94 of 97 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Just a few clarifying points, December 27, 2001
By A Customer
From a native Russian speaker, just a few remarks which hopefully will help you understand the book better:
1. Professor Preobrazhensky is modeled on professor Pavlov (of the salivating dogs fame), who himself is well known for a few remarks such as "for the kind of experiment the Communists are conducting on Russia I wouldn't sacrifice even a frog" and "a revolution is not an excuse for being 20 minutes late for work" (to a lab assistant who got caught in street shooting).
2. The book lashes out - VIOLENTLY - at working class, at lumpenproletariat (and in Soviet Russia these two terms were dangerously close for much of the 20th century). Please remember that when you're reading about Sharikov - the caricature of a heavily-drinking, crude Soviet worker (if you've ever spent time in small industrial towns in Russia, you'll be able to understand this book easily)
3. Sharik is a cliche nickname for dogs in Russia (something like Spot). Sharikov is akin to a dog taking the last name Spotter for himself.
4. Polygraph Polygraphovich sounds as ridiculous in English as it does in Russian :)
Some of my anglophone friends had problems with this 1925 book. Just trying to be helpful...
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60 of 62 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Extremely funny, incredibly written small masterpiece, February 21, 2003
Mikhail Bulgakov, best known for his brilliant novel "The Master and Margarita" was steeped in the theatrical craft. When his books were censored, he wrote a wild, heartfelt letter to authorities in Soviet Russia, asking that, if they were not to be allowed to publish his work, would they then assign him to work in theater, even as a lowly stagehand. In one of Stalin's capricious moves, Bulgakov was, indeed, assigned to work as an assistant director at a Moscow theater.
Meanwhile, Bulgakov continued to amass what must be one of the world's great hordes of literary work unpublished in the lifetime of an author. "Heart of a Dog" is probably his most viciously anti-Soviet, anti-Proletariat work, and it reads like a cross between Orwell's "Animal Farm" and Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" but with Bulgakov's intense sarcasm and humor thrown in. The book is so dramatic, it's almost impossible to read it without seeing it run like a film or play behind your eyes as you read it.
A professor (whose Russian name is a play on the scientist Pavlov) adopts a mongrel dog. The dog Sharik (Fido, Rover...) is grateful! His life on the street has been hard, he's been kicked, scalded with hot water and he is starving. The professor feeds him well. Ah, he's gaining weight and healing up. What a nice man! A god, even, well, to a dog. But wait a minute! The professor, noted surgeon that he is, is preparing to operate. He seizes the dog....
And then we see the results of the professor's cruel experiment. A dog gets a human brain portion and begins to develop as a human. But he isn't a nice friendly, tail-wagging human. Oh, no. He's low, a cur, yes, a dog of a man who chases cats uncontrollably, pinches women's bottoms and drinks like a fish (oops mixed metaphor there.) He demands to be registered and get papers like a human being in Soviet society. And the authorities are anxious, even rabid to assist him. Sharikov takes a first name and patronymic that is so inappropriate, so hysterically funny that you have to laugh out loud. Then he gets a prominent job as a purge director, eliminating those counter-revolutionary cats from Moscow's pure Communist society. That is, until the professor cooks up a plot.
This is a gem of a book. Bulgakov shares Orwell's deep hatred of totalitarianism, but unlike the delicate satire of Orwell, Bulgakov writes with massive belly laughs of deeply sarcastic humor and over-the-top jokes. He's a dramatist at heart, and this book shows his theatrical thinking, where exaggerated movement and stage props play as much a role in exposition as dialog.
This is a true small masterpiece and should appeal to just about anyone. It would be a very good book for a high school or college literature study. It is really wonderful, and prepares the reader for Bulgakov's wildly out of control masterpiece "Master and Margarita." Don't miss this book for anything!
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36 of 37 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great Soviet Era Satire, May 25, 2003
It's just something about those Russians. I guess because they've had to put up with so much turmoil, for so long, historically; or it could be those long Russian winters; but for whatever reason they have produced a steady stream of excellent satirists for the past two hundred years. Refer to Nikolai Leskov's LAUGHTER AND GRIEF, for a mid 19th century examination of the phenomenon from someone who first noticed it. Leskov's narrator, Vatahvskov, states in a conversation amongst his colleagues that the feature most singular in Russian society is "its abundance of unpleasant surprises."
Which brings me to Bulgakov and to HEART OF A DOG, for it is a novella full of "unpleasant surprises," both happening to and instigated by, Bulgakov's singular literary creation, Sharik (aka Mr. Sharik, aka Citizen Sharikov, aka Polygraph Polygraphovich Sharikov, commisar of cat control, etc.) Bulgakov takes an absurd situation (think of Gogol's "nose" wandering around the streets of St. Petersburg for comparison) and crafts it into a wonderful parody of the societal madhouse that was 30s Moscow under the party's intolerable decrees. His is a portrait of political correctness run amok. Citizen Shvonder, the representation of all things banal about the collectivist mentality of the era is the Bulgakov's primary target in this regard. His jealous rage at the fact that professor Phillipov is living the high life, while he and his ilk are sharing one room apartments, remains comically ineffectual. It was Bulgakov's way at getting back at all of the party appartchiks that were in fact causing him a great deal of consternation and physical hardship at the time.
A reviewer who was critical of this work as being too much akin to a Chagall painting was drawing an accurate analogy. Yet, coming from a perspective in which magical realism has become an accepted literary technique, I don't consider that a drawback. It is part of the same Russian tradition. The fanciful and the grotesque have long been an integral part of Russian fiction. Bulgakov is simply one of its more famous and adept practitioners.
BEK
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