Meanwhile, Bulgakov continued to amass what must be one of the world's great hordes of literary work unpublished in the lifetime of an author. "Heart of a Dog" is probably his most viciously anti-Soviet, anti-Proletariat work, and it reads like a cross between Orwell's "Animal Farm" and Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" but with Bulgakov's intense sarcasm and humor thrown in. The book is so dramatic, it's almost impossible to read it without seeing it run like a film or play behind your eyes as you read it.
A professor (whose Russian name is a play on the scientist Pavlov) adopts a mongrel dog. The dog Sharik (Fido, Rover...) is grateful! His life on the street has been hard, he's been kicked, scalded with hot water and he is starving. The professor feeds him well. Ah, he's gaining weight and healing up. What a nice man! A god, even, well, to a dog. But wait a minute! The professor, noted surgeon that he is, is preparing to operate. He seizes the dog....
And then we see the results of the professor's cruel experiment. A dog gets a human brain portion and begins to develop as a human. But he isn't a nice friendly, tail-wagging human. Oh, no. He's low, a cur, yes, a dog of a man who chases cats uncontrollably, pinches women's bottoms and drinks like a fish (oops mixed metaphor there.) He demands to be registered and get papers like a human being in Soviet society. And the authorities are anxious, even rabid to assist him. Sharikov takes a first name and patronymic that is so inappropriate, so hysterically funny that you have to laugh out loud. Then he gets a prominent job as a purge director, eliminating those counter-revolutionary cats from Moscow's pure Communist society. That is, until the professor cooks up a plot.
This is a gem of a book. Bulgakov shares Orwell's deep hatred of totalitarianism, but unlike the delicate satire of Orwell, Bulgakov writes with massive belly laughs of deeply sarcastic humor and over-the-top jokes. He's a dramatist at heart, and this book shows his theatrical thinking, where exaggerated movement and stage props play as much a role in exposition as dialog.
This is a true small masterpiece and should appeal to just about anyone. It would be a very good book for a high school or college literature study. It is really wonderful, and prepares the reader for Bulgakov's wildly out of control masterpiece "Master and Margarita." Don't miss this book for anything!
To begin with, Sharik the Dog is a wonderful, delightful animal. A real stray, the best of them--ready to serve and protect out of gratitude. Having been beaten, scalded, starved... imagine his joy when a nice-looking older gentleman takes him in, feeds him, bandages his scalded side. The poor thing is absolutely gratified. And really, just like Prof. Preobrazhensky says, Sharik is a very, very good dog.
So how does a very, very good dog turns into an absolute horror of a human? Whoever said that Sharikov the man is semi-developed is just wrong--he is fully developed, and herein lies the nightmare. He walks. Talks. Apparently induces a young woman to have sex with him, having promised her marriage and lied that the surgical scar on his forehead is left from the Civil War. He works in the Oblava (the office dealing with the catching, killing and using as fur of the stray cats), but not so much out of necessity, rather because it answers his heart of a dog.
Unfortunately, his hatred of cats is the only thing left from the adorable stray (who thought that he was unusually handsome and his granmother must have sinned with a Newfoundland). In all else, from his ridiculous, uneducated choice of a name, to the way he talks, to the lack of manners, to the Communist literature he reads, to his statements that the only way to solve the current situation is to "divide everything between those who have and those who have not"--in all of it, he is a quintessential proletariat man (the brain that was put into the dog came from a former alcoholic and prison inmate, Klim Chugunkin). The popular slogan of that era was Lenin's (I think) phrase that under the Soviet rule, a "kitchenmaid will rule the country". Well, it took us some seventy years to realize that a kitchenmaid shouldn't rule anything but a kitchen... Bulgakov saw it much earlier. His Sharikov is a terrifying portrait of what a member of lumpen-proletariat--a man without sense or education, common and base--becomes when he comes into relative power (at least over cats). To Russians, the image of Sharikov cannot be all that funny--after all, the inception of their state--their country, their life, their dark past--was intertwined inextricably with people like the late Klim Chugunkin (the last name means "wrought-iron"), aka P.P. Sharikov.
The other characters in the book--the old Professor Preobrazhensky and the galant, gentlemanly young Dr. Bormental--are both of a disappearing bread. After the Revolution, People with Preobrazhensky's sensibilities came face to face with the necessity to leave their country. Preobrazhensky, however, a distinguished man of science, an experimental biologist, highly respected--is pretending that it is possible to have the life he had had prior to the Revolution. He has a cook and a maid, and an apartment of seven rooms (a considerable luxury)--all of which he needs: he operates in one, sees patients in another, sleeps in the third one, etc, etc. Already early in the book, he is facing an encroachment upon his property: the Building Committee is finding it "inequitable" that one man can take up seven whole rooms! In the book, Preobrazhensky simply throws them out ("I don't care how many rooms Isadora Duncan has! She can eat in the bedroom and slaughter rabbits in the dining-room!"): he has connections, he can afford to do so. Would he be able to do so in real life? God knows. It seems that Preobrazhensky's experiment strips him of all his comfort by bringing him face-to-face with the Revolution--he can no longer hide from seeing who has the power in his country: its personification is right there, at his very table, stinking of dead cats. By the end of the book, it is almost transparent that the Professor will leave Russia. As to Dr. Bormental, so steeped in the notions of honor, respect, decency--men like him were often doomed, in the great purges that had happened already and were to come in the 1930s.
The book ends well--for the time being. The effects of the operation are reversed, and when Sharikov's friends, the House Committee, bring by the police, claiming that Preobrazhensky had murdered Sharikov, the Professor is able to produce him, still walking on hind legs, but already barely talking. The book concludes with Sharik the Dog thinking about how lucky he is to have found such a benefactor. I think that to fully appreciate the book, one must understand the bitterness with which its humor is suffused. It is funny, of course, but it is not light, by any means. Rather, it is poignant and sad.
The book remains delightfully readable 70 years after it is written - this is a book you will enjoy, not a book you 'should' read.A bit outdated, but fun nonetheless As a huge fan of Bulgakov's masterpiece Master and Margarita, I really enjoyed this book. It's a delightfully quick and witty read. Heart of a Dog is full of pointed references at Soviet society, many of which are outdated, but many of which are fully comprehensible and applicable by modern, Western readers. The satirical nature and tone that came to ultimate fruition with Master and Margarita can be traced through this book, making for an overall short, enjoyable read.
