Heart of a Dog

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Heart of a Dog (Russian: Собачье сердце, pronounced 'so-bah-tchye ser-tse') is a 1925 story by Mikhail Bulgakov.

It features a professor Philip Philippovich Preobrazhensky (his name is derived from the Russian word for "transfiguration") who implants human testicles and pituitary gland into a stray dog named Sharik. Sharik then proceeds to become more and more human as time passes, picks himself the name Polygraph Polygraphovich Sharikov, makes himself a career in the Bolshevik party, and turns the life in the professor's house into a nightmare until professor reverses the procedure.

Professor and Sharikov in the 1988 Soviet movie.

The story was apparently inspired by Frankenstein, The Island of Dr. Moreau, and the current experiments at cross-species breeding by Ilya Ivanov and other Soviet researchers. It was published in the Soviet Union only in 1987, more than 60 years after its completion, but was made known to Russian readers through samizdat. In 1968 it was published in English by Harvill Press, translated by Michael Glenny.

The tale has been interpreted either as a satire on the Soviet utopian attempts to radically improve human nature or as a wry comment on the scientists' attempts to interfere with nature. One commonly accepted interpretation is that Bulgakov was trying to show all the inconsistencies of the system in which a man with a dog's intelligence could become an important part (Sharikov); and that his another goal was to picture a man with a strong personality who could remain unaffected by the system and keep his personal independence (Preobrazhensky).^{[[Citing sources citation needed]]}

A comic opera, The Murder of Comrade Sharik by William Bergsma (1973), is based on the plot of the story.

A very popular 1988 Soviet movie was made (in sepia) by Vladimir Bortko. Major sequences in the movie were famously shot from an unusually low dog's point of view.

References

Bulgakov, Mikhail, Heart of a Dog, Grove Press; reprint edition (August 1, 1987), ISBN 0802150594 (paperback)

External links

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