The Fatal Eggs - Mikhail Bulgakov

I love Bulgakov. He is my favourite writer and wrote my favourite book, The Master and Margarita. The Fatal Eggs (1924-5) isn't in that league, but it is seeded through with bits of Bulgakov at his best.

In 1928 (a 'future' four years after it was written) Professor Persikov invents a red ray that speeds up the reproductive process. His invention couldn't be more timely, because a plague has wiped out the poultry of several large provinces. Eggs are hurriedly imported and bathed in the crimson glow of Persikov's ray. Meanwhile the Professor returns to his zoological studies in which his specialism happens to be eggs. Unfortunately, due to a typical bureaucratic blooper, supplies of eggs get mixed up. Poultry farms receive the eggs of amphibians and reptiles while Persikov wonders what he's supposed to do with common or garden chicken eggs.

The outcome - for Bulgakov - is inevitable. Giant predatory reptiles run amok in the provinces and rioting Muscovites attack the scientists. It's all wild, comic and clever. Just as the common cold did for H G Wells' martians, so a premature frost polishes off the tropical monsters. But, being Bulgakov and not Wells, we are reminded that some poor wretches have to dispose of the rotting corpses.

A fine translation by Roger Cockrell perfectly captures the tone.

Everything Flows - Vasily Grossman

I tried reading Grossman's Life and Fate when Radio 4 did an epic dramatisation a couple of years ago. I failed. I saw this much shorter work and thought it might be a way in to Grossman's work. I finished it, which was good, but I'm not sure I want to commit myself to another go at Life and Fate which is ten times longer.


Don't get me wrong, Everything Flows is a major work, impressive in many ways. It took Grossman eight years to write, his last eight years, and it is obviously unfinished. But there are several problem. It is a story of the Gulag - specifically the challenge facing Ivan Grigoryevich on his release after thirty years - and the atrocity of the Soviet penal system is always interesting. But it is not Grossman's story. Despite being Jewish, intellectual, a writer and opinionated, he was in no way suppressed by the Stalin regime. Indeed, his fame as a war reporter - his account of the extermination camps was used as evidence at the Nuremberg war trials - cushioned him from criticism. Some of his novels and short stories were successful. It was Krushchov rather than Stalin who took against him and the late novels were held up indefinitely as the censors demanded more and more rewrites.


The unfinished nature of the book, no doubt exacerbated by Grossman's stomach cancer, is all too evident. He has no vision for what the novel should be. He has an overarching theme about the Russian people's fetish for totalitarianism but cannot find a way to incorporate it as story. Instead the last quarter of what is only a 220 page book is given over to a historical essay purportedly written by Ivan Grigoryevich after the death of his landlady-lover. The essay is far too long and full of rather convenient aphorisms which strike my inner ear as glib and facile rather than insightful. It suffers especially because it follows a first-person narration of the Ukranian famine by the landlady-lover which is truly heart-rending.


There are other promising strands never followed up on - a widow who is sent to an all-female camp in Siberia and Ivan's cousin Nikolay, who has done rather well out of playing the system and thus feels an appalling burden of guilt. What we are left with, then, is the skeleton of a potentially great novel in progress.


There are, in my view, far too many notes and explanations. There was one thing that struck me, though, in the afterword by Grossman's daughter. When the novel came to light in the Perestroika era no Russian paper would publish it because it wasn't sufficiently Gulag. Are we any different today? An unfinished collection of linked fragments like Everything Flows gets translated and published because it supports our preconceptions about Soviet Russia whilst complete novels of Russian heroism, like Grossman's Stalingrad (For A Just Cause), based on his actual experience, are passed over.

The Double - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

You wait ages for a book called The Double to come along, then two arrive in doublequick time.  First the Pelecanos (see below), now the Dostoyevsky.

The Russian Double is from 1846, an early novella and the author's second published work of fiction.  Dostoyevsky was in his mid-twenties, a long way from imprisonment in Siberia and the dark depths of his mature work.  Essentially what we have here is a straight take on Gogol's The Nose from ten years earlier.  Even the dialogue smacks of the earlier work and, according to the notes by Ronald Wilks, Dostoyevsky even quotes from The Government Inspector and 'The Overcoat' in The Double.  We can safely say, then, he was a Gogol fan.

What the young Dostoyevsky lacks, however, is the mature Gogol's command of the absurd.  Here, middle ranking civil servant Golyadkin finds his life usurped by a doppelgänger who even claims to have the same name.  In The Nose the titular appendage absents itself from the face of Major Kovalyov and adopts an independent lifestyle.  Gogol embraces the absurd whereas Dostoyevsky opts for Kafkaesque comedy.  Both aim for a parody of naturalistic dialogue and internal monologue which was cutting edge at the time but now seems horribly contrived.  That said, The Double is enjoyable - I especially relished the description of the St Petersburg winter weather - and, like the best novellas, is just the perfect length for its story.  Wilks' translation (2009) seems about right.  I'm not sure I needed the notes.  Does it matter where some of the towns are?