Set in the early days of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Bulgakov’s science fiction satire Heart of a Dog is really an extended allegory of the Russian Revolution of 1917. When the mad scientist Professor Philip Philippovich Preobrazhensky transplants human organs into a mangy stray dog, Sharik, he’s astonished to watch Sharik take on human form and try to usurp his apartment. Shvonder, the communist head of Philip’s building management committee, helps Sharik the dog become Polygraph Polygraphovich Sharikov, the official government cat-catcher. Over the following weeks, Sharikov’s stealing, drinking, cat-chasing, and womanizing start to destroy Philip’s life. In fact, Philip’s experiment and Sharikov’s takeover are both metaphors for the Russian Revolution, in which a group of communist militants called the Bolsheviks seized power and replaced Russia’s old system of monarchy with a dictatorship led by the working classes, or proletariat. However, Bulgakov thinks that the proletariat neither deserved power nor wielded it responsibly. Instead, he suggests, the Bolsheviks created a monstrous, corrupt society in which the working classes preached cooperation and equality, but really manipulated others for their own selfish ends. For Bulgakov, this shows that revolutionary change generally sets humanity back rather than pushing it forward. Whether in science, politics, or culture, Bulgakov argues that sweeping change is counterproductive because it’s based on a naïve view of human nature.
Bulgakov uses his two main characters’ attempts to change the world—Philip’s experiments and Sharikov’s attempt to steal Philip’s apartment—as metaphors for the Russian Revolution. First, Philip spends his days transplanting animal testicles and ovaries into his human patients in an attempt to rejuvenate them, or restore them to youth and sexual vitality. Like the Revolution, rejuvenation promises a fresh start and a brighter future—but it’s unclear whether Philip’s procedures help people or simply feed their worst instincts. (Most of his patients are mainly interested in sex.) When he tries this experiment the other way around—by transplanting human organs into the stray dog Sharik—its true implications become clearer. Sharik turns into a human and takes on the vulgar personality of Klim Grigorievich Chugunkin, the criminal whose organs he received. He spends all day drinking, smoking, cursing, killing cats, and assaulting women, which infuriates Philip. The procedure doesn’t improve him at all—on the contrary, it makes him worse by giving him the power to pursue all his most dangerous and destructive desires. This is similar to how Bulgakov characterizes the Revolution: it didn’t improve Russia or the proletariat, but rather enabled their corruption and immorality.
After Philip’s failed revolution in the examination room creates Sharikov, Sharikov’s failed revolution in Philip’s home creates endless division, corruption, and violence for both of them. Sharikov exemplifies many of the communist regime’s worst tendencies. He gets legal papers in his absurd new name, “Polygraph Polygraphovich Sharikov,” that say he has a right to a portion of Philip’s seven-room apartment. Despite having no education whatsoever and not knowing the first thing about communism, he becomes a communist and starts preaching about equality. In reality, he just joined because the communists want to give people like him more property. His motives are totally selfish, and his supposed belief in equality is just an excuse for that selfishness—just like Bulgakov thinks the official Soviet ideology is a cover for the party members’ self-interest. Then, Sharikov gets a job as a government cat-catcher and allies with Shvonder to report Philip’s “counterrevolutionary” behavior. However, one of Philip’s powerful friends intercepts and stops the report—ironically enough, corruption saves him from Sharikov manipulating the system. Finally out of options, Sharikov draws a gun on Philip and Bormenthal—who subdue him and then reverse their original operation, turning him back into a dog. Ultimately, both Philip’s revolution in the laboratory and Sharikov’s in the apartment are spectacular failures. Both believe that they’re liberating people and improving the world—Philip thinks he’s helping his patients and pioneering new technologies to improve the human gene pool, while Sharikov thinks he’s liberating himself and the proletariat. But in reality, both actually set the world back by enabling selfishness and corruption.
