgakov’s fantasy created the “Red Ray” state farm in the Smolensk province near Nikolskoye, where director Alexander Semenovich Rokk conducts a tragic experiment with the eggs of reptiles - and the hatched giant anaconda devours his wife Manya before his eyes. Maybe “The Green Serpent” was based on Bulgakov’s Smolensk impressions and he wrote the story itself back then.

By the way, Bulgakov’s acquaintance with M.M. Zoshchenko could also be reflected here. The fact is that Mikhail Mikhailovich in November 1918 worked as a poultry farmer (officially the position was called “instructor in rabbit breeding and chicken breeding”) at the Smolensk state farm “Mankovo” near the city of Krasny and restored the number of chickens there after the previous pestilence. Perhaps this circumstance prompted him to choose the Smolensk province, so familiar to Bulgakov as a zemstvo doctor, as the location for the experiment “to restore the number of chickens in the republic.” Zoshchenko and Bulgakov met no later than May 10, 1926, when they performed together in Leningrad at literary evening. But it is quite possible that they met back in 1924.

Although Bulgakov and Zoshchenko were in different districts of the Smolensk province almost at the same time, the psychology of the peasants was the same everywhere. And hatred of the landowners was combined with the fear that they might still return.

But Bulgakov also saw the peasant revolt in Ukraine and knew that the naive darkness of the peasants was easily combined with incredible cruelty.

“First Color” in the name bears a certain echo with the Amphitheater “Fire Color”. It seems that the later edition of this early story could be the famous 1924 story "Khan's Fire". It describes a fire that actually occurred on the Muravishniki estate on the eve of the February Revolution. True, in the story it is dated to the early 20s.

This same story, by the way, reflected one of Henryk Sienkiewicz’s heroes, the Tatar Asia from “Pan Volodyevsky,” the son of the Tatar leader, the real Tugai Bey, who died near Berestechko (Tugai Bey himself as minor character takes place in the first novel of the trilogy - “With Fire and Sword”). Asia serves the Poles, but then betrays them and burns the place where the Tatar banner he leads stands. In Bulgakov’s story “Khan’s Fire,” the last representative of the princely family of Tugai-begs, like his literary prototype, obsessed with the thirst for destruction and revenge, burns his estate, turned into a museum, so that the rebellious people could not use it. Let us note that in 1929, one of the chapters of the first edition of “The Master and Margarita,” “Mania Furibunda,” submitted on May 8 for separate publication in the almanac “Nedra,” was signed by the author with the pseudonym “K. Tugai.”

The Yusupov estate served as the prototype for the estate in Khan's Fire, probably because Bulgakov was specifically interested in the story of the murder of Grigory Rasputin, in which Prince Felix Feliksovich Yusupov (the younger) played a prominent role. In 1921, Bulgakov was going to write a play about Rasputin and Nicholas II. In a letter to his mother in Kyiv on November 17, 1921, he asked to convey to his sister Nadya: “... We need all the material for the historical drama - everything that concerns Nikolai and Rasputin in the period of 16 and 17 (murder and coup). Newspapers, descriptions of the palace, memoirs, and most of all Purishkevich’s “Diary” (Vladimir Mitrofanovich Purishkevich, one of the leaders of the extreme right in the State Duma, monarchist, together with Prince F.F. Yusupov and Grand Duke Dmitry Pavlovich, organized the murder of G.E. Rasputin in December 1916, described in detail in the posthumously published diary - B.S.) - to the bitter end! Description of costumes, portraits, memories, etc. “I cherish the idea of ​​​​creating a grandiose drama in 5 acts by the end of the 22nd year. Some sketches and plans are already ready. The thought captivates me madly... Of course, with the draining work that I do, I will never be able to write anything worthwhile, but at least the road is a dream and work on it. If the “Diary” falls into her (Nadya’s – B.S.) hands temporarily, I ask that everything about the murder with the gramophone be immediately copied verbatim from it (the gramophone was supposed to drown out the sound of the shots, and before that create the impression in Rasputin’s mind that that in the room next door there is F.F. Yusupov’s wife Irina Aleksandrovna Yusupova, the granddaughter of Alexander III and the niece of Nicholas II, whom the “elder” (Gregory. - B.S.) desired, the conspiracy of Felix and Purishkevich, Purishkevich’s reports to Nikolai, the personality of Nikolai Mikhailovich (we are talking about Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich (1859–1919), chairman of the Russian Historical Society, executed during the Red Terror. - B.S.), and send it to me in letters (I think it’s possible? Titled “Drama Material”? ) (Here is a hint of the widespread illustration of letters. - B.S.) “However, Bulgakov never wrote a play about Rasputin and Nicholas II. The writer’s very appeal to this topic speaks volumes about his disappointment in the monarchy. At the time, in a work of any genre, Nicholas II and other representatives of the Romanov family could only be portrayed negatively. But Bulgakov himself had a rather negative attitude towards the overthrown dynasty in the early 20s. In a diary entry on April 15, 1924, he expressed himself rudely and directly in his heart: “Damn all the Romanovs!” There weren't enough of them." Unfulfilled plan historical play, obviously, was reflected in the “Khan’s Fire”. There is a fairly strong anti-monarchist tendency here. Nicholas II in the photograph is described as “a nondescript man with a beard and mustache, looking like a regimental doctor.” In the portrait of Emperor Alexander I, “the bald head smiled insidiously in the smoke.” Nicholas I is the “white haired general”. His mistress was once an old princess, “inexhaustible in depraved invention, who wore two glory all her life - a dazzling beauty and a terrible Messalina.” She could well have been among the outstanding libertines at Satan’s Great Ball, along with the dissolute wife of the Roman Emperor Claudius I, Valeria Messalina, who was executed in 48.”

