The Fatal Eggs is a science-fiction novella by Mikhail Bulgakov, a Soviet novelist and playwright whose most famous work is The Master and Margarita. It was written in 1924 and first published in 1925. The book became quite popular, but was much criticized by some Soviet critics as a satire of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the leadership of Soviet Russia.
The Fatal Eggs can be described as a science fiction novel. Its main protagonist is an aging zoologist, Vladimir Ipat'evich Persikov, a specialist in amphibians. The narration begins in Moscow of 1928, which seems to have overcome the destructive effects of the Russian Civil War and is 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 produced a ray of red light; amoeba left under that light showed an impossibly increased rate of binary fission, reproducing at enormous speeds and demonstrating unusual aggression.
Later experiments with large cameras, to produce a larger ray, confirmed 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. At the same time, the country is affected by an unknown disease in domesticated poultry, which results in a complete extinction of all chickens in the Soviet Russia, with the plague stopping at the borders of the country.
A sovkhoz manager Aleksandr Semenovich Rokk (whose name is also a pun on the novel's title, Rok meaning fate) receives an official permission to confiscate Persikov's