Heart of a Dog

Heart of a Dog (Sobachye serdtse) is a novella by Russian author Mikhail Bulgakov. A biting satire of Bolshevism, it was written in 1925 at the height of the NEP period, when communism appeared to be relaxing in the Soviet Union. It is generally interpreted as an allegory of the Communist revolution and "the revolution's misguided attempt to radically transform mankind." Its publication was initially prohibited in the Soviet Union, but it circulated in samizdat until it was officially released in the country in 1987. It was almost immediately turned into a TV movie, which was aired in late 1988 on First Programme (First Channel) of Soviet Television, gained almost universal acclaim and attracted many readers to the original Bulgakov text. Since then, the novella has become a cultural phenomenon in Russia, known and discussed by people "from schoolchildren to politicians." It has become a subject of critical argument, was filmed in Russian and Italian-language versions, and was adapted in English as a play and an opera. (wikipedia.org)

"There could not be a colder, more contemptuous criticism of Soviet reality . . . There were glorious writers in the Stalin period, and Bulgakov was the greatest."--Doris Lessing, The Guardian "Bulgakov is richly inventive, with an eye for the grotesque and the satirical."--Joyce Carol Oates From the highly celebrated author of The Master and Margarita comes the darkly funny and brilliantly inventive short novel in which a celebrated surgeon's radical experiment produces a monstrous mirror of the society he sought to perfect When rich, successful Professor Preobrazhensky befriends a scroungy Moscow mongrel named Sharik, he attempts a scientific first--transplanting into the stray dog the testes and pituitary gland of a recently deceased man. With a lecherous, vulgar human animal now on the loose, the professor's hitherto respectable life descends into chaos as Sharik inevitably finds his niche in the bureaucracy as the government official in charge of purging the city of cats. Written in 1925 but unpublished in the Soviet Union until 1987, Heart of a Dog is a bitingly comic masterpiece and one of the essential works of twentieth-century Russian literature. Called "an anarchic, resistant work of genius" by The New Yorker and a "as clean and bright as a scalpel" by The Sunday Times , this is Mikhail Bulgakov at his most inventive. In exposing the folly of trying to remake human nature by force and ideology, this satire is as ferocious and timely now as when it was written.

"There could not be a colder, more contemptuous criticism of Soviet reality . . . There were glorious writers in the Stalin period, and Bulgakov was the greatest."--Doris Lessing, The Guardian "Bulgakov is richly inventive, with an eye for the grotesque and the satirical."--Joyce Carol Oates From the highly celebrated author of The Master and Margarita comes the darkly funny and brilliantly inventive short novel in which a celebrated surgeon's radical experiment produces a monstrous mirror of the society he sought to perfect When rich, successful Professor Preobrazhensky befriends a scroungy Moscow mongrel named Sharik, he attempts a scientific first--transplanting into the stray dog the testes and pituitary gland of a recently deceased man. With a lecherous, vulgar human animal now on the loose, the professor's hitherto respectable life descends into chaos as Sharik inevitably finds his niche in the bureaucracy as the government official in charge of purging the city of cats. Written in 1925 but unpublished in the Soviet Union until 1987, Heart of a Dog is a bitingly comic masterpiece and one of the essential works of twentieth-century Russian literature. Called "an anarchic, resistant work of genius" by The New Yorker and a "as clean and bright as a scalpel" by The Sunday Times , this is Mikhail Bulgakov at his most inventive. In exposing the folly of trying to remake human nature by force and ideology, this satire is as ferocious and timely now as when it was written.

Heart of a Dog (Sobachye serdtse) is a novella by Russian author Mikhail Bulgakov. A biting satire of Bolshevism, it was written in 1925 at the height of the NEP period, when communism appeared to be relaxing in the Soviet Union. It is generally interpreted as an allegory of the Communist revolution and "the revolution's misguided attempt to radically transform mankind." Its publication was initially prohibited in the Soviet Union, but it circulated in samizdat until it was officially released in the country in 1987. It was almost immediately turned into a TV movie, which was aired in late 1988 on First Programme (First Channel) of Soviet Television, gained almost universal acclaim and attracted many readers to the original Bulgakov text. Since then, the novella has become a cultural phenomenon in Russia, known and discussed by people "from schoolchildren to politicians." It has become a subject of critical argument, was filmed in Russian and Italian-language versions, and was adapted in English as a play and an opera. (wikipedia.org)