Nicholas II is also satirically depicted in Bulgakov’s last play “Batum”. Closely connected by kinship with the imperial family, Prince Tugai-Beg is presented as a man doomed to extinction, leaving no offspring and dangerous to society with his willingness to destroy the family nest, so that it does not become the property of those whom the prince hates. If the devil did not take him, as Bulgakov wished for Romanov, then, of course, the devil brought him.

The prototype of Prince Anton Ivanovich Tugai-Beg could be the father and full namesake of the murderer Rasputin, Prince Felix Feliksovich Yusupov (the elder, born Count Sumarokov-Elston). In 1923, when the story takes place, he was 67 years old. The elder Yusupov’s wife, Zinaida Nikolaevna Yusupova, was also still alive at that time, but Bulgakov forced the wife of the hero of “Khan’s Fire” to die earlier in order to leave him completely alone, like Pontius Pilate and Woland later in “The Master and Margarita” (remember the words Woland on the Patriarchal: “Alone, alone, I am always alone”). The younger brother of Tugai-Beg, Pavel Ivanovich, mentioned in the story, who served in the horse grenadiers and died in the war with the Germans, has as his possible prototype his older brother F.F. Yusupov (younger) Count Nikolai Feliksovich Sumarokov-Elston, who was preparing to enter service in the Cavalry Corps , but killed in 1908 in a duel by Lieutenant of the Cavalry Regiment Count A.E. Manteuffel, who came from Baltic Germans.

But let's return to "Fatal Eggs". There are other parody sketches in the story. For example, the one where the fighters of the First Cavalry, at the head of which “in the same crimson hood as all the riders, rides the aging and gray-haired commander of the cavalry community who became legendary 10 years ago” - Semyon Mikhailovich Budyonny - set out on a campaign against the reptiles with thieves' song, sung in the manner of the Internationale:

Neither ace, nor queen, nor jack,

We will beat the bastards, without a doubt,

Four on the side - yours are not there...

Combining this song with the lines of “The Internationale”, we get a funny, but quite meaningful text:

Nobody will give us deliverance -

Neither ace, nor queen, nor jack.

We will achieve liberation

Four on the side - yours is not there.

A real case (or at least a widely spread rumor in Moscow) found its place here. On August 2, 1924, Bulgakov wrote in his diary a story from his friend writer Ilya Kremlev (Sven) that “the GPU regiment went to a demonstration with an orchestra that played “Everyone Adores These Girls.” The promise to “beat the bastards” in the story could, if desired, be attributed to the “red bastards” who captured Moscow, taking into account that, as Bulgakov thought, in the mid-20s, ordinary people were not at all eager to fight for the Bolsheviks. In the story, the GPU is replaced by the First Cavalry, and such foresight was not superfluous. The writer was undoubtedly familiar with evidence and rumors about the morals of the Budennovsky freemen, who were distinguished by violence and robberies. They were captured in the book of stories “Cavalry” by Isaac Babel (though in a somewhat softened form compared to the facts of his own cavalry diary).