Finally, Bulgakov also attacks the Russian Revolution head-on, by showing directly how it made Russia absurd and degraded instead of progressive and equal. Even Sharik the stray dog notices how things have deteriorated in Moscow: he compares Count Tolstoy’s cook Vlas (who used to toss him bones before the Revolution) to the cruel, bitter cook at the government cafeteria (who throws a pot of boiling water at him). Clearly, the Revolution hasn’t improved workers’ lives or even encouraged cooperation—people are more suspicious of one another than ever. For instance, Philip’s neighbors have stopped putting their shoes and coats out in the hallway, and now his building’s common areas are falling into disrepair. This is both evidence of the government’s failures and a microcosm of those failures in Russia as a whole. In their pursuit of novelty and equality, the communists also start doing things upside down. For instance, Shvonder visits Philip to insist he give up part of his apartment and start eating in his bedroom instead of his dining room. Meanwhile, the economy is crashing, the government persecutes anyone who disagrees with it, and the bureaucracy values documents and formalities above human lives—as Sharikov explains, “a man is strictly forbidden to exist without documents.” In the mid-1920s, Bulgakov sees a society around him that promises equality, modernity, and moral improvement but delivers corruption, backwardness, and vice. The Revolution tried—and failed—to improve human nature. Philip and Sharikov’s experiments both highlight the Russian Revolution’s specific failures and suggest that people react to sweeping change with selfishness and suspicion, not cooperation and consensus.
At the end of the novel, Philip operates on Sharikov again and turns him back into Sharik, the obedient and grateful dog. Clearly, Bulgakov wants Russia to do the same: undo the Revolution. He thinks that gradually improving existing systems is preferable to wiping them out entirely and replacing them with something new.
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Revolution and Regression Quotes in Heart of a Dog
Whoo-oo-oo-oo-hooh-hoo-oo! Oh, look at me, I am perishing in this gateway. The blizzard roars a prayer for the dying, and I howl with it. I am finished, finished. That bastard, in the dirty cap—the cook of the Normal Diet Cafeteria for employees of the People’s Central Economic Soviet—threw boiling water at me and scalded my left side. The scum, and he calls himself a proletarian! Lord, oh lord, how it hurts! My side is cooked to the bone. And now I howl and howl, but what’s the good of howling?
What harm did I do him? Would the People’s Economic Soviet get any poorer if I rooted in the garbage heap? The greedy brute!
Cooks can be of all sorts. For example, the late Vlas from Prechistenka.
How many he saved! Because the main thing is to get a bite to eat when you’re sick. All the old dogs still talk of how Vlas would throw them a bone, and with a solid chunk of meat on it. May he be blessed for it in the Heavenly Kingdom—a real personality he was, the gentry’s cook for the Counts Tolstoy, not one of those nobodies from the Soviet of Normal Diet. The things they do in that Normal Diet, it’s more than a dog’s brain can comprehend. Those scoundrels make soup of stinking corned beef, and the poor wretches don’t know what they’re eating. They come running, gobbling it down, lapping it up.
What’s that? Sausage? Sir, if you could see what this sausage is made of, you’d never come near that store. Better give it to me.
The dog gathered his last remnant of strength and crawled in a frenzy from under the gateway to the sidewalk. The blizzard clattered over his head like gunshots, and swept up the huge letters on a canvas placard, IS REJUVENATION POSSIBLE?
Naturally, it’s possible. The smell rejuvenated me, lifted me from my belly, contracted my stomach, empty for the last two days, with fiery spasms. The smell that conquered the hospital smells, the heavenly smell of chopped horsemeat with garlic and pepper.
“How did you manage to get such a nervous dog to follow you?” asked a pleasant masculine voice, and the trouser leg was rolled down. There was a smell of tobacco, and the glass jars tinkled in one of the cases.
“By kindness. The only method possible in dealing with living creatures. By terror you cannot get anywhere with an animal, no matter what its stage of development. I’ve always asserted this, I assert it today, and I shall go on asserting it. They are wrong thinking that terror will help them. No—no, it won’t, whatever its color: white, red, or even brown! Terror completely paralyzes the nervous system.”
