Собачье сердце = Sobach'e serdtse = The Heart of a Dog, Mikhail Afanasevich‬ Bulgakov Heart of a Dog is a novel by Russian author Mikhail Bulgakov. Moscow, 1924. While foraging for trash one winter day, a stray dog is found by a cook and scalded with boiling water. Lying forlorn in a doorway, the dog awaits his end awash in self-pity. To his surprise, a successful surgeon, Filipp Filippovich Preobrazhensky, arrives and offers the dog a piece of sausage. Overjoyed, the dog follows Filip back to h...

Rating: 4*of fiveThe Publisher Says: A new edition of Bulgakov’s fantastical precursor to The Master and Margarita, part of Melville House’s reissue of the Bulgakov backlist in Michael Glenny’s celebrated translations.A key work of early modernism, this is the superbly comic story of a Soviet scientist and a scroungy Moscow mongrel named Sharik. Attempting a medical first, the scientist transplants the glands of a petty criminal into the dog and, with that, turns a distinctly worryingly human an...

This✨was✨geniusMy first Bulgakov and I adored it (if you can “adore” such a bizarre and somewhat grotesque book hahaha)!!!I’ve been in such a reading slump recently, but I couldn’t put this book down! Thanks to my new friend Mikhail for this hilariously strange read! (I also think this is a great place to start with his writing if you also want to read his work but don’t know where to start!)

If your only acquaintance with Bulgakov is Master and Margarita then Heart of a Dog will come as a surprise. It is one of several science out of control, possibly influenced by Jules Verne and H.G. Wells stories.However what is not to like about this mad scientist story about how things go horribly wrong when the pituitary gland and testicles of a dead man are transplanted into a stray dog? Behold the Soviet new man constructed from death and a dog. No wonder that the opera going, traditionally

Loved this book.Unlike anything i have ever read.

Can you say "Booby Brash Bolsheviks" three times fast, comrades? If not, you can surely howl with laughter. Ooow-ow-ooow-owow!Operating on animals to effect a transform in a humanly direction has been around for some time. In novels, that is. There’s H.G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau published in 1896 and Kristen Bakis’ less well known 1997 Lives of the Monster Dogs, a bizarre, creepy story of humanoid German shepherds strolling Manhattan as rich aristocrats.Another such novel on the list,...

A Dog's Heart (or, The Heart of a Dog) still bites strongly with sharp teeth after so much time, and, unlike a lot of other Russian golden oldies that feel old, this could have been written yesterday. Bulgakov's satire of life in the early years of the Soviet Union cost himself dear, and it has not lost any of its provocative power. I even preferred this to his ever so popular Master and Margarita.Giving a reading of A Dog's Heart in his Moscow apartment - March 1925, he introduced to a group of...

Totally amazing book. More accessible than The Master and Margarita but just as evil in its way.

What does it mean to be human? To be an individual? How unfortunate we must be, us, merely to be human beings. We can never escape what we truly are. We can nip and tuck our way around our flaws, but humans inevitably are always their own disastrous downfalls and worst nightmares.Heart of a Dog is, before anything else, FUN. It's just really damn entertaining. We start with a sort of Woody Allen neurotic type stream of concsiousness narrative from a stray dog, Sharik, who is swooped up by doctor...

That of a stray dog is one of the hardest lives of all. Always suffering from hunger and being forced to live under open sky come rain or winds. And they are always afraid of people around them - a fear probably born of some violent experience.Our protagonist is one such dog. The first-person narrative of dog in first few chapter will put a knowing smile on face of anyone who has observed dogs closely.What follows is a cruel experiement in which some of dog's body parts are replaced with that of...

