Mikhail Bulgakov. The Fateful Eggs -
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he announced to Maria Stepanovna:
"If they don't stop this outrageous behaviour, I shall leave the
country, Maria Stepanovna."
Had the Professor carried out this plan, he would have experienced no
difficulty in obtaining a place in the zoology department of any university
in the world, for he was a really first-class scholar, and in the particular
field which deals with amphibians had no equal, with the exception of
professors William Weckle in Cambridge and Giacomo Bartolomeo Beccari in
Rome. The Professor could read four languages, as Mvell as Russian, and
spoke French and German like a native. Persikov did not carry out his
intention of going abroad, and 1920 was even worse than 1919. All sorts of
things happened, one after the other. Bolshaya Nikitskaya was renamed Herzen
Street. Then the clock on the wall of the corner building in Herzen Street
and Mokhovaya stopped at a quarter past eleven and, finally, unable to
endure the perturbations of this remarkable year, eight magnificent
specimens of tree-frogs died in the Institute's terrariums, followed by
fifteen ordinary toads and an exceptional specimen of the Surinam toad.
Immediately after the demise of the toads which devastated that first
order of amphibians rightly called tailless, old Vlas, the Institute's
caretaker of many years' standing, who did not belong to any order of
amphibians, also passed on to a better world. The cause of his death,
incidentally, was the same as that of the unfortunate amphibians, and
Persikov diagnosed it at once:
"Undernourishment!"
The scientist was perfectly right. Vlas should have been fed with flour
and the toads with flour weevils, but the disappearance of the former
determined that of the latter likewise, and Persikov tried to shift the
twenty surviving specimens of tree-frogs onto a diet of cockroaches, but