This early novella from Mikhail Bulgakov, published in 1925, already shows the surreal comic genius that later produced The Master and Margarita, the writer's masterpiece. A kind of Frankenstein parable, Heart of a Dog is the story of a stray dog that gains a human intelligence after a prominent Moscow professor transplants human glands into the unfortunate canine's body.


Nigel Jones, The Independent
"A blanket of silence succeeded in muffling, but never entirely stifled, his voice. An underground reputation persisted. Young people gathered each week on the stairway of his last home in Moscow's Arbat quarter to read from, act out and debate his work. In the West, in the theatre and literature, he is relished as one of the greatest of modern Russian writers, perhaps the greatest."





Language Notes
Text: English, Russian (translation)


The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature
Dystopian novelette by Mikhail Bulgakov, written in Russian in 1925 as Sobachye serdtse. It was published posthumously in the West in 1968, both in Russian and in translation, and in the Soviet Union in 1987. The book is a satirical examination of one of the goals of the October Revolution of 1917: to create a new breed of man, uncorrupted by the past and above petit bourgeois concerns. In addressing this subject The Heart of a Dog savages the rigid Soviet mind-set, science fiction, and a pseudoscientific theory of the 1920s that held out the promise of sexual rejuvenation through surgical transplantation of monkey glands.

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Published in 1967, 1975, and 1968, respectively, these display Bulgakov's satiric eye on Russian life.

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