Experimental Blog #88

Comments on "Fatal Eggs" and the play "Dead Souls" by Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov

Although only about 72 pages long "Fatal Eggs", which was published in 1925, is referred to as a novel, or book, in this volume of Bulgakov's collected works. This "fantastical - satirical" story is filled with references to people and events of those times, but almost all of them have little or no meaning to an American "outsider" today. The obvious exceptions are a couple of phone calls from a "rather well known, but mysterious person in the Kremlin" to professor Persikov, the primary character in the story, who "speaks in a sonorous bass voice", "sympathetically", or "importantly and tenderly", or "condescendingly".

Perhaps by 1930, when Joseph Stalin called Mikhail Bulgakov and identified himself, Bulgakov was already acquainted with this "baritone" voice; or perhaps Bulgakov had only heard about such calls from other people who had received them.

Although in 1930 "Fatal Eggs" was still counted as one of the most read books in the Soviet Union, Bulgakov had been at first mostly condemned by Soviet critics as a "right-wing and a reactionary writer" and then ignored and refused publication for his works.

The play "Dead Souls" was the first, or one of the first works, that Mikhail Bulgakov completed after he received his phone call from Joseph Stalin, which led to his employment at the Moscow Arts Theater. The play premiered in November 1932 and was performed at this theater for "decades", and, it seems, it was made into a movie.

The book "Dead Souls" by Nicolai Gogol was, as is well known, incomplete and, maybe, partly destroyed by the author Gogol himself. Roughly the first 2 of the 4 acts of this play sound rather repetitious and, perhaps, distorted to conform with the approved Soviet Marxist-Leninist idealogy. The play is called a comedy, but there doesn't seem to be anything to really laugh at, or about.

However, the rest of the play improves, where Bulgakov becomes more the real author; for instance, where in the book does Chichikov end up briefly in jail? The play becomes more alive and entertaining, and even a little bit genuinely satirical, in spite of the required ideological conformity.