The Heart of a Dog
by Mikhail Bulgakov
One hundred years ago, in mid-December 1924, a surgeon named Philip Philipovich came across a stray dog on the streets of Moscow and took it home.
On 23 December, after a few days of nursing and feeding the stray, Philip Philipovich attempts a ground-breaking scientific experiment: he transplants into the dog the testicles and pituitary gland of a human, a thief who has died in a drunken brawl. And the dog begins to change . . .
These are the opening events of Mikhail Bulgakov’s hilarious but chilling novella The Heart of a Dog, written in 1925 and rejected by the Soviet publishing houses. It circulated in samizdat manuscript until it was published in English translation in 1968. It wasn’t published in the original Russian until 1987.
Bulgakov had trained as a doctor in Kiev. He volunteered for the Red Cross during the First World War and worked as an army medic for the short-lived Ukrainian People’s Republic before it was subsumed into the Soviet Union in 1922. He moved to Moscow and made a living as a journalist, writing controversial plays and subversive novellas. In 1929, the government censor banned the publication of all of his work. He devoted the last dozen years of his life to writing a secret masterpiece, The Master and Margarita, which was not published until a quarter of a century after his death. The great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova wrote ‘In Memory of Mikhail Bulgakov’, in which she said:
You died as unflinchingly as you lived,
With magnificent defiance.
The Heart of a Dog is absurd and humorous but also a terrifying, subversive commentary on Stalinism. The dog becomes increasingly human and turns Philip Philipovich’s life into a nightmare, behaving grossly, attacking his female servants and demanding rights as a member of the proletariat. The human donor of the dog’s testicles and pituitary gland is named Chugunkin (‘cast iron’), a punning reference to Stalin (‘steel’).
When the novel was first published in the Soviet Union in 1986, it was immediately adapted into a Soviet film by Vladimir Bortko, incorporating elements from other Bulgakov stories. It won the Prix Italia in 1989.
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A great novella. Amusing but chilling by turns. Bulgakov was an extraordinary writer. I have seldom seen The Heart of a Dog chosen like this as part of a reading course.
Exciting! I didn’t know about this one