The Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov

First published:Sobache serdtse, 1968; revised, 1969 (English translation, 1968)

Type of work: Satiric allegory

Time of work: The early 1920’s

Locale: Moscow

Principal Characters:

• Professor Philip Philippovich Preobrazhensky, a research physician engaged in rejuvenation experiments
• Sharik, a mongrel dog that is the subject of one of Philip Philippovich’s experiments
• Polygraph Polygraphovich Sharikov, the dog-man Philip Philippovich creates
• Dr. Bormenthal, Philip Philippovich’s assistant
• Shvonder, the head of the housing committee in the building where Philip Philippovich lives and works

The Novel

The Heart of a Dog recounts a scientific experiment and its unexpected result. Like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Mikhail Bulgakov’s novella describes a creator’s rejection of the creature he brings into existence. Incorporating several narrators as well as elements of fantasy and surrealism, The Heart of a Dog is a sometimes comic, sometimes blackly humorous reminder of the limits of human perfectibility.

The action begins on a snow-swept Moscow street. An injured, starving dog—mistakenly perceived as a cuddly “Sharik” (“Little Ball”) by passers-by—is lured into an apartment by a well-dressed man who offers him sausage. Sharik quickly learns to revere his master, who can provide good food, warm lodging, and medical care.

Sharik’s benefactor is Philip Philippovich Preobrazhensky, a noted surgeon and researcher. Specializing in the rejuvenation of human organs, Philip Philippovich plans to transplant a dead man’s testes and pituitary gland into Sharik. With little hope that the dog will survive, but convinced that the experiment will yield valuable data, Philip Philippovich performs the transplant.

Surprisingly, Sharik survives and flourishes. He rapidly takes on human appearance: He walks erect, fur falls from his body, his mouth makes speech. The dog-man is often caught between worlds, clumsily reacting with a dog’s instincts to social situations which human beings habitually handle with common sense. Quickly Sharik, now calling himself Polygraph Polygraphovich Sharikov, after a machine advertised on a medical calendar, grows restless. He is reluctant to obey as a man the master he worshipped as a dog.

His rebellion is aided by Shvonder, who chairs the housing committee in the apartment building where Philip Philippovich lives. Shvonder hates Philip Philippovich; he believes in the Communist equality which was won in the October Revolution of 1917, and regards Philip Philippovich as a counterrevolutionary who puts his own comfort and interests before social duty. With Shvonder’s help, Sharikov gets official identity papers, goes to work for the local Soviet ministry, and finds a girlfriend. Sharikov even learns, like a good citizen, to inform against his benefactor by reporting antirevolutionary remarks or habits.

Appalled by the transformation he has wrought, Philip Philippovich orders Sharikov to move out of the house. A fight breaks out and the dog-man is subdued. With the help of Dr. Bormenthal, his assistant, Philip Philippovich retransplants the dog’s original organs. Rapidly, Polygraph Polygraphovich Sharikov devolves into Sharik. When Shvonder comes looking for his friend, he finds only a dog—albeit an odd-looking one—seated at Philip Philippovich’s feet.

The Characters

Sharik is an appealing mutt. Because the first chapter is told primarily through his eyes, the reader immediately senses that Sharik is a dog undeservedly down on his luck. Though he feels self-pity and curses the plight of dogs in general, he views his situation with humor. He notes that his cold and hungry state is shared by many humans, and he realizes that he is more fortunate than some people. When Philip Philippovich lures him home, Sharik willingly abandons the hard freedom of the streets for the comfortable dependency of the apartment. For Sharik it is natural that a dog be obedient to and fawn over his master. Though Sharik takes a jaundiced view of the activities in the apartment/clinic, he nevertheless considers the professor a superior being, even a god.

