Satire Saturdays — Crocodile: An Extraordinary Incident
Once upon a time in the busy centre of Petersburg in Tsarist Russia, a mortal, just like Dostoyevsky’s many characters suddenly escapes death.
“Now it’s all over with our friend Ivan Matveitch!”
A curious gentleman, his wife, and his friend decide to visit the shop of a german who has put his collection of beasts on display. The centre of the attraction is the crocodile, the first ever to be seen in Russia. The german proprietor of the exhibition collects the toll and proudly presents his uninteresting beast. The whole aura of curiosity collapses immediately on the uncaring and ignorant crocodile, and the wife moves on to look at the monkeys that have uncanny resemblances to her friends. And suddenly the extraordinary begins.
The extraordinary history of human political rhetoric is doomed to vacillate between the extremes of religious fervour and progressivism. While the creator plays this cruel scientific joke of expressing the complexity of human existence into the simplistic model of a harmonic oscillator, our fellow humans have made sure to critique even the limited springs of progressivism. This critique may be justified and might be the reason for over periodic retrograde behaviour. And yet, our illustrious stoic author presents this extraordinary case devoid of all its seriousness.
“the principle of economics over everything”
The extraordinary situation demands the flaying of the poor animal, but the german proprietor and his very german mother refuse straightaway. They have realised the immense potential of this extraordinary situation and wants to capitalise on it. Ivan Matveitch, our protagonist and a fervent progressivist agree. His dear friend drops his wife home and proceeds to a traditionalist for advice.
The traditionalist reaffirms that the crocodile is private property and must not be flayed, or if flayed then the proprietor must be duly compensated. He again emphasises on the extraordinary situation and is disheartened by the curious nature of our dear protagonist. He blames his over education! A lengthy discussion on the importance of foreign capital ensues (a characteristic hallmark of a progressive society), and profitable use for this extraordinary situation is conceptualised, that is befitting to a progressive capitalist society.
“I shall certainly develop a new economic theory of my own and I shall be proud of it.”
Like a true hero, happily ignorant to the outside world, our protagonist, whose life has taken such an extraordinary turn not only becomes comfortable in his new “skin,” but at once rises above his delicate situation. The narrator of the incident is visibly annoyed by his frivolous, and surely fever-induced hallucinations; however, your narrator cannot deny the genius of Ivan Matveitch.
Like all godmen, he predicts his rise to the status of a godman and proclaims that his every utterance will be thought over, repeated, and printed. And reprinted (my emphasis). He affirms his love for his upcoming completely imagined fate. “To all the rest, I shall serve as a pattern to fate and the will of Providence.”
After conjuring a perpetual energy source arrangement with the crocodile, Ivan Matveitch narrates his whole life ahead of him, now redesigned as an intellectual socialite from his new extraordinary chambers. “If not Socrates, then Diogenes, or both of them together — that is my future role among mankind,” he proclaims. He makes great plans for his wife too who he imagines as his perfect intellectual partner.
The next day our narrator visits the wife, who has decided that she wants a divorce. Our narrator, a true friend, tries to convince the wife that the matter of the extraordinary incident is quite trivial, and Ivan Matveitch truly loves his ‘darling absurdity.’ Our narrator finally collects a bunch of newspapers, as promised to Ivan Matveitch, and visits him. He turns up the collar of his coat to confront the crowd outside the crocodile establishment that has gathered to cheer that new Russian industry.
Now it’s all over with this extraordinary tale.
In the middle of the night, somewhere in Poland, Ivan Matveitch emerges out of the confines of the extraordinary situation. People are still not sure how he accomplished this. Some convincing theories mention the deepened maternal bond between the beast and Ivan Matveitch and his skilled diplomacy that led to his own extradition.
As the train slowly stumbled through the blurred domains of Celtic to Germanic, the calm and composing figure of the mother assumed the stern stature of the father. With an understanding nod, Ivan Matveitch and the Crocodile now parted ways. Ivan Matveitch is drenched in the nourishing digestive juices and is still wearing his weak Russian clothes that had somehow held his intellectual fortress.
He immediately decides to pen down his new economic theory and his finding on the fine beast, which the lack of paper and ink had prevented earlier. In an undeniable stroke of genius, or as his now-estranged dear friend would describe ‘feverish,’ he combined the two. He wrote a second economic theory inspired by his findings of the beast and the beast’s predatory spirit.
Ivan Matveitch, now completely forgotten in his motherland Russia, has inspired countless capitalists that are so obsessed with predatory animals. Experiments inspired by the extraordinary incident were conducted throughout the world. An American decided to explore the confines of a bull, in a similar fashion and went on to found the American Livestock Exchange. Ivan Matveitch’s manuscript also got into the hands of a German national, an ardent crocodile hater Karl Marx, who later opposed the idea thoroughly. Ironically, or as a planned plot of revenge, Marx’s anti-crocodile ideology would find firm ground in Ivan Matveitch’s motherland Russia.
This story is part of “Satire Saturdays!”, a new series by BeetleBox on the greatest, funniest, out of this world satire of this world.
Read the Short Story: Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crocodile: An Extraordinary Incident
Author and Illustrator: Yatharth Bhasin