It was quite appropriate to put a criminal song in the rhythm of the Internationale into the mouths of the Budennovites. The slang expression of professional cheaters “Four on the side - there are none of yours” is deciphered by Fima Zhiganets in the article “On the secret symbolism of one name in the novel “The Master and Margarita””: “...In the pre-revolutionary years, this proverb did not have a wide “circulation”, it was used only in a narrow circle of the criminal world. It was born among gamblers, from a situation in the game “point”. If a banker adds a nine or a ten to the ace he has in his hand (the only two cards that have four suit icons on each side; the nine has one more icon in the center, and the ten has two), this means his undoubted win. He immediately scores either 20 points or 21 (the value of an ace is 11 points). Even if the player has 20 points, a draw is interpreted in favor of the banker (“banker’s point”), and if the player immediately scored 21 points, this would mean that he automatically wins, and there is no point in buying cards for the banker. Thus, “four on the side” are four icons of a card suit, meaning the player’s inevitable loss. Later, the expression began to be used in a figurative sense to denote a hopeless situation, a loss.”

“Fatal Eggs” received critical and positive responses. Thus, Yu. Sobolev in “Dawn of the East” on March 11, 1925 assessed the story as the most significant publication in the 6th book of “Nedr”, arguing: “Only Bulgakov with his ironic-fantastic and satirical-utopian story “Fatal Eggs” unexpectedly falls out of the general, very well-intentioned and very decent tone.” The critic saw the “utopianism” of “Fatal Eggs” “in the very picture of Moscow in 1928, in which Professor Persikov again receives a “six-room apartment” and feels his entire life as it was... before October.” However, in general, Soviet criticism reacted negatively to the story as a phenomenon counteracting official ideology. Censorship became more vigilant towards the novice author, and Bulgakov’s next story, “The Heart of a Dog,” was never published during his lifetime.

“Fatal Eggs” enjoyed great reader success and even in 1930 remained one of the most requested works in libraries.

An analysis of the artistic motives of “Fatal Eggs” gives reason to speculate about how Bulgakov treated Lenin.

At first glance, this attitude of Bulgakov is quite benevolent, judging only by the image of Persikov and the censored essays discussed in the first volume of our book. The professor evokes obvious sympathy both for his tragic death, and for his genuine grief upon receiving the news of the death of his long-abandoned but still beloved wife, and for his commitment to strict scientific knowledge, and his reluctance to follow the political situation. But this is clearly not from the Leninist incarnation of Persikov, but from two others - the Russian intellectual and the scientist-creator. Persikov had another prototype - Bulgakov's uncle, surgeon Nikolai Mikhailovich Pokrovsky. Hence, probably, Persikov’s tall stature, his bachelor lifestyle, and much more. Bulgakov, as we will now see, did not have a positive attitude towards Lenin.

The fact is that Bulgakov’s Leninism did not end with Persikov. Let's try to get ahead a little and find Lenin's traces in the novel “The Master and Margarita,” which the writer began in 1929, that is, five years after “The Fatal Eggs.” The new novel chronologically continued the story, because its action, as we will show later, also takes place in 1929 - which, as expected, came immediately after 1928 - that near future in which the events in the story unfold. Only in “The Master and Margarita” Bulgakov no longer describes the future, but the present.

To understand which hero of “The Master and Margarita” Lenin became the prototype for, let us turn to the clipping from “Pravda” dated November 6–7, 1921, preserved in Bulgakov’s archive, with Alexander Shotman’s memoirs “Lenin in Underground.” It described how the leader of the Bolsheviks in the summer and autumn of 1917 was hiding from the Provisional Government, which declared him a German spy. Shotman, in particular, noted that “not only counterintelligence and criminal detectives were brought to their feet, but even dogs, including the famous sniffer dog Tref, were mobilized to capture Lenin” and they were helped by “hundreds of volunteer detectives among the bourgeois inhabitants” . These lines make us remember the episode of the novel when the famous police dog Tuzbuben unsuccessfully searches for Woland and his henchmen after a scandal in Variety. By the way, after February 1917, the police were officially renamed the police by the Provisional Government, so the bloodhound Tref, like Tuzbuben, is correctly called the police.

