Heart of a Dog

“There could not be a colder, more contemptuous criticism of Soviet reality . . . There were glorious writers in the Stalin period, and Bulgakov was the greatest.”—Doris Lessing, The Guardian “Bulgakov is richly inventive, with an eye for the grotesque and the satirical.”—Joyce Carol Oates From the highly celebrated author of The Master and Margarita comes the darkly funny and brilliantly inventive short novel in which a celebrated surgeon’s radical experiment produces a monstrous mirror of the society he sought to perfect When rich, successful Professor Preobrazhensky befriends a scroungy Moscow mongrel named Sharik, he attempts a scientific first—transplanting into the stray dog the testes and pituitary gland of a recently deceased man. With a lecherous, vulgar human animal now on the loose, the professor’s hitherto respectable life descends into chaos as Sharik inevitably finds his niche in the bureaucracy as the government official in charge of purging the city of cats. Written in 1925 but unpublished in the Soviet Union until 1987, Heart of a Dog is a bitingly comic masterpiece and one of the essential works of twentieth-century Russian literature. Called “an anarchic, resistant work of genius” by The New Yorker and a “as clean and bright as a scalpel” by The Sunday Times, this is Mikhail Bulgakov at his most inventive. In exposing the folly of trying to remake human nature by force and ideology, this satire is as ferocious and timely now as when it was written.