In the early days of the Soviet Union, a mad scientist (Prof. Preobrazhensky) implants a human pituitary gland into a stray dog (Sharik) and accidentally turns him into a man. In Heart of a Dog, Mikhail Bulgakov uses this fictional experiment as a metaphor for what he sees as the failures of the Russian Revolution and communist Bolshevik government. Just as the professor’s unruly experiment upends his life, Bulgakov suggests, the Bolsheviks destroyed Russian society through their unruly communist experiment in social equality.
The novel opens with the perspective of a wounded dog, who howls as he freezes to death in the harsh Moscow winter. The cook in a Soviet government cafeteria threw a pot of boiling water at him, scalding his side. The dog curses the cook, a dishonest scoundrel who serves rotten meat. He watches a young typist (Vasnetsova) run out of the cafeteria into the snowstorm and pities her. She pets him and nicknames him “Sharik” (which means “Little Ball”).
Then, a well-dressed gentleman (Prof. Philip Philippovich Preobrazhensky) marches over and feeds Sharik a horsemeat sausage. Thrilled, the mangy Sharik follows the gentleman through Moscow back to his huge, elegantly-decorated department. But when Prof. Philip and his beautiful young maid Zina lead Sharik to an operating room, Sharik realizes what’s happening. He tries to run away and bites Prof. Philip’s assistant, Dr. Bormenthal, who puts him to sleep with a noxious gas.
But Philip is only healing Sharik’s scalded side, and Sharik awakens clean, bandaged up, and pain-free. He follows Philip into his office, where he naps while one strange-looking patient after another drops their pants and pays Philip a huge sum of money. It turns out that Philip is a surgeon who transplants animal organs into humans in the hopes of rejuvenating them.
Later that day, four angry young communists led by a man named Shvonder visit Philip and introduce themselves as the building’s new management committee. They explain that Philip’s seven-room apartment is too big and demand that he give up some of his space. He angrily refuses. He calls one of his patients, an influential government official, and gets the management committee to leave him alone.
Over the next several days, Sharik naps and lounges around in Philip’s apartment while Philip and Bormenthal dine extravagantly and complain about the state of Moscow under the new communist government. Sharik eats voraciously, admires himself in the mirror, and starts hanging out with the cook Darya Petrovna in the kitchen.
One evening, Bormenthal frantically tells Philip that someone has died. The two men lock Sharik in the bathroom and scramble to set up the examination room. Then, they put Sharik to sleep and start the operation. Philip replaces Sharik’s seminal vesicles (part of the reproductive system) and pituitary gland (an important gland in the brain) with human organs he brings in jars.
The next chapter is Dr. Bormenthal’s journal. After the operation, he and Philip expect Sharik to die. Instead, Sharik’s condition improves. He sheds his fur, starts moaning, and walks on his hind legs. His tail falls off, he starts speaking Russian, and he increasingly looks like a human. Philip is astonished, and the newspapers are starting to gossip about his experiments. Soon, Sharik starts laughing, smoking, wearing clothes, and swearing at everyone around him. Bormenthal and Philip realize that he’s becoming human—and he’s taking on the attributes of the organ donor who gave him his pituitary gland, a lowlife thief and balalaika player named Klim Grigorievich Chugunkin.
With his humanization complete, Sharik becomes vile and offensive over the following weeks. He starts sleeping in the kitchen, playing the balalaika, harassing Zina and Darya, and wearing the same ugly clothes as all the other men in Moscow. He criticizes Philip’s elitism, insists on being treated as an equal, and conspires with Shvonder to get government papers listing his absurd new name, “Polygraph Polygraphovich Sharikov.”
Then, Sharikov sees a cat. He chases after it, breaks a window, and locks himself in the bathroom with the faucet on. The apartment starts to flood, and the doorman Fyodor climbs through the window to fix the faucet. Bormenthal has to send all of Philip’s patients home while they clean up the water. Sharikov doesn’t apologize—he starts complaining about the cat instead. He keeps up his bad manners, getting drunk at dinner and loudly criticizing Philip’s elitism and taste in theatre. Philip declares that Sharikov is obviously “on the lowest rung of development” and doesn’t deserve to be an equal to civilized, educated men like himself and Bormenthal.
Over the next week, Philip starts to plan something in secret. He tries to kick Sharikov out of his apartment, but Sharikov has government papers saying he now has a right to a portion of Philip’s apartment. Meanwhile, Bormenthal and Philip lament their failed experiment and plot to get rid of Sharikov. They debate whether Sharikov’s problem is that he’s part dog, or that he’s all too human. When they learn that Sharikov tried to sexually assault Darya Petrovna in her sleep, Bormenthal attacks Sharikov and promises to teach him a lesson when he sobers up in the morning.
But in the morning, Sharikov has disappeared. Three days later, he returns with new clothes and a new job as a government cat-catcher. After a few more days, Vasnetsova, the young typist from the beginning of the novel, comes to the apartment. Sharikov has lied about being a war hero and convinced her to move in with him. But Philip tells her the truth, and she leaves in tears. The next morning, Philip learns that Sharikov has reported him to the government for his anti-communist outbursts. He and Bormenthal confront Sharikov, who pulls a gun on them. Bormenthal and Philip subdue Sharikov and take him back into the examination room.
In the epilogue, the reader learns what they’ve done: they’ve turned Sharikov back into a dog. The police come to investigate Sharikov’s disappearance, and Philip introduces them to his dog. He claims that Shvonder registered Sharik, the dog, for a government job as an animal-catcher in order to get back at him. That night, Sharik lazes on the rug, feeling grateful for his beautiful life and wondering why the doctors kept operating on him. And Philip, “the superior being,” is back to his old peaceful self.
