Originally published in 1925, ‘Heart of a Dog’ by Russian author and playwright Mikhail Bulgakov, is a dark, fantastical satire of the failures inherent in the dream of a Communist utopia.
When a respected surgeon decides to transplant human body parts into a stray dog, he creates a monster—drunken, profligate, aggressive, and selfish. It seems the worst aspects of the donor have been transplanted as well. As his previously well-regulated home descends into riotous chaos, the doctor realizes he will have to try to reverse the operation, but the dog isn’t so keen. Wild, uproarious, and deliriously comic, Bulgakov’s short novel is at once a comment on the problems of 1920s Russia and a lasting satire on human nature.
Both a nod to the Frankenstein myth and a vicious critique of the Soviet government’s attempts to reshape and redefine personhood during and after the Russian Revolution, it was rejected for publication by censors in 1925, but was circulated via samizdat—the clandestine production and distribution of literature that had been banned by the state—for years until it was translated into English in 1968.
To this day, the book remains one of Bulgakov’s most highly regarded works.