Philip Philippovich is singularly dedicated to his research. His dedication puts him at odds with the majority of his fellow citizens, who have embraced the Revolution. For Philip Philippovich the Revolution has destroyed the social amenities and creature comforts which made life refined and genteel. His desire to transcend his time and place is symbolized by his habit of humming lines from Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Aida. The reader’s tendency to sympathize with the professor is tempered by the unsavory nature of his research. He rejuvenates the sexual organs of those who seem more desperate than deserving: The aging roue who longs for the hedonism of his youth; the lonely matron who wants to attract a younger man; the bureaucrat who wants to restore the virginity of a teenager he seduced, before he is arrested or exposed. The goal of Philip Philippovich’s operation on Sharik, to implant the organs of a criminal into a dog, is also unsavory. The description of the procedure is gruesome: The doctor ferociously hacks, drills, and pummels the helpless creature.

The resulting dog-man is the predictable product of a thoughtless operation. Sharikov’s rude, obnoxious behavior soon demonstrates that he no longer possesses the heart of a dog; he now has the heart of a criminal. Though some of his awkward adaptations to society are amusing, Sharikov never gains the reader’s sympathy. He is as unattractive to the reader as to his creator.

Part of Sharikov’s unattractiveness is physical: His body is an unnatural amalgam of species. Another part is psychological, because he takes on the personality and worldview of Shvonder, the young man who heads the housing committee. Shvonder is an ideologue, a committed Communist who unthinkingly accepts the premises of the Revolution, which makes him aggressive, harsh, and confrontational. Shvonder sees the world in opposites: good Reds versus bad Whites, revolutionary versus counterrevolutionary, proletarian versus bourgeois, documented citizen versus undocumented troublemakers.

None of Bulgakov’s characters are full psychological portraits. They are representatives or types, who embody certain social and philosophical positions. After initially establishing the reader’s identification with Sharik, Bulgakov keeps all subsequent characters at arm’s length. Thus distanced, he can make readers laugh with or laugh at them, depending upon his purpose at any point in the text.

Critical Context

The Heart of a Dog is one of Bulgakov’s major fictions about the October Revolution. The others are the realistic novel Belaya gvardiya (1927, 1929; The White Guard, 1973), the fantastic tales of Diavoliada (1925; Diabolid and Other Stories, 1972), and the lengthy surrealistic/realistic narrative Master i Margarita (1966-1967, 1969; The Master and Margarita, 1967). These works express Bulgakov’s nightmare vision of the Revolution: the bureaucrat’s heaven which would be a citizen’s hell. The four works may be viewed as stages in an evolving attitude toward the upheavals of the 1910’s and 1920’s. The White Guard sympathetically portrays prerevolutionary and antirevolutionary Russians through the genre of the family chronicle. The Heart of a Dog and Diabolid and Other Stories combine fantastic and comic elements to satirize the architects of violent revolution; they paint a gloomy picture of cultural and spiritual losses which no one knows how to repair. The Master and Margarita, equally surreal and no less caustic about the Revolution, envisions the hidden hand of Providence working toward good amid man-made evils.

For four decades, Bulgakov’s fiction was suppressed in the Soviet Union and virtually unknown to foreign readers. Bulgakov had a reputation as a significant playwright whose always controversial, sometimes banned work enlivened the generally barren theater of the 1920’s and 1930’s. His plays lack, however, the comic and satiric inventiveness of his fiction. His rediscovery as a novelist and short story writer in the 1960’s occurred first outside the Soviet Union. The publication in the West of Soviet writers such as Boris Pasternak, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn whetted appetites for more of the literature that Soviet politics had suppressed. The publication of Bulgakov’s fiction in Russian and in other languages is belated recognition for one of the masters of twentieth century political satire. The Heart of a Dog ranks with George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945), Karel Capek’s Valka s mloky (1936; The War with the Newts, 1937), and Yevgeny Zamyatin’s My (1952; We, 1924) as a classic exposure of humanity’s infatuation with dangerous ideologies.

Bibliography

Goscilo, Helena. “Point of View in Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog,” in Russian Literature Triquarterly. XV (1976), pp. 281-291.

Proffer, Ellendea. Mikhail Bulgakov: Life and Work, 1984.

Rydel, Christine. “Bulgakov and H.G. Wells,” in Russian Literature Triquarterly. XV (1976), pp. 293-311.

Wright, A. Colin. Mikhail Bulgakov: Life and Interpretations, 1978.