Recommendations
Books Like Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov
A dog given a criminal's organs is the perfect Soviet citizen
If you were delighted by Bulgakov's perfectly shaped satire of the Soviet 'new man' project — the dog who becomes a bureaucrat, the professor who reverses his experiment — these works share the same satirical energy and the same horror at social engineering's possibilities.
- 1Buy on Amazon
The Master and Margarita
by Mikhail Bulgakov
Bulgakov's masterpiece — the full development of the comic-fantastical mode Heart of a Dog demonstrates; Woland doing what Preobrazhensky does with his scalpel, but on all of Soviet society.
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Buy on AmazonAnimal Farm
by George Orwell
Orwell's allegory of the Soviet Union — animals becoming humanoid rulers; the most direct parallel to Heart of a Dog's central conceit, written twenty years later.
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We
by Yevgeny Zamyatin
Zamyatin's dystopian novel — the Soviet-era satire that Heart of a Dog belongs to; both written in the 1920s, both banned, both prophetic about where Soviet ideology was leading.
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Buy on AmazonBrave New World
by Aldous Huxley
Huxley's dystopia of engineered humanity — the Western version of the Soviet project Bulgakov satirizes; conditioning the human being rather than surgically altering the dog.
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The Island of Doctor Moreau
by H.G. Wells
Wells's scientific horror — a scientist creating animal-human hybrids; Bulgakov's obvious source, and the tradition of the mad scientist that Preobrazhensky belongs to.
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Dead Souls
by Nikolai Gogol
Gogol's satirical novel — the Russian satirical tradition Bulgakov inherits; Chichikov is to dead serfs what Sharikov is to apartment space: an opportunist exploiting the system.
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Buy on AmazonThe Trial
by Franz Kafka
Kafka's novel of bureaucratic persecution — the same vision of the state as an incomprehensible, arbitrary machine; Sharikov's accusations against Preobrazhensky are the mechanism of The Trial made comic.
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Buy on AmazonFlowers for Algernon
by Daniel Keyes
Keyes's science fiction novella — surgical transformation of intelligence; Heart of a Dog and Flowers for Algernon are the two great literary explorations of what surgery can reveal about humanity.
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