Heart of a Dog
개의 심장
A 1925 short novel by Mikhail Bulgakov. A Moscow surgeon transplants human glands into a stray dog, which becomes the drunken citizen Poligraf Sharikov, rises in the world and denounces his master. A satire on the revolution from the NEP years, its manuscript was seized in 1926 and it was not published in the USSR until 1987.
In depth
What is the story?
Moscow, December 1924. The celebrated surgeon Professor Filipp Filippovich Preobrazhensky, famous for rejuvenation, and his assistant Bormental attempt a bold experiment: they transplant human pituitary and testes into a mongrel, Sharik, taken from the street. It succeeds beyond expectations. The dog gains human form. The trouble is the human: the organs came from the lumpen Klim Chugunkin, killed in a drunken brawl, and the new man is as coarse and drunk as he was.
Shvonder, chairman of the house committee, takes him up, telling him he is a proletarian oppressed by the bourgeoisie, gives him papers as Poligraf Poligrafovich Sharikov and forces the professor to register him in the flat. Sharikov gets a job catching and destroying stray animals and quickly becomes its boss. Half-read in Communist literature, he plays master of the house, steals, pesters the maid and finally denounces the professor and his assistant, which goes no further only thanks to an influential patient. Told to leave, he draws a revolver. The doctors reverse the operation, restoring a dog's pituitary, and Sharikov gradually turns back into a dog.
What is it satirising?
It is usually read as an allegory of the revolution's attempt to "radically transform humanity": a monster made by an intellectual scientist and raised by a party activist. It was written in January-March 1925, at the height of the NEP. The book is neither a plain hymn nor a plain curse: the experiment comes from the professor's own arrogance, and it is he who must undo it.
How was it banned?
When Bulgakov read the manuscript at the Nikitin literary circle on 7 and 21 March 1925, an OGPU agent was in the room, and he reported that such things read in "the most brilliant Moscow literary circle" were far more dangerous than harmless recitals. Bulgakov hoped to place it in Nedra; the editor Nikolai Angarsky took it to Lev Kamenev, whose answer was: "This is a sharp pamphlet on the present day, on no account to be printed." On 7 May 1926 the OGPU searched his home and seized the manuscript, returned only over three years later after Gorky interceded.
It then circulated in samizdat. In 1968 a careless copy appeared in Grani (Frankfurt) and Student (London) without the knowledge of his widow, and the same flawed text, with over a thousand errors, was used by Znamya in June 1987. A verified text came only in 1989 from Lidia Yanovskaya.
On screen?
The film of the same name, shown on Soviet television in 1988, was hugely popular and brought many readers to the book. Boris Tishchenko's chamber work (1988) and Alexander Raskatov's opera (premiered in Amsterdam, 2010) also draw on it.