“Eat in the bedroom,” he said in a slightly choked voice, “read in the examination room, dress in the waiting room, operate in the maid’s room, and examine patients in the dining room.”
“You are a hater of the proletariat!” the woman declared proudly.
“You are right, I do not like the proletariat,” Philip Philippovich agreed sadly and pressed a button. A bell rang somewhere within, and the door into the corridor swung open.
“If you care about your digestion, my good advice is—do not talk about Bolshevism or medicine at dinner. And—heaven preserve!—don’t read any Soviet newspapers before dinner.”
“Hm … But there are no others.”
“That’s just it, don’t read any. You know, I carried out thirty tests at my hospital. And what do you think? Patients who read no newspapers feel excellent. But those whom I deliberately compelled to read Pravda lost weight.”
“One fine day in March of 1917, all the galoshes disappeared, including two pair of mine. Also three canes, a coat, and the porter’s samovar. And from that day on the stand for galoshes ceased to exist. […] I ask you why, when this whole business started, did everyone begin to go up the marble staircase in muddy galoshes and felt boots? […] Why was the rug removed from the front stairway? Does Karl Marx forbid rugs on the stairs? Does he say anywhere in his writings that the second entrance of the Kalabukhov house on Prechistenka must be boarded up, and people must go around the house and enter through the backyard? Who needs this? Why can’t the proletarian leave his galoshes downstairs instead of tracking up the marble?”
“It’s the general rack and ruin, Philip Philippovich. Economic collapse.”
“No,” Philip Philippovich argued with utmost assurance. “No. You ought to be the first, Ivan Arnoldovich, to refrain from using these terms. They are a mirage, a puff of smoke, a fiction.” Philip Philippovich spread out his short fingers, and two shadows like turtles stirred on the tablecloth. “What is this general ruin of yours? An old crone with a crutch? A witch who has knocked out all the windows and extinguished all the lights? Why, there’s no such thing! It doesn’t exist. What do you mean by these words?”
But suddenly his angry thoughts broke off. For some reason, a vivid fragment of his earliest youth rose in his memory: a vast, sunny courtyard near the Preobrazhensky Turnpike, splinters of sun in bottles, cracked bricks, free, stray dogs.
Oh, no, why lie to yourself, you’ll never leave here, you’ll never go back to freedom, the dog spoke to himself in anguish, sniffing. I am a gentleman’s dog, an intellectual creature, I’ve tasted a better life. And what is freedom, anyway? Nothing, a puff of smoke, a mirage, a fiction… A sick dream of those wretched democrats…
January 6. (Partly in pencil, partly in violet ink)
Today, after his tail dropped off, he enunciated with utmost clarity the word “saloon.” The recording machine is working. The devil knows what is going on.
I am totally bewildered.
There is no doubt whatsoever that this is his illegitimate son (as they used to say in the corrupt bourgeois society). This is how our pseudo-scientific bourgeoisie amuses itself. Anyone can occupy seven rooms—until the gleaming sword of justice flashes its scarlet ray over his head.
Shv…r.
“Why are you nagging all the time? … Don’t spit. Don’t smoke. Don’t go here. Don’t go there … What sort of business is it anyway? Just like in the streetcar. Why’nt you let me live? And as for ‘dad,’ you’ve no call to … Did I ask you for the operation?” The man barked indignantly. “A fine thing! Grabbed an animal beast, slashed up his head with a knife, and now they’re squeamish. Maybe I never gave you no permission to operate? And likewise (the man rolled up his eyes to the ceiling, as though trying to remember a certain formula), and likewise my relatives. I have the right to sue you, maybe.”
“And what do you wish to call yourself?”
The man adjusted his tie and answered:
“Polygraph Polygraphovich.”
“Excuse me, Professor, but citizen Sharikov is entirely right. It is certainly his right to participate in the discussion of his own fate, especially insofar as it has to do with documents. A document is the most important thing in the world.”
