Fate with a document? A rare combination

Mikhail Bulgakov is one of my favorite authors. His best known work, The Master and Margarita, has remained my number one favorite book for years. The Fatal Eggs is a lesser known work of his; my dad picked this up overseas and gave it to me. It is about the same length as his Heart of a Dog, which I reviewed early last year.

There are a lot of similarities between The Fatal Eggs and Heart of a Dog. Both are about scientists that perform controversial experiments that go horribly wrong by going right. In The Fatal Eggs, our scientist, Persikov, discovers a ray of light that increases growth in frog eggs exponentially. Frogs the size of cats are hopping around his laboratory. Persikov is a character that can't see the larger implications of what he is doing and is very annoyed when anyone asks him to think about them.

Because this takes place in communist Russia, the government, represented by Comrade Alexander Semyonovich Faight, takes the ray into their own hands. Faight does this because all of the chickens in Russia have died off from some unknown illness and the other countries are laughing at Russia. However, what hatches from Faight's eggs is not quite the Frankenstein chicken I expected. It's better.

"Alexander Semyonovich brought the flute up to his lips, have a horse squeak and, gasping for breath at every second, started to play the waltz from Eugene Onegin. The eyes in the greenery immediately began to burn with an implacable hatred for that opera."

I thought that this book was very good. This book seemed to have more direct government influence than Heart of a Dog and in this book the scientist doesn't learn anything from his actions. This edition of the book has a great foreword by Doris Lessing and is translated by Hugh Aplin. Normally I am a bit of a snob when it comes to Russian translations and like to stick with Pevear and Volokhonsky, but I thought that Aplin's translation was well done. There were some footnotes that were helpful, however to get a full understanding of the work I think you need at least a basic understanding of what was happening at Russia during this time.

"All Moscow rose, and the white sheets of the newspapers dressed it, like birds."

This is a quick read, only about a hundred pages. If nothing else, it teaches the importance of reading the shipping list on all packages delivered to you, especially if you are a crazy scientist.

New on the shelves

Just wanted to let you all know the books I bought this week that are now gracing my book shelves.

I bought one book while I was on vacation because the brothers would not let me go into any books stores. I only managed to sneak away once to one when we were sitting around some plaza waiting for my dad. I'm so glad I did though because I found a copy of the Master and Margarita as a graphic novel. There was no way I was leaving the store without it.

Back home I stopped at Half Price the other day and picked up a few things. I was looking for some history books on various revolutions and found The Age of Revolution by Eric Hobsawm.

I also bought Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Anais Nin Volume I, White Teeth by Zadie Smith, Equus by Peter Shaffer and The American Dream and Zoo Story by Edward Albee.

I did buy one book online before I left for vacation that I opened this week. This is one I am really excited about reading - I read the first chapter last night and loved it. Mr. Abernathy by Tony Delgrosso. He's someone I follow on twitter and tumblr. Anyway, his book isn't on amazon but you can check him out for yourself on his website: http://www.delgrosso.com/.

I'm way behind on my book reviews. I've just been so lazy this week after the stress of vacationing with one's family. Expect a lot of them this weekend though.

It's my jaw not the government's!

Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov

This is the second book by Bulgakov I have read. His the Master and Margarita is, by far, my favorite book. So I was very excited to read this novella.

The story is about a dog, Sharik, who is taken in by a doctor. This doctor, Philip Philippovich, does some very interesting surgeries in attempt to keep his paients young. He transplants some of their organs with animal ones. However, with Sharik, he replaces the dogs testes and pituitary gland with that of a criminal who has recently died. Sharik becomes more and more human much to the alarm of Philip Philippovich and his assistant Dr. Bormenthal.

This story connected in my mind not only to Frankenstien, but also to A Clockwork Orange, for not only does Philip turn Sharik into a "human" but he also is trying very much to change the nature of this human, albeit not with the certain force used in Clockwork. Also, the more I think about it you could also see a little of My Fair Lady in there as well, since they do their best to turn Sharikov into a gentleman.

There is also a great deal of issue over "rights" in this novella: the right of the upper class over the lowe and how this is transitioning at that point in Russia, the right over the educated over the uneducated, human rights over animal rights, doctor's rights over patient's rights and creator's rights over the creation'r rights. Can you tell that I am drooling to write a paper on this book?

This book was translated by Mirra Ginsburg. I've never read any of her translations before. I think that some of the finer points of the story might be lost on readers without a background on Russian life at the time, since there are no footnotes in this edition explaining things. One thing that just didn't click with me was that there were several instances of young men who turn out to be young women, I'm not quite sure what the deal is since they are only talked about for a
moment or two.

This book is very short, only 118 pages, but gives you a lot to think about. What makes a man and what the purpose is of human/animal testing are things that Philip Philippovich struggles with.

There were so many quotes that I wrote down; I'll just share a few.

" The whole horror, you see, is that his heart is no longer a dog's heart, but a human one. And the viliest one you could find." pg 105

"The doctor's eyes resembled two black muzzles of guns aimed straigt at Sharikov." pg 110. I love that image.

"You are a creature just in the process of formation, with a feeble intellect. All your actions are the actions of an animal. Yet you permit yourself to speak with utterly insufferable impudence in the presence of two people with a university education - to offer advice on a cosmic scale and of equally cosmic stupidity on how to divide everything..." pg 91

And because I find this to be humorous:
"I am not a mister, all the misters are in Paris!" pg 96.