Heart of a Dog

January 7th: Creature can now pronounce several words: 'taxi', 'full up', 'evening paper', 'take one home for the kiddies' and every known Russian swear-word. His appearance is strange. He now only has hair on his head, chin and chest. Elsewhere he is bald, with flabby skin. His genital region now has the appearance of an immature human male. His skull has enlarged considerably. Brow low and receding. My God, I must be going mad…

Heart of a Dog was written in 1925, in the relative Soviet calm between the death of Lenin and the rise of Stalin, was banned before publication, distributed for 60 years in samizdat form, and officially released in 1987 (being made into a successful Soviet TV movie the following year). Apparently, in the intervening years, so little had changed for the average Soviet citizen under Communist rule, that Mikhail Bulgakov's satirical masterpiece was considered timely and relevant despite the delay in its publication.

Part Frankenstein and part Animal Farm, this book features a Bourgeois Professor -- surgeon to the Soviet elite; a man who wouldn't dream of giving up even one of the seven rooms in his apartment, despite the officially imposed multi-family crowding in the flats around him -- who takes in a stray dog in order to perform medical experiments on him. After transplanting the pituitary and seminal glands of a dead criminal into the dog, the Professor and his assistant are dismayed to watch the animal transform into a walking, talking man. Even worse, "Furball" is transformed into a loutish Bolshevik who knows and demands his state-sanctioned rights, and when the Professor fights back, Comrade Furballovich makes a complaint of counter-revolutionary thoughts against him to the secret police.

There are many levels to this slim story -- overtly a commentary on the New Soviet Man and eugenics -- with likely many levels going over my head. There were some ideas that I understood, like the Professor's response to Furball's views:

"You belong to the lowest possible stage of development," Philip Philipovich shouted him down. "You are still in the formative stage. You are intellectually weak, all your actions are purely bestial. Yet you allow yourself in the presence of two university-educated men to offer advice, with quite intolerable familiarity, on a cosmic scale and of quite cosmic stupidity, on the redistribution of wealth . . . and at the same time you eat toothpaste . . ."

And in the face of state-sanctioned brutality, and despite Furball's repeated destructive behaviours, this repeated message must have been a controversial one: 

Nobody should be whipped. Remember that, once and for all. Neither man nor animal can be influenced by anything but suggestion.

And when it is stated that the problem with Furball is that he is still a dog at heart, the Professor responds:

The whole horror of the situation is that he now has a human heart, not a dog's heart. And about the rottenest heart in all creation!

So, humans are the worst beasts of creation, and simply elevating the working class to a situation of "official equality" doesn't mean that there are not yet some that are more equal than others. Gotcha. Heart of a Dog is considered a comedy, but it wasn't really a knee slapper (I did laugh when Furball secured a position as a cat-catcher. When asked what he does with the dead bodies, he replies that they are made into fake squirrel-fur coats for the masses. Nice.) I can't imagine what it must have been like for those Soviets who had gotten their hands on a forbidden copy of this book during the dark days behind the Iron Curtain, and for them, I hope they got the chuckles that they sought.