“And what is your opinion of it, if I may ask?”
Sharikov shrugged.
“I don’t agree.”
“With whom? With Engels, or with Kautsky?”
“With neither,” answered Sharikov.
“That’s marvelous, I swear. Everyone who says the other … And what would you propose yourself?”
“What’s there to propose? … They write and write … congress, Germans … who knows them … makes your head spin. Just take everything and divide it up…”
“I thought so,” exclaimed Philip Philippovich, slamming his hand on the tablecloth. “Exactly what I thought.”
“Do you know how to do it, too?” asked Bormenthal with curiosity.
“How, how,” Sharikov began, growing voluble after the vodka. “It’s plain enough. What do you think? One man spreads himself out in seven rooms and has forty pair of pants, and another hangs around garbage dumps, looking for something to eat.”
“Doctor, would you please take him to the circus? But, for God’s sake, take a look at the program first—make sure they have no cats.”
“How do they let such trash into the circus?” Sharikov wondered morosely, shaking his head.
“Philip Philippovich, I say to you…” Bormenthal exclaimed passionately. He rushed to the door leading into the hallway, closed it more firmly, and returned, continuing in a whisper, “it is the only solution. Of course, I would not presume to advise you, but, Philip Philippovich, look at yourself, you are utterly worn out, it is impossible to go on working under such conditions!”
“Absolutely impossible,” Philip Philippovich agreed, sighing.
“Look at that business with the cats! A man with the heart of a dog.”
“Oh, no, no,” Philip Philippovich sang out. “You are mistaken, Doctor. In heaven’s name, don’t malign the dog. […] The whole horror, you see, is that his heart is no longer a dog’s heart but a human one. And the vilest you could find!”
The document read: “This will certify that the bearer of same, Comrade Polygraph Polygraphovich Sharikov, is the director of the sub-section for purging the city of Moscow of stray animals (cats, etc.) of the Moscow Communal Property Administration.”
Philip Philippovich saddled his nose with pince-nez over his glasses and began to read. He muttered to himself for a long time, changing color every second. “… and also threatening to kill the house committee chairman, from which it can be seen that he owns firearms. And he makes counterrevolutionary speeches, and even ordered his social servant Zinaida Prokofievna Bunina to throw Engels into the stove, as an open Menshevik with his assistant Bormenthal, Ivan Arnoldovich, who secretly lives in his apartment without registration. Signed, Director of the purge sub-section P. P. Sharikov—attested to by Chairman of the House Committee, Shvonder, and Secretary Pestrukhin.”
Sharikov invited his own death. He raised his left arm toward Philip Philippovich and made an obscene gesture with his scratched fist which reeked intolerably of cats. Then with his right hand, he took a revolver from his pocket and aimed it at the dangerous Bormenthal. Bormenthal’s cigarette dropped like a falling star, and a few seconds later Philip Philippovich was rushing beck and forth in mortal terror from instrument case to sofa, jumping over broken glass. On the sofa, the director of the purge section lay supine and gurgling, with the surgeon Bormenthal astride his chest and choking him with a small white pillow.
“I don’t understand anything,” answered Philip Philippovich, raising his shoulders with a royal air. “What Sharikov? Ah, sorry, you mean my dog … on whom I operated? […] Sharik is still alive, and no one has killed him.”
The superior being, the dignified benefactor of dogs, sat in his armchair, and the dog Sharik lay sprawled on the rug near the leather sofa. […]
I’ve been so lucky, so lucky, he thought, dozing off. Just incredibly lucky. I’m set for life in this apartment. I am absolutely convinced that there was something shady in my ancestry. There must have been a Newfoundland. She was a whore, my grandmother, may she rest in the Heavenly Kingdom, the old lady. True, they’ve slashed up my whole head for some strange reason, but it’ll heal before my wedding. It’s not worth mentioning.
“Toward the sacred banks of the Nile…”
