Heart of a Dog Reading Order

Heart of a Dog (Sobachye Serdtse, 1925) by Mikhail Bulgakov is the most perfectly shaped of his shorter works — a satirical novella of about 90 pages that manages to be simultaneously a comic masterpiece, a devastating critique of Soviet social engineering, and a meditation on the nature of humanity. Professor Preobrazhensky, a distinguished Moscow surgeon who specializes in rejuvenation operations for the Soviet elite, performs an experimental operation on a stray dog named Sharik, transplanting the pituitary gland and testes of a recently deceased petty criminal. The dog gradually transforms into a man — or rather into a sub-man, since he retains the instincts and character of the criminal whose organs he received. He calls himself Polygraph Polygraphovich Sharikov, joins the Housing Committee as an informer, denounces his creator to the authorities, and becomes a fully realized Soviet citizen. Bulgakov wrote Heart of a Dog in 1925, during the brief period of relative literary freedom of the New Economic Policy. The Soviet censors immediately recognized its subversive intent and banned it; the text circulated only in samizdat (underground hand-copied manuscripts) until its Soviet publication in 1987, at the height of glasnost. The novella's central satire is unmistakable: the Soviet project of creating a 'new Soviet man' is compared to a mad scientist's experiment in which a dog is given the organs of a criminal; the result is not a new kind of human being but simply a criminal with bureaucratic power. Professor Preobrazhensky — an Olympian, self-sufficient figure who insists on eating his meals at the proper time regardless of revolutionary convenience — represents the old professional class that the new Soviet order is attempting to either co-opt or destroy.