The events described by Shortman are very reminiscent in their atmosphere of the search for Woland and his retinue (after a session of black magic) and, to an even greater extent, the actions in the epilogue of the novel, when distraught ordinary people detain tens and hundreds of suspicious people and cats. The memoirist also quotes the words of Y.M. Sverdlov at the VI Party Congress that “although Lenin is deprived of the opportunity to personally attend the congress, he is invisibly present and leads it.” In exactly the same way, Woland, by his own admission to Berlioz and Bezdomny, was invisibly personally present at the trial of Yeshua, “but only secretly, incognito, so to speak,” and the writers in response suspected that their interlocutor was a German spy.

Shotman tells how, while hiding from enemies, Lenin and G.E. Zinoviev, who was with him in Razliv, changed their appearance: “Comrade. Lenin in a wig, without a mustache and beard was almost unrecognizable, but Comrade. By this time, Zinoviev’s mustache and beard had grown, his hair was cut, and he was completely unrecognizable.” Perhaps this is why Bulgakov’s professor Persikov and professor Woland both have shaved hair, and the cat Behemoth, Woland’s favorite jester, the closest to him from his entire retinue, suddenly takes on a resemblance to Zinoviev in The Master and Margarita. The plump, food-loving Zinoviev, with his mustache and beard, must have acquired something of a cat's appearance, and on a personal level he was indeed the closest to Lenin of all the Bolshevik leaders. By the way, Stalin, who replaced Lenin, treated Zinoviev as a buffoon, although later, in the 30s, he did not spare him.

Shotman, who was with Lenin both in Razliv and in Finland, recalled one of the conversations with the leader: “I very much regret that I did not study shorthand and did not write down everything that he said. But... I am convinced that Vladimir Ilyich foresaw much of what happened after the October Revolution.” In The Master and Margarita, Woland is endowed with a similar gift of foresight.

A.V. Shotman, who wrote the memoirs that fed Bulgakov’s creative imagination, was shot in 1937, and his memoirs were banned. Mikhail Afanasyevich, of course, remembered that Persikov’s prototype was identified quite easily at one time. True, then, after the death of Bulgakov, when “Fatal Eggs” was not republished for decades, even for people professionally involved in literature, the connection between the main character of the story and Lenin became far from obvious, and anyway could not be made public due to strict censorship . For the first time, as far as we know, such a connection was openly played out in the dramatization of “Fatal Eggs,” staged by E. Yelanskaya at the Moscow Sphere Theater in 1989. But Bulgakov’s contemporaries were much more directly interested in collecting incriminating evidence than their descendants, and the censorship was more vigilant. So Lenin’s endings in the novel had to be hidden more carefully, otherwise there was no way to seriously count on publication. Just likening Lenin to Satan was worth it!

The following literary source, in particular, served the purposes of camouflage: In 1923, Mikhail Zoshchenko’s story “The Dog Case” appeared. It was about an old professor conducting scientific experiments with the prostate gland in dogs (Professor Preobrazhensky also conducts similar experiments in “Heart of a Dog”), and the criminal bloodhound Trefka also appeared in the course of the action. The story was quite well known to contemporaries, and it is unlikely that anyone would compare it with it, and not with Shotman’s memoirs, which were never republished after 1921. Bulgakov's dog Tuzbubena. So Bulgakov’s novel now has a kind of cover. And such a forced camouflage of one prototype by another became one of the “trademark” features of Bulgakov’s work.

The parody itself in Zoshchenko's story is based on the fact that the club is the official suit, which is why police (as well as police) dogs were often given a similar name. Before the revolution, the ace of diamonds was sewn onto the backs of criminals (Blok’s characterization of the revolutionaries from The Twelve immediately comes to mind: “You should have an ace of diamonds on your back”).

