Heart of a Dog Study Guide

Mikhail Bulgakov was born in Kiev, Ukraine—then part of the Russian Empire—to an elite Russian family of Orthodox clergymen and scholars. His father died in his youth, but his diligent mother, a teacher, oversaw his education and cultivated his early interest in literature. He went on to study medicine at Kiev University, then work at the Kiev Military Hospital and serve as a Red Cross physician during World War I. After the war, he became a surgeon and then began working as a country doctor in rural Smolensk province. He spent his free time writing short stories, which he eventually published in the collection A Country Doctor’s Notebook. Bulgakov eventually returned to Ukraine, then treated patients throughout Russia during the Russian Civil War. In the war, his brothers joined the White Army and fought against the Bolsheviks, and afterward, most of his family moved to Paris. But because of a serious typhus infection, Bulgakov wasn’t allowed to leave. Instead, he moved to Moscow, quit medicine, and decided to become a writer. He managed to find work writing science fiction satire for local newspapers, and in the early 1920s, he wrote several plays and novellas like Heart of the Dog. However, the Soviet government wouldn’t let most of them get produced or published because they were critical of the Bolsheviks. Among others, the government made an exception for The Days of the Turbins, which ran from 1926 to 1929 and was actually one of Stalin’s favorite works. But when the government definitively shut down Bulgakov’s career in 1929, Bulgakov wrote a letter to Stalin asking for permission to leave Russia. Stalin called him on the phone and allowed him to work in the Moscow Art Theater as a stage director. From the early 1930s until the end of his life, he worked in various theaters but primarily dedicated himself to writing and revising The Master and Margarita, his last and most famous novel. While other writers were arrested, killed, or forced into exile, Bulgakov managed to survive because Stalin was a fan of his early work. But he also wasn’t allowed to publish anything, which was a constant source of frustration to him. He finished The Master and Margarita less than a year before his death from kidney disease. Most of his work wasn’t officially published until decades after his death, when the Soviet Union eased its censorship policies in the 1960s.

Heart of a Dog is set in the Soviet Union in the mid-1920s, during the New Economic Policy period just after the Russian Revolution and the Russian Civil War. In March 1917, the Russian Empire collapsed in the face of mass unrest and a new Russian Provisional Government took over. But in November of the same year, the Bolsheviks, a group of revolutionary communists led by Vladimir Lenin, took power. Lenin’s government withdrew Russia from World War I, moved the national capital from St. Petersburg to Moscow, and started persecuting its political enemies, including anti-communist intellectuals and the wealthy elite (or bourgeoisie). From 1917 to 1922, the Bolshevik Red Army fought a devastating civil war against the White Army composed of several anti-communist rebel groups. The Bolsheviks won and founded the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in 1922. During the war, the Bolsheviks controlled the entire national economy and redirected it to support the Red Army. But productivity declined, and the nation faced widespread poverty and shortages of food, fuel, and public services. This culminated in a tragic famine in the winter of 1921–2. In response, Lenin implemented the New Economic Policy (NEP), a system that combined the centralized state control of some sectors of the market with capitalist free markets in other sectors. This policy successfully increased production around Russia—especially in agriculture—and created a new class of small businesspeople called “NEPmen.” Bulgakov wrote and set Heart of a Dog in this NEP period, when the Bolsheviks seemed to be turning back to capitalism after watching their socialist policies fail. A few years later, in 1928, Stalin ended the NEP in the Great Break. He collectivized all farmland (with catastrophic effects) and accelerated industrial production (which proved a spectacular success). He also ramped up censorship and started expelling the elite specialists—like scientists, doctors, and engineers—whom the Soviet regime had tolerated until that point. This increasing pressure on the educated elite is obvious in Heart of a Dog, as Professor Philip Philippovich Preobrazhensky watches the new government collectivize his apartment building and faces increased suspicion. This repression and censorship prevented Bulgakov from releasing any of his work until decades after his death in the 1930s.

The film version of Heart of a Dog is better known than the book—and it actually drew many Russians to Bulgakov’s novel in the late 1980s. Bulgakov’s best-known novel is The Master and Margarita (1967), which adapts the famous Dr. Faust legend to atheist Soviet Russia. However, most of Bulgakov’s work—including Heart of a Dog and The Master and Margarita—was widely banned and circulated primarily in the underground publications known as samizdat until after the author’s death. Some exceptions include Bulgakov’s short story collection A Young Doctor’s Notebook (1926), based on his service as a village doctor in rural Russia, , and his first novel, The White Guard, which was partially serialized in 1925 but not published in full until 1966. During the 1920s, he also wrote several plays, but most of them weren’t performed or published during Bulgakov’s lifetime. The exception was The Days of the Turbins, an adaptation of The White Guard, which caused a public scandal during its three-year run at the Moscow Art Theatre from 1926–9. Other significant Soviet dissident writers include Boris Pasternak, who is best known for Doctor Zhivago (1957), and Joseph Brodsky, who is best remembered for his Collected Poems (2000) and his essay collection Less Than One (1986). Even the famous social realist communist writer Maxim Gorky, who supported the Bolsheviks before and during the Russian Revolution, eventually turned against the Bolshevik government. He’s best known for novels like The Mother (1907) and plays like The Lower Depths (1902). Finally, George Orwell also famously used animals as an allegory for the Russian Revolution in Animal Farm (1945).