The Fatal Eggs

The Fatal Eggs is a novella by Mikhail Bulgakov, a Soviet novelist and playwright. It was written in 1924 and first published in 1925. The novel became quite popular, but was much criticised by most Soviet critics as a mockery of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the leadership of Soviet Russia. Background By 1924, Bulgakov was relatively well known as a writer. He had published several short stories, including Dyavoliada, which was in some ways a precursor to Master and Margarita, and started publishing his first novel, The White Guard. He finished The Fatal Eggs in early October 1924 and published it in the journal Nedra in February 1925 and included in the short-story collection Diaboliad later that year. A shortened edition was also published in May–June 1925 in the Krasnaya Panorama journal under the title The Ray of Life. Bulgakov also read the novel on several occasions to various social gatherings, and it was met with a favorable reception. Plot summary The Fatal Eggs can be described as a satirical science fiction novel. Its main protagonist is an aging zoologist and specialist in amphibians, Vladimir Ipatyevich Persikov. The narration begins in Moscow of the then-future year of 1928, which seems to have overcome the destructive effects of the Russian Civil War and to be quite prosperous. After a long period of degradation, research at the Zoological Institute has revived. After leaving his microscope for several hours, Persikov suddenly noticed that the out-of-focus microscope has produced a ray of red light since amoeba left under that light showed an impossibly-increased rate of binary fission, reproduce at enormous speeds, and demonstrate unusual aggression. Later experiments with large cameras, to produce a larger ray, confirm that the same increased speed of reproduction applied to other organisms, such as frogs, which evolved and produced a next generation within two days. Persikov's invention quickly becomes known to journalists and eventually to foreign spies and to the GPU, the Soviet secret service. Meanwhile, the country is affected by an unknown disease in domesticated poultry, which results in the extinction of all chickens in Soviet Russia, with the plague stopping at the nation's borders.