Of course, Woland can lay claim to the title of the most sympathetic devil in world literature, but he remains a devil. And any doubts about Bulgakov’s attitude towards Lenin completely disappear when the name of another character in “The Master and Margarita” is revealed, the prototype of which was also Ilyich.

Let us remember the dramatic artist who convinced the house manager, Bosogo, and other arrestees to voluntarily surrender their currency and other valuables. In the final text he is called Savva Potapovich Kurolesov, but in the previous edition of 1937–1938 he was named much more transparently - Ilya Vladimirovich Akulinov (as an option - also Ilya Potapovich Burdasov). This is how this unattractive character is described: “The promised Burdasov did not hesitate to appear on stage and turned out to be elderly, shaven, in a tailcoat and white tie.

Without any preamble, he made a gloomy face, knitted his eyebrows and spoke in an unnatural voice, looking at the golden bell:

Like a young rake waiting for a date with some wicked libertine...

Further, Burdasov told a lot of bad things about himself. Nikanor Ivanovich, very gloomy, heard Burdasov admit that some unfortunate widow, howling, knelt before him in the rain, but did not touch the artist’s callous heart. Nikanor Ivanovich did not know the poet Pushkin at all before this incident, although he uttered, and often, the phrase: “Will Pushkin pay for the apartment?” - and now, having become acquainted with his work, he immediately became sad, thought and imagined a woman with children on their knees and involuntarily thought: “This bastard Burdasov!” And he, raising his voice, walked on and completely confused Nikanor Ivanovich, because he suddenly began to address someone who was not on stage, and for this absentee he himself He answered himself, and called himself now “sovereign,” now “baron,” now “father,” now “son,” now “you,” now “you.”

Nikanor Ivanovich understood only one thing: that the artist died an evil death, shouting: “Keys!” The keys are mine!“ - after that he fell to the floor, wheezing and tearing off his tie.

Having died, he stood up, shook off the dust from his tail-coat knees, bowed, smiling a false smile, and walked away amid thin applause, and the entertainer spoke like this.

Well, dear currency traders, you listened to the wonderful performance of Ilya Vladimirovich Akulinov “ The Stingy Knight“».

A woman with children, on her knees begging the “miserly knight” for a piece of bread, is not just a quote from Pushkin’s “The Stingy Knight,” but also an allusion to a famous episode from the life of Lenin. In all likelihood, Bulgakov was familiar with the contents of the article “Lenin in Power”, published in the popular Russian émigré Parisian magazine “Illustrated Russia” in 1933 by the author, hiding under the pseudonym “Chronicle” (perhaps it was the former secretary of the Organizing Bureau who fled to the West and Politburo Boris Georgievich Bazhanov). In this article we find the following interesting touch to the portrait of the Bolshevik leader:

“From the very beginning, he understood perfectly well that the peasantry would not, for the sake of the new order, not only make selfless sacrifices, but also voluntarily give up the fruits of their hard labor. And alone with his closest collaborators, Lenin, without hesitation, said exactly the opposite of what he had to say and write officially. When it was pointed out to him that even the children of the workers, that is, the very class for whose sake and in whose name the coup was carried out, were malnourished and even starving, Lenin retorted the claim with indignation:

The government cannot give them bread. Sitting here in St. Petersburg, you won’t get bread. You have to fight for bread with a rifle in your hands... If they fail to fight, they will die of hunger!..”

It is difficult to say whether the Bolshevik leader actually said this or whether we are dealing with another legend, but Lenin’s mood is reliably conveyed here.

Ilya Vladimirovich Akulinov is a parody of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Lenin). The correspondences here are obvious: Ilya Vladimirovich - Vladimir Ilyich, Ulyana - Akulina (the last two names are consistently paired in folklore). The names themselves, which form the basis of surnames, are also significant. Ulyana is a distorted Latin Juliana, that is, belonging to the Julian family, from which Julius Caesar came, whose nickname was adopted in a modified form by the Russian tsars. Akulina is a distorted Latin Aquilina, that is, eagle-like, and the eagle, as you know, is a symbol of the monarchy. Probably, Persikov’s middle name, Ipatievich, is in the same category. It appeared not only because of the consonance between Ipatich and Ilyich, but, most likely, also because in the house of engineer Ipatiev in Yekaterinburg in July 1918, on the orders of Lenin, the Romanov family was destroyed. Let us also remember that the first Romanov, before his coronation, found refuge in the Ipatiev Monastery.

