The Heart of a Dog

Mikhail Bulgakov's absurdist parable of the Russian Revolution. A world-famous Moscow professor-rich, successful, and violently envied by his neighbors-befriends a stray dog and resolves to achieve a daring scientific "first" by transplanting into it the testicles and pituitary gland of a dead man. But the results are wholly unexpected: a distinctly and worryingly human animal is on the loose, and the professor's hitherto respectable life becomes a nightmare beyond endurance. As in The Master and Margarita, the masterpiece he completed shortly before his death, Mikhail Bulgakov's early novel, written in 1925, combines outrageously grotesque ideas with a narrative of deadpan naturalism. The Heart of a Dog can be read as an absurd and wonderfully comic story; it can also be read as a fierce parable of the Russian Revolution.