Steven Godin's Reviews > A Dog's Heart

A Dog's Heart (or, The Heart of a Dog) still bites strongly with sharp teeth after so much time, and, unlike a lot of other Russian golden oldies that feel old, this could have been written yesterday.
Bulgakov's satire of life in the early years of the Soviet Union cost himself dear, and it has not lost any of its provocative power. I even preferred this to his ever so popular Master and Margarita.

Giving a reading of A Dog's Heart in his Moscow apartment - March 1925, he introduced to a group of people, Sharik, the humanoid dog, and the arrogant surgeon who created him. But there just so happened to be an informer in the small crowd, who took it as a threatening mockery as to his views on Soviet society. Bulgakov’s residence was searched and the manuscript seized. Though it was returned to him, but not for another four years. Sharik makes his first appearance as a mangy mongrel cringing in a blizzard after being douched with boiling water by a cook, and out of a shop pops a man with the smell of hospitals and cigars, Philip Philipovich. With sausage he has just bought, he lures Sharik back to his apartment, a seven-room suite in a building that has been requisitioned by a committee of zealous young revolutionaries. Even early on, Bulgakov conveys so much about Soviet life in the way he perceived it. After his latest experiment (which is described in gruesome medical detail) he witnesses what happens when the dog is implanted with the testicles and pituitary glands of a human.

The creature emerges from the operating table, and soon walks, talks, drinks, smokes, and is a seasoned veteran when it comes to Russian swearwords. After receiving identity papers he is placed in charge of the Moscow Cleansing Department responsible for eliminating vagrant quadrupeds, cats, etc...but not before he has turned to crime, stealing from gentlemen and comrades alike, and attempting to have his wicked way with women whilst they sleep.

Bulgakov, the political commentator sending up Soviet theories, was also, as a former physician, poking fun at western Europeans who flocked to a Paris-based quack in the belief that he could restore virility with an injection of monkey glands of all things. In his own formulation, this novella is both a scathing satire with an inflammatory gesture and a riotous science-fiction dark comedy. It's runs through with an energy, that, after nearly 100 years in passing, still seems freshly defiant.

Gets my bark of approval.