Although in the early 20s Bulgakov was going to write a book about the royal family and G.E. Rasputin and was interested in all the sources related to this, he never wrote this drama, probably realizing the impossibility of adapting it to censorship conditions, which were satisfied only by frank fakes like “The Conspiracy of the Empress” by A.N. Tolstoy and P.E. Shchegolev. But Mikhail Afanasyevich was keenly interested in materials related to the fate of the last Russian Tsar.

Since the name Ilya Vladimirovich Akulinov would be too obvious a challenge to censorship, Bulgakov tried other names for this character that would make readers smile without scaring the censors. He was called, in particular, Ilya Potapovich Burdasov, which evoked associations with hunting dogs. In the end, Bulgakov named his hero Savva Potapovich Kurolesov. The character's name and patronymic are associated with the censor Savva Lukich from the play "Crimson Island" (one can also recall Lenin's popular nickname - Lukich). And the surname reminds us of the consequences for Russia of the activities of the Bolshevik leader and his comrades, who really “played the trick.” In the epilogue of the novel, the actor, like Lenin, dies an evil death - from a blow. The addresses that Akulinov-Kurolesov addresses to himself: “sovereign,” “father,” “son” are a hint both at the monarchical essence of Lenin’s power (the term “commissar power” was popular in the first years after the revolution among the anti-communist opposition), and at deification of the leader’s personality by Soviet propaganda (he is God the Son, God the Father, and God the Holy Spirit).

The special atmosphere characteristic of the progressive development of technology and science, impressive inventions similar to the discoveries of Welsh heroes, the presence of specialized terms in “The Fatal Eggs” and “The Heart of a Dog” by Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov can be correlated in the mind of a not entirely attentive reader with the belonging of these stories to a number of scientific -fantastic works. However, the data literary works They also touch upon social problems characteristic of the author’s contemporary era, which, among other things, makes us talk about “Fatal Eggs” and “Heart of a Dog” as dystopias.

Written in 1924, “Fatal Eggs” contains the story of the zoologist professor Persikov, who discovered a ray of life that accelerates the growth and reproduction processes of all living creatures that fall within its field of action. To further study the beam, the inventor orders eggs of snakes and crocodiles from abroad. At the same time, an epidemic spread throughout the country, killing all the chickens; In order to “revive” them, one of the state farms decided to use Persikov’s equipment. And here a fatal mistake occurs: instead of chicken eggs, reptile eggs ordered by the professor end up on the state farm... A massive fight against giant reptiles begins in the country, and only the unprecedented August frosts became a salvation from them. The scientist himself (even before the victory over the mutants) was killed by an angry crowd.

“... the professor began to get dressed in the lobby. He put on a gray summer coat and a soft hat, then, remembering the picture in the microscope, stared at his galoshes as if he was seeing them for the first time. Then I put the left one on and wanted to put the right one on the left one, but it didn’t fit. “What a monstrous accident that he called me away,” said the scientist, “otherwise I would never have noticed him.” But what does this promise?.. After all, it promises God knows what!.. The professor grinned, squinted at his galoshes and took off the left one and put on the right one. - My God! After all, you can’t even imagine all the consequences... - The professor contemptuously poked his left galosh, which irritated him, not wanting to fit on the right one, and went to the exit in one galosh. He immediately lost his handkerchief and went out, slamming the heavy door. On the porch, he spent a long time looking for matches in his pockets, slapping his sides, found them and set off down the street with an unlit cigarette in his mouth. The scientist did not meet a single person until the temple itself. There the professor, with his head raised, was chained to a golden helmet. The sun licked him sweetly on one side. - How come I haven’t seen him before, what an accident? Should we return to Pankrat? No, you won't wake him up. It would be a pity to leave her, the vile one. You'll have to carry it in your hands. “He took off his galosh and carried it with disgust.”

Also comical is the typo in the newspaper, where Persikov’s last name is misspelled: “Pevsikov,” which hints at the professor’s burr, and, consequently, at identifying him with the main Russian and Soviet “experimenter” - Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Here it is important to remember the fate that the author “prepared” for the leader.

