The Dog-Lover's Guide to the Russian Revolution

Mikhail Bulgakov, A Dog's Heart

I'm more of a cat person myself.

Like surely everyone, my first encounter with Bulgakov was the magisterial The Master and Margarita. It's one of those works which swamps everything else it's author wrote (see also: Joseph Roth's Radetzky March), which makes it easy to then neglect everything else that author has produced. It's partly simply a matter of length. There's a cultural prejudice that we seem to be suffering from to an even greater extent in our present times which equates the significance of a given novel to it's length. It's partly a simple matter of the time which you inevitably need to put in to reading a novel. Something which is hundreds of pages long will inevitably take us all longer to read than a shorter, more compact work. So the tendency is surely to try and justify the effort we have to put it into our reading. It's also clearly a matter of fact that many of the greatest works of literature are actually very long (although that's partly down to the fact that the economic conditions under which many 19th century novels were produced under encouraged length; although the conditions are obviously very different, it does feel as though there has been a similar pressure to produce novels of length in America and Britain and no doubt elsewhere since at least the 1980s). But it's also simple prejudice, related perhaps to the similar prejudice which sees comedy as inherently inferior to more 'serious' drama.

A Dog's Heart is great comedy, filled with a raucous laughter. Our hero Sharik is transformed, Frankenstein-like, from a homeless 'shaggy-haired devil' of a mutt into an equally disreputable dog-human hybrid, when an experimental Doctor, Philipp Philippovich, who is interested in the science of rejuvenation. the experiment involves the transplantation of testicles and a 'pituitary gland' from a recently deceased human.

You can probably guess how it turns out. Shari retains something of his dog-like nature, causing endless trouble by continuing to chase after cats and gorging himself on food. He also confounds the Doctor's attempt at civilising him. And not only that, but this is a tale which takes place in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution. Philipp Philippovich has managed to hold on to his entire apartment through the patronage of patients who are high up within the new establishment, but is still in constant dispute with the newly installed housing committee, who naturally want to take away some of his rooms in favour of the newly identified 'proletariat'. In turn, they attempt to adopt the newly human Sharik as one of their own, only for him to confound their ideology, pointedly refusing any suggestion that he might on behalf of the new Soviet state in favour of his own needs and desires. He's a creature of pure individuality who mocks equally both sides of the ideological divide. While normality may eventually be restored - as it always is in this kind of story - what really makes this story work is it's telling, switching between Sharik's slangy, first person narration and a more straightforward account in the third person, full of an antic energy.