It ain't easy being a dog. No, it ain't easy. Especially when you have to rummage the streets of Moscow, avoiding the bitter proletariat who will kick you and curse you and throw boiling water on your hide, just because you want a bite to eat. And you want to be a good doggie, make no mistake. Everyone wants a friend, even dogs. So you take kindness from whatever hand that offers; and how could anyone expect a good dog like you to do otherwise? Who cares if the pampered hand you have to lick is

"The whole horror of the situation is that he now has a human heart, not a dog's heart. And about the rottenest heart in all creation!"The recipe for success a la Bulgakov:# Take a street dog, hungry and flea-ridden and wickedly smart (yes, he can even read - you gotta do that to survive on the cruel winter Moscow streets!). # Take a brilliant and renown professor with a knack for brain surgery/transplants and desire to advance science. # Add to the mix a dead good-for-nothing delinquent alcohol...

A dog with no real name feebly walks his last steps in the cold winters day in Moscow of the 1920's, unloved like many strays in the uncaring city, hungry, filthy with no future, he has not eaten in two days, injured by a man full of hate throwing boiling water at him which burns his side , why ? Just a nuisance to all businessmen, the wandering mutt needed only a little nourishment nobody else gives a second look towards the dying, suffering two year old, the whimpering animal last hours are ne...

My favourite kind of satire is not laugh-out-loud funny; it's unsettling, and disturbing, and beautifully weird. Bulgakov brings it, with this short and vicious fable about a dog who is implanted with the genitals and pituitary gland of a deceased convict, transforming him into a bestial hybrid. It's like reading an early-Soviet Chris Morris script – in fact, what this book made me think of more than anything was this creepy sketch from Blue Jam. Bulgakov seems to offer a similarly discomfiting

”Such an eccentric! Why, he need only blink an eye and he could have the finest dog in town! But maybe I am handsome? I guess I’m lucky!”My humour and I seem to have parted company recently. I was desperate to start the New Year with a “happy” story. Plus I needed something short and snappy to get my reading mojo back, as that seems to have walked down the road with my humour.“Happy” I could not find. But it popped into my head to re-visit Heart of a Dog. This is another book (along with Clive B...

Ronald Reagan used to alarm his Soviet counterparts by saying that surely they'd both unite against an invasion from Mars. -- Christopher HitchensIn Soviet Russia, dog's testicles lick you.What happens when a Russian stray dog meets a early Soviet doctor? Testicles and pituitary glands get involved and a New Soviet man is made. Part Kafkaesque transformation story, part mockery of eugenics and early Soviet attempts at creating the ideal Russian man, Bulgakov's novella is not quite as brilliant a...

I'm not even sure where to begin...there is so much going on in this little novella (particularly concerning the Russian government and its sociopolitical policies in the 1920's and beyond), that I'm be afraid that discussing it in detail would only serve to highlight my ignorance on the subject. So here it is! Me highlighting my ignorance on the subject...I decided to read this story simultaneously with The Master and Margarita with the hope of completing The Heart of a Dog first. I did this na...

How not to train your dogThere are many breeds of dogs, and humans –Each come with certain qualities, each serve a certain purpose. Bulgakov, the doctor, examines the Frankenstein theme, laying bare the nature of the revolutionary, what is imbedded in his heart, what lives in his brain. You can take a man out of the streets but you can’t take the streets out of the man.This is the conclusion, after a ground-breaking organ transplantation, that leave us with a talking, swearing, boozing and gener...

Mikhail Bulgakov is one of the most overlooked Russian satirists/geniuses of the 20th century.I’ve read two works of his now, and both have floored me with the scathing cleverness of their satire, the sheer originality of their ideas, and the fact that both these Russian texts – written during Stalin’s reign – are instantly accessible to the modern reader.The Heart of a Dog (1925) is a short blast against the ‘New Soviet Man’ – a comment on the declining power of Communism and the changing tides...

This book has been on my 'bucket list' for a long time. Part allegory and part dystopian fiction it examines the connection between class struggle and the role social stratification plays in the formation of society. Poligraf Poligrafovich Sharikov was a 'dog' who was forced to become a 'man' through an experiment he had no control over. But what kind of man he becomes is a question that must be looked at from many differing perspectives. No wonder this novel was banned in the Soviet Union for 6...