In general, the story (like Bulgakov’s work as a whole) is literally imbued with various kinds of prototypes, their presence further clothes it in a dystopian genre form, precisely based on the technique of parodies. In the work “Above the pages of the dystopias of K. Chapek and M. Bulgakov” S.V. Nikolsky points out the writer’s use of prototypes, except for Lenin, Abrikosov (Persikov), Trotsky (Bronsky), Stalin (Stepanov), Kamenev (Rokk).

The inclusion of these parallels (real person - character) contains a clear indication of revolutionary events. The whole story is “painted” with red shades: raspberry eggs, the state farm “Red Ray”, the hotel “Red Paris”, the newspaper “Red Evening Moscow”, the magazines “Red Light”, “Red Searchlight”, “Red Pepper”, “Red Magazine” . Even the ray of life is “painted” in the color of the revolution, and the amoebas endlessly moving and fighting with each other under the microscope are the participants in the revolutionary movement themselves.

It is entirely logical that at the center of this socially acute work there is a tense conflict, where the mind of Professor Persikov confronts the absurdity of the head of the state farm, Rokka. The thoughtless use of scientific discoveries can harm society. Rokk did not take this into account, which led to disaster.

The very solution to the problem associated with the mass death of chickens is absurd in nature. Attempts at artificial breeding of birds turned not into a chicken Renaissance, but into a reptile invasion...

Bulgakov gave a different outcome to the story “Heart of a Dog,” written in 1925. Moscow professor Philip Filippovich Preobrazhensky, conducting research in the field of rejuvenation, performs an operation to transplant human organs into a dog. The donor for the homeless dog Sharik was the thief and alcoholic Klim Chugunkin, who died in a fight. Soon the professor appears at the house new person, possessing both “Sharikovsky” and “Klimovsky” negative habits. Preobrazhensky very soon had to regret his experience, since his “ward,” oversaturated with proletarian ideas, actually became a class enemy. The scientist, together with his assistant Bormenthal, decides to transform Sharikov back into Sharik, who, already in his old guise, remains to live in the professor’s apartment, not remembering his past offenses before the owner.

Preobrazhensky, unlike Persikov, who is significant only as the inventor of the ray of life, is one of the main characters. The “life lines” of the professors from the first and second stories are similar: they have social significance, since they have impressive scientific potential, both are creators of phenomenal inventions, represent a “tasty morsel” for scandalous journalists, are subject to pressure from socialists, for example, through attempts separation of rooms. But in the biography of Philip Philipovich Preobrazhensky you can no longer find any misunderstandings with galoshes or typos. He is presented as a wise, educated, independent and, it is important to emphasize, intelligent person.

As an active defender of the rights of intellectuals, Bulgakov very vividly depicted their confrontation with the proletarians, who live by principles in the spirit of “divide everything” or “who was nothing will become everything.” Sharikov, who adheres to the interests of the working class, is a clear antipode to Preobrazhensky. And, it seems to me, in order to even more clearly focus on the relationships of these heroes, the writer gave them names and patronymics, built on the same model: Philip Philipovich and Poligraf Poligrafovich. Through this plot conflict, and it is closely connected with social reality, the story’s belonging to a number of dystopias is clearly expressed.

So, Sharikov is the “new man” that supporters of Marxist teachings wanted to create, this is the real harbinger of the beginning of the “new era” that the revolutionaries most expected. And here, according to dystopian trends created on the basis of variations of the myths about the birth of Jesus and the flood, he is a parody of Christ, and therefore the Antichrist. If you look at the situation more broadly, then Preobrazhensky is God himself. This is what a model of the most undesirable future looks like, when two ideals irreconcilably collide with each other!

Bulgakov’s stories “Fatal Eggs” and “Heart of a Dog” contain ideal examples of a far from ideal future. These works have a bright, expressionistic style, a futurological orientation and, most importantly, social significance. Mikhail Afanasyevich, deeply concerned about social problems, clearly showed how great the influence of the environment on objects and phenomena is. The results of the discoveries of Persikov and Preobrazhensky in themselves would have been safe, but in the current social conditions they became deadly...

And there is no reason to doubt the genius of the writer, who, even at an early stage of his work, so skillfully handled dystopian techniques.