Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.
“THE HEART OF A DOG” by Mikhail Bulgakov (Written in 1925. Banned in Russia until 1987. English translation by Michael Glenny published in 1968.)
It starts with a hungry dog, a mutt, who’s just had boiling water sloshed over him by a man chasing him away from a restaurant. Poor mutt! He has to wander through the streets of Moscow searching in rubbish bins for scraps to eat. He’s abused. He’s kicked. He’s starving. You can see his ribs sticking out. And what makes it worse is that we hear his thoughts told to us in the first person. Animals can think and animals can feel, can’t they? But salvation comes. A doctor called Philip Philipovich Preobrezhensky takes pity on the dog, names the dog Sharik (apparently a generic Russian name for a well-fed pooch), and takes him back to his capacious apartment where he gets his servants Zina and Darya to look after the dog and feed the dog well. He has landed in paradise. After a few weeks he is a plump, well-fed, pampered dog. What pleasure for the dog! What luck! How nice human beings can be…
Thus begins Mikhail Bulgakov’s third-most-famous novel after The Master and Margarita and The White Guard, both of which have been reviewed on this blog. The Heart of a Dog is quite short – call it either a short novel or a longish novella. Bulgakov wrote it in 1925 after The White Guard but years before he started writing The Master and Margarita. The novella was not allowed to be published and the OGPU confiscated Bulgakov’s manuscript. But surprisingly Leon Trotsky arranged for it to be returned to Bulgakov. For years, The Heart of a Dog was circulated in samizdat (clandestine, dissident publication) but was allowed to be published openly in Russia only in 1987, when the USSR was on its last legs. Like other works by Bulgakov, it immediately became popular in Russia and has been filmed, turned into a stage play and even presented as an opera. Meanwhile, the English translation by Michael Glenny was published in 1968.
To proceed with the narrative… Dr. Preobrezhensky isn’t really looking after Sharik the dog for charity. His aim is medical research with the dog as his guinea pig. Using parts of a man who has recently died, Preobrezhensky anaesthetises Sharik and grafts onto the dog human pituitary glands and human testicles, the aim being to trigger rejuvenation. Believe me, the three or four pages describing the operation are shockingly explicit and liable to make the stomach churn. This is where the novella is most like science-fiction, the man-made monster. Think Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or even think Kafka’s Metamorphosis. But at the same time, be aware of two things. First, Bulgakov was, as it has been proven, basing Preobrezhensky on two Russian surgeons who really did experiment in grafting animal glands onto people. Second, at the time Bulgakov was writing there was a notorious Russian charlatan, Serge Voronoff, who made his living in Western Europe by persuading jaded, wealthy older men and women that they could be rejuvenated by “monkey glands”. In the 1920s and early 1930s “monkey glands” became all the rage with people who had more money than sense, before the practice was thoroughly debunked.
But as it turns out, Preobrezhensky’s operation doesn’t rejuvenate the dog. Instead [as the text says] it creates the “total humanisation” of the dog. First Sharik begins to gurgle sounds that are vaguely like human speech. Then he begins articulating the filthiest words he’s heard shouted in his doggie days on the thoroughfares and mean streets of Moscow. Soon he starts walking on his two back legs, and day by day he looks more and more humanoid, even if a very strange specimen. But what sort of creature is he? He is combative and extremely sarcastic, even to the doctor who brought him into being. Much of what Sharik does is pure mischief, such as chasing cats, destroying stuffed animals in Preobrezhensky’s flat, and even at once point causing the apartment to be flooded. [This is a little like a foretaste of the havoc created by the Devil and his henchmen in The Master and Margarita. Bulgakov revelled in depicting chaotic slapstick]. What is more upsetting for Preobrezhensky and his lodger the Dr Ivan Arnoldovich Bormenthal is that, purely to be provocative, Sharik sides with the “block management committee” which is constantly nagging Preobrezhensky about how he has more rooms in his apartment than other people in the block have. Shvonder, doctrinaire Communist head of the nagging committee, wants Sharik to be registered as a human being. Shvonder approves of Sharik adopting a typically utilitarian industry-related Communist name, Poligraph Poligraphovich. Shvonder gets Sharik a job killing cats to make cheap cat-skin coats for the proletariat. Sharik swears at Preobrezhensky and Bormenthal, disturbing their peace. Sharik eats like a slob. Sharik goes so far as seducing a young woman who is shamed and humiliated on discovering that she has slept with a dog. In short, Sharik has become the perfect Bolshevik yahoo. How can Preobrezhensky and Bormenthal relieve themselves of this nuisance? Perhaps the only way will be to turn Sharik back into a dog…
The Heart of a Dog is clearly a satirical blast at the Soviet regime and its attempts to radically transform people, in effect creating a new sort of human being. In Bulgakov’s view Sharik is the type of human being the regime is really producing – uncouth, foul-mouthed, rowdy, aggressive, destructive slobs. Bulgakov is also ridiculing eugenics – the pseudo-science that sought to create “perfect” human beings. As in his later novel The Master and Margarita, Bulgakov declares that humanity cannot be perfected in the way utopian and totalitarian regimes claim. The many flaws of human beings will always come to the fore. The novella also emphasises what is sordid in Moscow 1925. There is that unending problem of insufficient housing, with people crammed into community apartment buildings and angry arguments over who will get the flat with the most space - and with fanatical Communists patrolling the apartment buildings and butting into people’s private affairs.
Yet The Heart of a Dog is very ambiguous in its satire, for if it satirises Communism and the Soviet regime, it also blasts the snobbery of middle-class professionals who still pine for the ancien regime. Dr. Preobrezhensky clings to his large, comfy flat. In a supposedly classless society, Preobrezhensky has privileges that the mass of Mucovites do not have. When threatened by the “management committee” with having his apartment made smaller, he is able to ring a higher-up bureaucrat who over-rides the committee. And he is quite open in his contempt for the lower classes. When the block committee argue with Preobrezhensky, they say “You just hate the proletariat.” Preobrezhensky replies boldly “You’re right. I don’t like the proletariat.” [Chapter 2] When Preobrezhensky rebukes Bormenthal he says “never read Soviet newspapers before dinner… don’t read any at all. Do you know I once made thirty tests in my clinic. And what do you think? The patients who never read newspapers felt excellent. Those whom I specially made read Pravda all lost weight.” (Chapter 3). He curses the Soviet regime and its proletariat saying they are “two hundred years behind the rest of Europe and who so far can’t even manage to do up their own fly-buttons properly.” (Chapter 3) And he frequently complains about the lack of culture in his social inferiors.
While admiring Bulgakov’s two-fisted attack on an oppressive regime, I do see The Heart of a Dog as satire in the tradition of Juvenal and Swift – punching angrily in all directions fuelled by spleen and angst.
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