«Rokovye yaitsa» in inglese

Professor Persikov's Curriculum Vitae

On the evening of 16 April, 1928, the Zoology Professor of the Fourth State University and Director of the Moscow Zoological Institute, Persikov, went into his laboratory at the Zoological Institute in Herzen Street.

The Professor switched on the frosted ceiling light and looked around him.

This ill-fated evening must be regarded as marking the beginning of the appalling catastrophe, just as Professor Vladimir Ipatievich Persikov must be seen as the prime cause of the said catastrophe.

He was fifty-eight years old.

With a splendid bald head, like a pestle, and tufts of yellowish hair sticking out at the sides.

His face was clean-shaven, with a slightly protruding lower lip which gave it a slightly cantankerous expression.

Tall and round-shouldered, he had small bright eyes and tiny old-fashioned spectacles in silver frames on a red nose.

He spoke in a grating, high, croaking voice and one of his many idiosyncrasies was to crook the index finger of his right hand and screw up his eyes, whenever he was saying something weighty and authoritative.

And since he always spoke authoritatively, because his knowledge in his field was quite phenomenal, the crooked finger was frequently pointed at those with whom the Professor was conversing.

Outside his field, that is, zoology, embriology, anatomy, botany and geography, however, Professor Persikov said almost nothing at all.

Professor Persikov did not read the newspapers or go to the theatre. His wife had run away with a tenor from the Zimin opera in 1913, leaving him a note which read as follows:

"Your frogs make me shudder with intolerable loathing.

I shall be unhappy all my life because of them."

The Professor did not marry again and had no children.

He was short-tempered, but did not bear grudges, liked cloudberry tea and lived in Prechistenka Street in a flat with five rooms, one of which was occupied by the old housekeeper, Maria Stepanovna, who looked after the Professor like a nanny.

In 1919 three of the Professor's five rooms were taken away.

Whereupon 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.